Leader: Fringing on managerial failure

APART from the rain, this has not been a happy year for the Festival Fringe. Arguably the world's biggest artistic event, the Fringe has been bedevilled by problems with its new box-office computer system. This left thousands of customers without tickets while shows were oversold, or even advertised as sold out when they weren't. Overall, the Fringe can still claim to have been a success, but the computer glitch has caused misery for many theatre goers and might well have hurt sales.

Perhaps understandably, the Fringe organisers were loath initially to admit the scale of their computer problems – sometimes implying the press were exaggerating the difficulties. However, the Fringe Society, at its board AGM on Saturday, admitted to...