After thousands of tickets went on sale for Peter Kay Live on Thursday and Friday, the Manchester Evening News reported that up to 2 million people had queued on Saturday. Many fans reported seeing messages on the Ticketmaster website telling them there were more than 300,000 people ahead of them in the virtual line – roughly the population of Nottingham. The tour was originally scheduled to end in August 2023, but the additional dates mean it will now run until November 2024. Ticketmaster tweeted: “Unsurprisingly, Peter Kay is hugely popular this morning. To make it as fair as possible, we’ve put everyone in a queue. Be patient and don’t refresh or you’ll lose your spot.” A number of extra dates have been added to the tour after “unprecedented” demand left many fans unable to access apps and websites offering pre-sale tickets. These included two new shows in Birmingham, four in London and six in Manchester. Channel 5 News presenter Dan Walker was among those in the queue, tweeting: “Trying to get Peter Kay tickets is like trying to book a GP appointment! “Please hold… there are currently 170,000 people ahead of you in line.” Fellow comic Jason Munford joked: “Phew was lucky enough to get 2 tickets for Peter Kay. 2x Peter Kay tickets for sale, £3500 each.” Just before 11am, the Liverpool Echo reported that all tickets for the city’s M&S Bank arena were sold out. Some ticket resale sites such as Viagogo had seats available for up to £1,000, with many people calling for more to be done to stop sales and control the number of purchases. Others reported that the site had collapsed due to high demand. Kay’s return from a five-year hiatus was announced during a commercial break at the launch of ITV’s I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here! during which Kay was seen carrying a rolled up rug into a house. The ad ended with fans asking Kay if he finally bought his mum a bungalow – a reference to the comic’s previous Mum Wants A Bungalow tour. Kay replied that he had, and that his mother now wanted a new carpet put in. Get our weekly pop culture email delivered free to your inbox every Friday Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online advertising and content sponsored by external parties. For more information, see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and Google’s Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Kay appeared on Zoe Ball’s BBC Radio 2 morning show on Wednesday and said he had been “overwhelmed” by the response to his comeback, even before his tickets went on sale. Announcing his new appointments, the 49-year-old from Bolton said: “It’s good to be back doing what I love to do best, standup comedy, and if there’s ever a time when people need a laugh, it’s now.” After successfully securing tickets for a London date next summer, comedy fan Ben Andrews, from London, said: “The pressure was on to get tickets – especially as I’m married to a North Easterner. “I was in the digital waiting room from 9.45am. and I immediately had 50 thousand people ahead of me. With a capacity of 20 thousand, I had to cross my fingers.” His wife Sarah Farrell, from Manchester, added: ‘To give us a better chance I got in the queue too but I did it late, panicked and ended up queuing for 2024. At one point there were a quarter of a million people. in front of me, so I just went and put the kettle on.’ In addition to his UK tour, Kay will become the first comedian to hold his own residency at the O2 arena in London. It will appear there once a month between December 2022 and November 2023. In 2010, Kay achieved a place in the Guinness Book of World Records for the biggest selling standup tour of all time, performing to over 1.2 million people. He was set to hit the road in 2017, but canceled those shows due to “unforeseen family circumstances.”
