Cheltenham ahead by a few lengths

This year's London Literary Festival, The Word, is reported to have had some very disappointing audiences.

An event with Michael Heseltine, who has recently published his autobiography, and Boris Johnson, the huge editor of the Spectator, was cancelled by the publisher, when it was realised that only 40 or so tickets had been sold for the 450-seater Globe Theatre. Melvyn Bragg, television face as well as - as he crossly insisted recently on his radio programme - novelist, sold just 30 tickets. John Mortimer, a great turn normally guaranteed to fill any hall, attracted just 40 people. Two documentary film makers, Phil Craig and Tim Clayton, talking about the Blitz, an event that made a degree of difference to London, found themselves addressing just four, a gathering which might better have retired to the nearest pub.

Before the festival began, its tirelessly ebullient director, Peter Florence, bravely volunteered to me that "It'll fail if we don't excite enough readers to come. We are aiming to break even at 35,000 tickets - fewer than a full-house at Highbury, and more modest - in our infancy - than the other big three [Hay-on-Wye, Edinburgh, Cheltenham]. But realistic."

It is not yet clear whether or not The Word has met this modest aim. It was initially funded with a two-year tranche of Lottery money, via the Arts Council. Gary McKeone, the literary director of the council, says a little ominously that he will certainly be looking closely at the figures recorded this year before a decision is taken on further funding. Peter Florence admits they won't hit his own target but maintains they'll be "pretty close" and that much has been learned.

"What we've learned is what works and what doesn't work." Non-fiction subjects have to be much more topical in London than elsewhere, he has realised, and certain writers, such as Michael Heseltine or Simon Schama, who would be "bankers" in the provinces, can fail to attract big audiences here. Then again, he thinks the festival should be at least a month later in the year, for the benefit of students and schoolchildren. Better marketing is needed too, and he believes next year's sponsor, Orange, will help with that. One expert on festivals also doubts that the Globe has proved the ideal venue. "It's absolutely essential to be keyed into a residential community for your hub venue - the Globe isn't."

Cheltenham Festival of Literature, which opens today and runs until 22 October, certainly achieves that. It is now on its 51st year and is a roaring success, selling more than 50,000 tickets annually. John Walsh, its director for three years, says that one year 23 different events attracted an audience of more than 400 people. For Boris Johnson and Michael Heseltine, they'd be "hanging from the chandeliers in Cheltenham", he expostulates, expletives deleted. The audiences there make sure they get good value too, he remarks, asking the writers tough questions and not letting them get away with waffle.

As Walsh points out, in Cheltenham it's a big event to get famous writers on stage. In London, it's no great excitement to be able to see a bloke talking about his books. "London is too spoilt." Moreover, he says, if on the one hand, there's not such a trendy throng as at Hay-on-Wye, Cheltenham is grand in a different way. It has "that imperial square", he points out, which makes other venues, such as the Globe, the centre of London's festival, look a bit pokey. Asked why Cheltenham succeeds, Walsh becomes tactfully vague. "It's something to do with class and age and remoteness", he suggests. It is perhaps a little more Right wing than most literary events. There's also, he believes, "an element of pilgrimage" in many festival-goers, hoping to hear "some fantastically elevated discourse", even a "sacra conversazione". The Cheltenham audiences are not "yawning, cynical Londoners".

Sarah Smyth, this year's Cheltenham director, says its success is "very much related to place" - location, location, location, as estate agents say. "The location of the festival and also the time of year give it its character", she thinks. The average Cheltenham Festival-goer goes to no less than 10 events each year - "a very loyal audience". Effective use is made of the 25 venues around town and walks and tours take advantage of all this location too. At weekends, 60 per cent of the people come from more than an hour's drive away, 40 per cent from within an hour's drive; during the week, those figures are reversed. Cheltenham clearly acts as a hub for a large part of central England, from Oxford to Bristol.

Moreover, as Smyth puts it, at Cheltenham they "deliberately programme events to appeal to a huge range of people". Her predecessor, Walsh, says the same more robustly. "Cheltenham goes shamelessly mad for people who aren't writers - ballerinas, fashion designers, rock stars, all that - as long as they've written a book, they're in." The programme is huge. This year it includes Jostein Gaarder, Bill Bryson, Willy Russell, Adrian Noble, Prunella Scales, Beryl Bainbridge, Edward Said, Zadie Smith, The League of Gentlemen, Martin Bell and Fergal Keane, the Evening Standard's editor Max Hastings and columnist George Walden, John Bird and John Fortune, Andrew Motion, Martin Jarvis, Gitta Sereny. With 250 events and over 300 authors more than 40,000 tickets have already been sold. Against such an established success, the attempt to give London, the one place that does not actually need a literary festival, a new festival, seems ever more quixotic.

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