I can now. Maybe I could step back and do an overview of the experience we've had in Glasgow and in Scotland more widely. We too see charging for exhibitions as part of a much wider income-generation strategy. We've charged for exhibitions for at least 40 years, since I moved to Glasgow. I'm not from around here, as you might have guessed. Most large museums services generate between and 15 and 25 per cent of their income. In Glasgow, it's 15 per cent. The national museum in Edinburgh would generate 25 per cent. So, 75 to 85 per cent of a museum's budget are fixed costs—staff, buildings, collection preservation—so there's quite a small sum of money left and you have to think very carefully about what you spend that on. We've had some big successes with charging for touring temporary exhibitions. We had a big Banksy exhibition recently, which was very successful, and we've done exhibitions about the greatest Scottish local artist, Charles Rennie Mackintosh.
But equally, we've had very expensive disasters, and I suppose one of the privileges of being (a) retired and (b) an outsider is I can talk about my disasters more easily. We thought we would be very populist and we did a big exhibition on Scottish football, with amazing collections from famous players and clubs and from the national team, but, unfortunately, the national team were going through an exceptionally bad patch, so the atmosphere around Scottish football was very miserable and nobody wanted to go and celebrate it in an exhibition. We lost a lot of money on that. Similarly, we did a big exhibition on the birth of impressionism, with major works and expensive loans from France and America, and we got 25,000 visits, which was only a fraction of the target.
People talk about benchmarking, but it's very difficult, because going to exhibitions, you're competing with going to the cinema or having a day out outside the city, or whatever. So, it's very difficult to gauge what will work and what doesn't work. For example, the venue behind me is the Riverside Museum, Scotland’s museum of transport and travel, which opened as a new museum in 2011, and we designed it with no temporary exhibition space. We have a major venue, quite like the national museum in Cardiff, that has art history and natural history all in one building, a big encyclopaedic museum called Kelvingrove. That has a big temporary exhibition space, and we thought we just couldn't afford to run two big temporary exhibition spaces.
On the strategy for Riverside, as you can see, it's in a big plaza. So, that's specifically designed to host events, and we have everything there from car rallies, concerts, a big annual what we call a blue-light festival, where all the emergency services—the fire brigade and the police and everybody—come along. It was stopped a few years ago because there were so many people coming it wasn't safe. We got 40,000 people in one day. But the strategy for the exhibitions in this museum is we make small changes—four to six individual stories are changed each year. So, between events and small story changes, we keep its profile up. So, 12 years on it still gets over 1 million visits a year, and 60 per cent of those visits are from west of Scotland people, 40 per cent are tourists. So, it's a very nuanced strategy. Because of the amount of unrestricted cash in the museum's budget, it's high risk, because if you spend £200,000 on an exhibition and you only get £100,000 back, that's a significant loss to the museum.
In terms of one of the big questions on the agenda, about whether temporary exhibitions can attract a diverse audience, can I say a few words about that, or do you want—