WHEN award-winning comedian Josh Widdicombe had to cancel his show at Oxford Playhouse because of a power cut it was just one of dozens of businesses affected.

Pubs and restaurants on George Street were forced to close for the night after the outage at 6.30pm on Wednesday, losing thousands of pounds in business.

Gourmet Burger Kitchen and Byron burger restaurant both had to send customers away hungry, while the fully booked 14-bedroom Victoria House Hotel was left apologising to guests.

Electricity supplier SSE was yesterday unable to explain what went wrong other than “a cable fault and a transformer fault” which it said it was investigating.

Mr Widdicome, who was starting a nationwide tour with his show at the Playhouse, had to apologise to hundreds of fans.

From an upstairs room at the theatre he tweeted: “I am so sorry for the cancellation of the gig at Oxford Playhouse tonight due to power cut, I appreciate you all coming down and apologise.”

He added: “If you are still here please have a drink on me at the bar as a thank-you for your patience.”

The Playhouse show has now been rescheduled to Friday, January 22, and any ticket holder who cannot make the date will be refunded.

Gourmet Burger Kitchen assistant manager Antonios Athanasiou estimated the restaurant had lost about £1,000 worth of business.

He said almost all the other businesses in George Street lost power, including Jamie’s Italian, the Wig & Pen and Java & Co. The power cut also affected streets on Osney Island.

The Oxford Mail, on Osney Mead industrial estate, was not affected but some of our sister publications, including The Oxford Times, suffered delays as a result.

A spokesman for SSE said there were two faults which both impacted the same areas.

The first happened at 6.16pm and affected 1,318 customers, with some powerless for up to four hours. Of those, 779 were back within two minutes and the rest were brought back in stages until 11.27pm.

The second fault happened at 6.44pm and affected 2,601 customers who all had power restored by 7.50pm.