I bought my parents tickets to The Ladykillers for Christmas. They were stalls seats; row B, no less. Perhaps this seems like a gold-plated gift – top-price tickets come in at £55, or a whopping £85 for a premium seat – but I had a secret weapon: the annual industry discount ticket promotion Get Into London Theatre (GILT), which allowed me to get them for a rather more reasonable £35.

If I'd been buying for myself, I might have been more likely to opt for one of GILT's cheaper deals, which go as low as £10. There's only one problem, of course: as of 10 February, after six weeks, the promotion has come to an end for another year. For me and for many others, it's back to biting the bullet and paying out for full-price tickets, or (more likely) rooting around for cut-price deals.

I should emphasise that it's not as if these don't exist. At the Lyric Hammersmith I found a fantastic mid-week matinee deal to pick up a £12.50 ticket to Lovesong. The performance was packed; all of us no doubt chuffed to see a great production at such a tiny price. But if you work 9 to 5, and aren't under 26 or over 60, it's much harder to find affordable ways of seeing a show – even more so when it comes to commercial theatre. While the Lyric and other off-West End and subsidised venues like the Donmar Warehouse, Royal Court and National Theatre (whose Travelex £12 ticket offer is thankfully still going strong) are affordable, and an increasing number do pay-what-you-can evenings, it's no revelation to say that commercial West End shows are steep, and only getting steeper with the adoption of premium seats and the creeping up of bottom-tier prices. The TKTS booth offers discounts on top shows, but you need to be spontaneous to get the best deals – not always an option unless you're able to drop everything and zoom off to the theatre.

This is, I think, why the GILT scheme – which has been running for 11 years – is so good: it makes it possible for people to experience theatre not as a luxury, nor as something it's necessary to jump through hoops to see, but as something that could be part of normal life – something that could become a passion. Like many others, I rarely went to the theatre as a child because my family wasn't flush; the occasional trip to Stratford with my English GCSE class was as far as it went. But over the past few years, thanks to a great job in the arts, I've seen a lot of fantastic theatre – much of it, gratefully, for free – and I've developed a love for the stage that I wish I'd had earlier in my life. Surely everyone should get to see theatre, and with the same regularity as other culturally enriching pastimes such as reading books or going to the cinema. But for many, theatre isn't affordable – or, at least, a theatre habit isn't affordable.

While young people have access to youth ticket discounts (and so they should) and retirees have the time to take advantage of mid-week matinee offers, it's the average Joes – average age, average salary, average working hours – who are missing out on the chance to develop what could be a long-term passion. The sad fact is that if you didn't have the means to acquire one earlier in life, you often have little opportunity to do so in adulthood, either.

So how about this: make Get Into London Theatre last all year, with every West End show making a commitment to offer a certain number of pre-bookable tickets through the promotion. (If it started this Olympic year, it might even help prevent the tumbleweed-in-Theatreland scenario as predicted by some harbingers of doom.) A permanent, officially regulated ticket deal would make theatre more accessible to the average person, which would fuel a theatregoing habit in people who would not otherwise have had the means to develop one. Isn't it worth a shot? As I've discovered, once you've picked up a theatregoing habit, it's hard to break. But you need to pick it up to start with.