Arts diary: Catty remarks add some colour to the great arts funding debate

Published on Tuesday 27 July 2010 19:02

THE bitter rows breaking out in London over swingeing cuts in arts funding, even before the shock of the UK Film Council getting summarily canned, suggest a grim foretaste of what some have dubbed a "perfect storm" heading north. Gird your loins.

The cry of all hands to the philanthropy pumps – echoed recently in smoke signals at Creative Scotland HQ – has come in for particularly bitter scorn. Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt has touted private giving as an alternative to Arts Council grants as he proposes a 50 per cent cut at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.

The Evening Standard's city editor Chris Blackhurst laid into the likes of Nicholas Serota, declaring that "The Arts should give up whingeing and start singing for its supper". The arts community is better placed to take tough medicine, he said, because it can "tap into private wealth" in ways other departments cannot.

"More needs to be done to encourage philanthropy from companies and rich individuals," he stated. "Someone will always come forward and underwrite a production such as Salom at the Royal Opera House…What's required is a wholesale promotion of corporate and individual giving to the arts."

It brought a damning retort from the actor and director Samuel West: "If I could only afford a caf in my theatre because someone wanted to name it after their cat," he said.

"The idea that artists deplore private money is nonsense; we've been gratefully squeezing every last drop of money from sponsors for years."

West cites the English numbers to prove "arts are cheap, and they're profitable".

The arts cost only 0.07 per cent of total public spending – 7p in every 100, he notes. The Arts Council of England's theatre budget for 2008 was 54 million; but theatre paid back 76m in VAT in London alone, where the best productions often start in the subsidised sector before moving to the West End. Oh, and 54 million is one 30,000th of the sum to bail out the banks.

"Philanthro-capitalism will make theatre more expensive, and more elitist," he concludes. "The working class has no rich mates to put money into stuff made for them."

Resurrection shuffle

AN EARLY and deserving contender for the 2010 Best Fringe PR Stunt Award is Glasgow bluesman John Alexander, who recently scaled the highest mountain in Morocco's Atlas range with his guitar strapped to his back to belt out his newly penned song Call me a Doctor.

There's a Youtube clip, of course, showing Alexander sitting on the 13,700ft summit of Mount Toubkal performing a twangy-and-lonesome number, mostly in this case about how he's nearly dying of exhaustion: "Well I should be, full of coffee, but I feel, like I'm dead."

Even at altitude and in the Moroccan summer heat, with temperatures of 44C, Alexander proves his worth in a strong performance. The jaunt, dubbed the Ain't No Mountain Charity Challenge, was to raise funds for MacMillan Cancer Support. After playing to sell-out crowds at the Fringe last year, he's back with "Dustbowl Blues with a Glasgow Kick," in two performances at the Acoustic Music Centre in St Brides on 12 and 19 August.

Bit of a Partridge

SPEAKING of crooners, the oracle has spoken. Could it Be Forever? is a play that follows the fortunes of three teenage friends meeting up decades later and revisiting their crush on David Cassidy. "There is a moment in our formative years when loving your parents is not enough," the play's promo materials declare, "and we discover our capacity for passion by yearning for the unobtainable. At that crossroads anything is possible… and then along came David Cassidy."

Now the great man has has posted on his website, saying he is "extremely flattered" to be the subject of said work. "I have been aware of the Festival for decades now," he writes, "and have been so impressed by original plays and productions presented there. Being the subject of the artistic imagination often humbles me. Knowing that I've had a significant impact on other human beings, I have always tried to bring light into other peoples' lives. Projects such as this merely confirm this belief." Glad to know that he's "been aware" of us for decades, but the work's writers/actors Lucie Fitchett and Victoria Willing have now showered him with invitations and will surely go gooey at the knees if he decides to grace us with his presence.