Tim Cornwell: This year, Edinburgh, next year - the world

Published on Wednesday 5 January 2011 13:46

Edinburgh's Hogmanay prides itself on attracting an international influx to the city at New Year. Interviewing European visitors in the streets on New Year's Eve, such as an older German couple who had celebrated New Year in cities across the continent, including Linz in Austria, European Capital of Culture in 2009, one hoped they'd find enough to recommend Edinburgh to their friends.

Like most Edinburghers of a certain age I am not driven to enthusiastically join what one friend called the "half-naked rammy", drunken, densely packed and cheerful, on Princes Street. For the first time in several years, however, I saw out most of the official programme.

The half-naked element was provided spectacularly by Biffy Clyro, the Scottish rockers who stripped to their tattoos for the Gardens concert. The lowest point of the proceedings, certainly in the Gardens, was the playing of Kenneth McKellar's Auld Lang Syne, ostensibly for the crowd to sing along. With all respect to his memory, Burns belting out the speakers on the heels of Biffy reduced the audience to gob-smacked mouthing.

Jazz and haikus were in the Hogmanay offering this year, alongside the midnight rammy on Princes Street. Fifers Ian Rankin and KT Tunstall headlined separate literary and musical events on New Year's Day, pursuing something more than just another rock concert.

The ingenuity and experience of Edinburgh's Mr Hogmanay, Pete Irvine, and the veteran producers and supporters that surround him, continue to shape the celebration - for all the sniping at his operation. Irvine is talking up next year's Hogmanay as a way to project Scotland as part of the Cultural Olympiad around the games in 2012. The tasters of a wider cultural offering beyond the Street Party crowds certainly left an appetite for more.

Edinburgh needs the Street Party crowds for the international TV coverage, which was said to be strong this year. It needs the numbers for the economic impact. New Year's Eve from New York to Sydney is a party celebrating a change in the date, more about giggles and kisses than spiritual meaning. That doesn't mean budget cuts should shrink it back to the Street Party. For visitors who are looking for something thought-provoking and memorable from the Edinburgh cultural scene or the Scottish Hogmanay they have (hopefully) heard so much about, it seems an opportune time to encourage and expand the alternative side.

The opening of the National Galleries of Scotland on New Year's Day is a major bonus. Next year could be a bumper offering, on a day that claims a huge surge of visitors in town, with the reopening of the Royal Museum.

What's been lost in recent years, apparently, are the City Art Centre, and the Fruitmarket Gallery. Hogmanay events in those places have generated some of their biggest one-day visitor numbers, it is said.Why were two publicly-funded galleries, geographically at the heart of the Hogmanay bash, shuttered from 1-3 January?

The New Year's Day conversation with writers Rankin and Lin Anderson, hosted by Catherine Lockerbie, was popular and well received. Tunstall introduced the interesting Silver Columns, Adem Ilhan and Johnny Lynch.

Rankin's global fame drew a mixed audience to the Hawthornden theatre. The appetite is there for these events and writers like Alexander McCall Smith or AL Kennedy would also be a big draw.

The main line up was distinctive Scottish, though Irvine had caught Biffy Clyro on the crest of a fairly strange surge, with a Biffy Christmas Number One thanks to the X Factor. (They claimed to be "flattered" by it, between gritted teeth.)

Free public events take public funding, sore lacking at the minute. The Scottish Government's Expo Fund filled a gap this year. There might be more mileage in smaller, paid events. When The Donkey Show, a Fringe hit, was brought to Hogmanay some years ago, it was a big success.

Hogmanay was officially included as one of Edinburgh's festivals only after some debate about its cultural content. The Cultural Olympiad could be a hook to seize that identity and further diversify the line-up.