Give me a sweetie

A few days ago on here I was nice about the National Theatre. Yesterday I was nice about Yes Minister.

I've a fundrasing drive going on at the moment in a desperate attempt to compensate for an ACE-shaped hole in my budget for Man Across the way, and as part of it my beautiful wife sent letters to 250 theatre celebrities. Yesterday I got a cheque from Nicholas Hytner, today I got one from Derek Fowlds. It is the policy of this blog, in a spirit of fitting optimism, to be nice about everyone with a chequebook.

Which in a roundabout way includes James Purnell, our new culture secretary, who everyone seems to think is so far doing a good job. What a nice man. I bet he's great with children and animals.

Oh alright, I admit it. I remain to be convinced. Just because a man likes the theatre doesn't necessarily mean he'll do a great job running the whole national cultural infrastructure. I know loads of season ticket holders at Middlesbrough, for example, who'd do a ghastly job of managing the team.

But Purnell has now given a new speech, which might help readers of this blog to forget the one to the IPPR I so cruelly dismantled a week ago. It's much better, almost as happy clappy as Blair's earlier this year, but in this case with something to say. I've had no luck in unearthing the full text, so we'll have to take Charlotte Higgins' word for it and assume she's read the whole thing and not just the press release. It's moderately encouraging.

Excellence, he says, is going to be the main criterion from now on. I'd like so see how he plans on measuring it: peer review seems the only sensible strategy, and there are obvious difficulties even with that. But still. The chances a piece of art has of being good art seems like a very good place to start when formulating an arts funding strategy. He's wrong to say that the access battle has been won, but one of the best ways of widening access is to make really terrific work that people want to see. His example, Punchdrunk's Faust, is a good one.

This brings me to the most surprising news story of the week: Michael Billington in "not talking total arse" shocker. Billington argues fairly persuasively that we do in fact have to continue considering access in the arts world. There's no point in making great work if no more than the same seven people come to see it every time.

This means creating work that will appeal to demographics other theatres can't reach, with all of the attendant problems that brings. Because of course we can't create work in bad faith; that will only lead to bad work. We just have to hope that our beliefs about what is good are shared by the people we manage to get through the door. The root problem then, is not a lack of diversity in the audiences, but a lack of diversity in the directors and theatre managers. There have been massive strides on this in the last ten years or so, but the vast majority of us are still white, middle class and university-educated. In having been working class for about the first fourteen years of my life, I'm mildly divergent from the norm, but not all that much.

So how do we get a real reflection in our profession of the society to whom we profess to speak? I have to come back to youth and community work. As I've said before, this stuff is not a waste of time or money. It's about the future.

But there's an awful lot of bad, tokenist box-tickery going on in this sector, I hear you cry. So there is. And the solution is simple. Put the emphasis on excellence. Inclusion is not a de facto good if what you're included in is rubbish. There's no merit in having been in the Leeds United squad; youth and community work can and should be encouraged to excel. I'm not a believer in entering kids into drama competitions and whatnot; I'm a great believer in doing good work with them and some of my best work is done there. If I ever hear about this bloody job in York (the board meeting to discuss whether they can afford to pay my wages was on Thursday and I'm waiting for the phone to ring: predictions welcome) I hope to continue doing more.

So Purnell may be onto a good thing in putting the emphasis on excellence. But one can't help but feel he's pouring honey into one ear and poison into the other. He's guarded where it most counts: he admits that he doesn't hold the purse strings on this one, and admits it's going to be a tough round. And of course he's right. He can sing the praises of the arts all he likes, but it will only really count when he convinces not us, who are well-known to already have a high enough opinion of our value, but the Chancellor and the Prime Minister. It's all very well telling your child he's a good boy. What he wants to know is: are you going to give him a sweetie?

The Arts Under Socialism

So today's the day. Blair is finally off, and not a minute too soon, to be replaced by a real politician, Gordon Brown. And the last couple of weeks have been excellent demonstrations of the view of politics as a branch of the entertainment industry, with cliffhangers agogo: what will happen next? Will Tony set up his preposterous face-to-faith forum, since he's done so much for the good name of Christianity and good relations with Islam? Will he recover from his "frank" drubbing from Pope Benedict, hardly a moderate himself? Gosh, no, it looks like he's off to bring peace to the middle east. (Surely that's meant as a joke, as though the Fonz disappeared to a monastery?)

Meanwhile we have all the humming and ha-ing about who will compose the first Brown cabinet. Will there be a deputy Prime Minister? How can Jack Straw's loyalty be rewarded without giving him a brief he might fuck up? How to deal with David Milliband, the nearly-challenger? Or Harriet Harman, who one can't help feeling wouldn't have been Brown's first choice as Deputy? (The latter has been neatly dealt with by doubling up the deputy leadership and the party chairmanship: no dangerous cabinet brief for moderately disloyal Harriet.)

And now we have one final twist in the tale: Quentin Davies' splendid resignation of the Tory whip and defection to the government benches. It could hardly be more timely for Brown, or more cutting to Cameron, who is indicted on a bewildering number of charges: vacuity? check. Superficiality? check. Hypocrisy? check. It's lovely, and I hope Blair saves some of it for Brown rather than using up the whole lot in his final PMQs today.

But this resignation is pleasing for more reasons than mere entertainment. It's about time someone stuck it to Cameron or, more to the point, about time people started to realise that being a nice young man with his heart in the right place is not a suitable qualification for the highest office in the land. So he deserves everything he gets and it'll be nice to see the Tories start unravelling again. That is satisfying, in the way it's satisfying to see the judge don his black cap when passing judgement on the man who killed your children.

Perhaps through the principle that a change is as good as a rest, I'm feeling oddly optimistic about Gordon Brown. Admittedly you can't put a fag paper between him and Blair in terms of policy. But Brown's a details man, so perhaps he's in a position to make some of the admirably-conceived reforms of the last ten years actually work. (Before you deluge me with comments: not all of the reforms have been admirably-conceived.) And Brown actually believes in them, whereas change the name at the top of Quentin Davies' letter and it could just as well be read to Blair. Let's hope the one thing Cameron doesn't learn from his Labour alter ego is the teflon trick.

The one thing I don't feel particularly optimistic about is the future of arts funding. The comprehensive spending review due later this year is unlikely, whoever the new chancellor turns out to be, to deliver even inflation-level rises to ACE, and nor is it likely to address the losses suffered by the smash-and-grab raid recently effected on behalf of the Olympics. It's these losses that are most damaging for me personally, as they manifest themselves as a 33% cut in Grants for the Arts, the scheme making grants on a project-by-project basis, and through which all of the public funding I've ever had has come.

Brown was recently full of praise for the arts in Britain, almost as fulsome as Blair was earlier this year. But it's utterly meaningless. Screwing the arts is politically low-cost and so it's all too easy to smile, and smile, and be a villain. But no-one will ever resign a whip because of little white lies like these.

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I've spent the last couple of weeks in London working on Man Across the Way, and trying to watch as many shows as possible, so apologies to my readers (both of you) for the extended absence. I'll fill you in on all my adventures over the next few days. In the meantime, here's one meditation. Finding myself with an hour or two to kill before a show at the Soho Theatre, I wandered into the London Review Bookshop and browsed my way to JB Priestley's essay The Arts Under Socialism. In it he lambasts the confusion between means and ends that he sees as besetting much of left-wing art. Art under capitalism is not a means to the end of socialism; art under socialism is not a means to the end of the maintenance of socialism. Such a view of art impoverishes art immeasurably, as good art is an end in itself, not arguing for this or that case of affairs, but rather pushing us, or dragging us, towards greater understanding or greater awareness of our lack of understanding. Art is good under whatever system of governance and the enlightened system will support it. What do you reckon, Gordon?