Blog/27/8/10

Sad news from Wales. Bryn Terfel’s Faenol Festival, due to brighten up August Bank Holiday but which AI reported last time was in trouble, has been cancelled – for the second year in succession. In spite of the Welsh Assembly giving £250,000 in July for the next three Faenols, the festival chairman, Sir David Henshaw, says, ‘We could not waste the generous grant of public money’, with Bryn himself adding: ‘Advance ticket sales in this challenging economic climate have not been sufficient for us to feel confident that we can move ahead with a full festival’. There are now urgent discussions with Gwynedd County Council, also a funder, as to whether there will ever be another Brynfest.

Are the Scots being adult and responsible about their arts funding, or hopelessly naive compared with the English? Fiona Hyslop has announced that there will be no cuts in arts funding north of the border, at least until the Scottish government gets its funding settlement from Whitehall. She told the Beeb’s Will Gompertz, during his EdFest mission, that while international tourism has slumped by 2%, in Scotland it’s gone up 4%, at least partly because of the arts. And after all, Scotland has already gone through its arts quango transformation, however torturously, in joining the old Scottish Arts Council and Scottish Screen in the new Creative Scotland, halving the bureaucratic cost. It seems like impulse denial for the Scots not to go for the slash and burn option, but let’s ee if they are allowed to get away with it, and if they are who is right.

It looks like the government has decided to merge English Heritage and HLF in its quango blitz, while the MLA will disappear into the Arts Council. You can make out the shape of things to come by the shade on the wall, this time by the increasingly shrill objections to the expected coalescence from the Heritage Alliance. ‘English Heritage covers England and is an official advisor, HLF is UK-wide and a lottery distributor and doesn’t give grants to private owners’ says the Alliance’s Kate Pugh. ‘They have different remits, I am not convinced it is a happy marriage’. And then there is the National Heritage Memorial Fund, set up after the war to preserve the built heritage as an imaginative memorial to the war dead with a stonking £50m from the redundant National Land Fund. That money went, often on some pretty idiotic acquisitions, and it subsists on a government grant now to be a ‘fund of last resort’ operated separately within the HLF. That separateness might not be to the taste of Mr Hunt. The whole thing is reminiscent of the way the extra quango, HLF, was created inth efirst pl;ace, under Lord Rothschild. When the National Lottery was created a fifth of the good causes windfall was to go to heritage, and the then relevant minister, Peter Brooke, had it in mind to hand the money to EH. But the lottery was UK-wide, EH only serves England, so he looked to the NHMF. This was national but much too small, so the HLF was created around it. Rothschild and the first CEO, Georgina Naylor, came to a lunch with arts journalists to be asked what the new body was going to do. ‘We were rather hoping you would be able to tell us’ a bewildered Jacob Rothschild responded.

Here is one of those deliciously savoury ‘why I hate Ryanair’ stories. A 12-year-old has been banned from taking her violin has hand luggage on a flight, despite having been told before hand that it would be OK because, of course, committing the instrument to the hold would mean its instant death. It looks beastly, and the Incorporated Society of Musicians is righteously furious, but maybe there is more to it than has been reported. After all, was a time when gents with pencil moustaches, shades and chalk-stripe suits carried violin cases whose shape belied their actual contents, so maybe this was a security thing. But a 12-year-old from Manchester? More likely, perhaps, that having had experience of pubescents with musical instruments airline staff in Berlin made her play a few bars and humanely decided that their English friends should be spared a similar experience, so we should be duly grateful.