Awarded an MBE for services to arts-based businesses, I am passionate about generating inspiring, socially engaging, creative practice within educational contexts both nationally and internationally.
Green’s Windmill in Sneinton Nottingham has all the appearance of being an irascible monument. It’s being refurbished at the moment and apparently some builders got injured in the process so they too are now undergoing some kind of physical refurbishment to their own bodies and souls.
You can’t help but wonder, if the windmill had a mind of its own, would it have taken kindly to being crawled over by scaffolders intent on acts of refurbishment? Perhaps it would have preferred to have been allowed to gently fade away and its brick work continue to crumble? Perhaps the need for the refurbishers to be undergoing their own refurbishment is the mark of a monument irritated by its place in the world?
Fortunately though for the casual tourist and local resident, the windmill’s desire to deny its role in the world has been thwarted by a local group of enthusiasts, skilled experts and Nottingham Council. The restoration and refurbishment which has been going on for many years now imaginatively draws you into what it would have meant to be living off the land with nothing but a sharp north-easterly to grind your wheat into the finest organic flour.
The windmill can’t help but be interesting, whatever attempts it might surreptitiously make to present itself as unworthy of the visitor. Whilst it might want to resemble the battleship windmills of Holland, or the industrial machinery of Don Quixote legends, flailing at imagined heroes and mobsters, its more modest role to serve the local people of Nottinghamshire with the provision of flour, ground out by its heavy stones, cogs and gears means that its role is assured in the heart of the community and wider city.
It’s a place to visit which nurtures the soul by providing the very physical stuff of life. I for one am glad that it’s being nurtured for a longer life, despite its irascibility.
I’ve some great thought provoking responses from colleagues about the CEO SleepOut campaign I’m involved in which have got to the heart of the matter.
Such as, why don’t the organisers invite some homeless people along to the evening and enable them to talk directly with participants? And isn’t what homeless people need is to be given respect rather than been seeing as beneficiaries of charity? I’ve raised these questions with the organisers so we’ll see what they say about that.
But more fundamentally, these questions ask some important questions about why we have charities at all, what the relationship is between donors, charitable organisations and beneficiaries, and whether the act of ‘doing good’ or ‘just giving’ actually does more harm than good (in that it just provides short term, superficial Elastoplast solutions to things which require more systematic, substantial solutions to deep rooted social issues): or actually takes more than it gives (in that campaigning takes the focus of the problem away from the root cause of that problem and ‘gives’ the focus to those people who are on the receiving end of the charitable ‘give’.
One obvious answer is that if charities didn’t do what they do, no-one else (e.g. The State) is going to step up to the mark to address the short term pressures that people face here and now, rather than in some distant future when the state might have stepped up. So if a charity’s purpose can only be short term – then that’s because the long term is too distant a proposition for those who need solutions, right here, right now.
But there’s lot to think about here so many thanks for your responses!
But in the meantime, if you can contribute to the campaign, it would be great to hear from you just here:
I’m taking part in ‘CEO SleepOut in Nottingham on 13 October and are looking for sponsors who might be able to contribute to reaching my target of £1,000 which will go to local charities who are working on the front line with homeless people.
So, we get it that a lack of arts infrastructure means no audiences in theatres, library closure and artists consigned to talk to themselves for ever and a day, trapped in the basement of their own imaginations: but what type of arts infrastructure is it that we need?
The ‘just in time’ type exemplified in Wallace and Gromit’s train chase in The Wrong Trousers where Gromit has nano-seconds to lay down the track in front of him?
Or a 50 year plan which is built on the Big Data of today? But which might fall apart after the next election when experts are finally shown the door by No. 10 Downing Street and we’re left with the ‘I know what I like and I like what I know’ approach to building the nation’s cultural railways?
Whatever it turns out to be, we can be pretty sure that doing more of the same isn’t going to address the inequalities which are rife in the arts. Perhaps it’s not so much of needing Gromit to build our infrastructure, but the equivalent of a hyper loop travel system which can connect young people to artists to platforms and venues and audiences directly, immediately and without any of the paraphernalia that chasing a penguin with a colander on your head entails.
There’s been a move afoot in recent years which argues that you don’t need an arts infrastructure and that all arts funding should go directly to front line organisations. It suggests that if the larger theatres and museums, for example, could develop big enough education and outreach departments, these would be enough to increase audiences, develop new work, engage more young people, connect with more schools and improve cultural diversity. All the current ills facing the art world would be solved if you just did away with the infrastructure and handed over the cash to the deliverers.
This is all very well but imagine a scenario in the physical world where you did away with national power, transport and water infrastructure and allowed individual cities or regions to generate their own infrastructures. You’d have at least 17 different types of railway gauge across the country, none of which connected with each other; 53 different highway codes, none of which could be remembered by anyone; and power supplies which favoured the wealthy and cut off anyone who couldn’t afford the tariffs or had access to the countless plug adapters which would proliferate as a result of the dismantling of the national power grid.
There’s a lot that needs improving with the U.K’s arts infrastructure: but systematically destroying it isn’t the solution. It’s like the roads, the railways and the National Grid: you’ll only notice it when it’s gone.
People ask me, what are The MightyCreatives then? And what’s an Arts Council Bridge Organisation when it’s at home? And what does being an arts infrastructure organisation actually mean? And why don’t you just give the money directly to the organisations that are actually delivering the arts? And cut out the middle men? I used to ask the same question myself a lot.
But now I get it – and it’s very simple. An arts infrastructure organisation builds infrastructure much like architects and civil engineers build roads, railways, water supplies and the national grid.
Without civil infrastructure, people would never have travelled, economies would have stalled, cities would never have grown and public health would have been an impossible day dream.
Civic infrastructure is not a particularly sexy subject and although there is some romance to roads, railways and wind turbines, we generally don’t enthuse about how wonderful infrastructure can be – until it goes missing.
Arts infrastructure has similar functions: it gives young people the chance to learn and progress; it provides opportunities for people to experience cultural richness on a scale that would have been impossible if the only resources they had access to was an out of tune upright piano in the parlour. Without artistic infrastructure, civic health and well being would be unimaginable.
We’d soon know the importance of arts infrastructure if it disappeared overnight. Auditoria would be empty; libraries a thing of the past and you’d only be able to remember 3 tunes on your upright piano which you’d play over and over again. You’d go mad, and you’d take everyone with you.
So, a lack of arts infrastructure means no audiences in theatres, library closure and artists consigned to talk to themselves for ever and a day, trapped in the basement of their own imaginations: but what type of arts infrastructure is it that we need?
The ‘just in time’ type exemplified in Wallace and Gromit’s train chase in The Wrong Trousers where Gromit has nano-seconds to lay down the track in front of him?
Or a 50 year plan which is built on the Big Data of today? But which might fall apart after the next election when experts are finally shown the door by No. 10 Downing Street and we’re left with the ‘I know what I like and I like what I know’ approach to building the nation’s cultural railways?
Whatever it turns out to be, we can be pretty sure that doing more of the same isn’t going to address the inequalities which are rife in the arts. Perhaps it’s not so much of needing Gromit to build our infrastructure, but the equivalent of a hyper loop travel system which can connect young people to artists to platforms and venues and audiences directly, immediately and without any of the paraphernalia that chasing a penguin with a colander on your head entails.
That’s what organisations like The Mighty Creatives do. We help fill your theatres, open doors to knowledge and experience and stop you driving yourself bonkers with inept renditions of Scott Joplin’s Maple Leaf Rag.
It’s not a sexy job but someone has to be the cultural architects, planners and engineers of the future. That’s a pretty romantic thing to aspire to.
I met Tony back in 1993 when he came up to Liverpool from London to reignite his acting and directing career in the theatre. I was struck immediately by his energy and passion for his work. I hadn’t seen him in Absolute Beginners, or fully understood the iconic status he had as a result of his appearance in that film, but when I saw him on stage in front of me, there was no doubt that we had a truly original talent here which needed to find the right channels to express itself.
We worked together first on a new play I had written for part of a new theatre writing season at the Liverpool Everyman Theatre back in 1993. It was called Hunting the Dead Daughter and was a macabre story about a young girl being rejected by her father to such an extent that she was born old and regressed to the womb at her death. It was heavy duty stuff and Tony played the role of the demonic father with a frightening intensity. He showed me how good actors don’t just read text, they wrestle it off the page and scare it into physical existence: and if he had heard me say that, he would have shouted out that out-size Tony-laugh in a way only he could. HA! he would have shouted. HA!
After that project – directed by Clare McColgan incidentally, who went on to be CEO of the Liverpool Capital of Culture – we kept in touch and toyed with many ideas about some further collaboration but it wasn’t until some friends and I had set up a new film company, Latent Productions, that Tony really came into his own.
Together, years before Idris Elba was on the scene, we proposed that the next James Bond should be a black man; and that the best black man to play him would of course be Tony Hippolyte.
There was only one problem with this proposition: none of us had a clue about how to get Tony in front of the casting agents. And even if we had, we thought it was unlikely that Tony would have got a look in.
But undeterred, we soldiered on with the idea until he hit upon the brilliant idea that the project would be a cartoon and that he would provide the voice of the new, black James Bond: or as Tony put it: “The Black 007 – James Blonde, Licenced to Spill”.
Before too long, he had invented a crazy new James Blonde world with his usual manic energy. He saw Blonde living in an International Garden Centre who would, every morning, leap off his bed with abandon and karate chop his way to breakfast, clicking his fingers every step of the way. Rather than the traditional Vodka Martini, Tony’s James Blonde was a committed Kristall drinker: which probably accounted for the crazy characters that inhabited this world.
They included Q (the sssssttutttering professor); Bloch (the bald baddy about to let forth a plague of mechanical gnats which would defoliate Europe unless his mad demands were satisfied) and of course the ‘Blonde girl’ called Honey (named not because of her blonde hair, charming personality or physical attributes – but because she tended to stick to people, like glue, often outstaying her welcome into the bargain.)
Bloch: a villain from James Blonde 007: Licensed to Thrill (thanks to Tony Ealey)
And Tony being Tony, he quickly came up with some memorable ‘James Blonde’ quotes which we were convinced would soon make it into popular culture. Quotes like:
“Why do you roll a dice if you didn’t wanna bet?”
“I’ve never met an institution that never looked after itself”
“She loves me. It’s just a matter of time.”
“I taught myself to survive and don’t you forget it.”
And many, many more.
Sadly, Tony’s Black 007 never made it beyond the idea stage and a few scribbled notes on the backs of fag packets and their virtual equivalent. Tony and I went our separate ways: him to Skelmersdale, and me eventually to Nottingham: and now it looks like he’ll be taken to rest at his final resting place in St Lucia (hence the photo at the top of this text), whilst I move onto my next chapter in Leicester.
But I’ll never forget his enthusiasm, talent and energy: it provided me with some unforgettable times in Liverpool and who knows? Perhaps some-one out there might like to breath some life into the work one of our original thinkers and actors: Tony Hippolyte, the Black 007. James Blonde, Licenced to Spill.
“It depends how you count ’em…” has been a constant refrain through the cultural education exchange visit in Finland this week. Whether it’s golf courses in Espoo (7 or 8), municipalities in Helsinki (4 or 14) or lakes in Finland (187,888 plus or minus), it all depends on how you count them. For phenomena you might think are pretty unequivocal (when is a golf course not a golf course?), it turns out that there is a lot more to a thing than meets the eye.
Walking along the coast line of the Tooivo Kuulas park this morning you can see why. One moment the lake looks like an impressively large pond; the next it stretches way off into the distance and it conjures up memories of Balaton Lake in Hungary; and soon enough you find out that it’s not a lake at all but just another link in the supply chain to the Baltic Sea.
It struck me that the same case could be said for student attainment. How can a country’s education system said to be performing well? Through its ratings on the PISA scale? Numbers of students who graduate into work on completion of their undergraduate study? Aggregated ratings on a mental health scale of well being? Like the lakes in Finland, it depends on how you count them. My top PISA rating may be nothing more than a drop in your Baltic Sea when it comes to evaluating the relevance those ratings have on students lives.
Whilst it’s temporarily startling that Espoo has a disputed number of golf courses in its territory, it is comforting to think that if we can’t count golf courses with confidence, we can confidently be a little less confident about the value of numbers when it comes to understanding the effects of cultural education on our children.
“Look what I’ve got!” Eamon triumphantly pulled out a glass sugar dispenser from the inside of his voluminous flak jacket. “It’s from the hotel!” His acquisition was met with near-universal approval in the packed minibus of 15 young trainees and not so young tutors. Anything that could be liberated from the German hotel was fair game it seemed and if this meant the relocation of a sugar dispenser to a new home in Liverpool, then so be it. This was just one more way of settling the score, after their national football team had beaten us at penalties in the World Cup the previous year.
The approval was not quite universal though as a few of us in the minibus thought that the liberation of a sugar bowl by a young Scouser (particularly a young Scouser who has just been on a week’s cultural programme which involved arguing that stereotypes were terrible things, and that he, along with many others of us in the minibus, had had enough of being stereotyped as bin robbers) just reinforced the stereotyping he had been vociferously campaigning against all week.
Thankfully, the irony was not lost on anyone and the journey continued soberly through to Belgium where we found ourselves driving the wrong way around the Belgian Grand Prix Race track in Spa Francorchamps before our map reader realised he’d been holding the map upside down and soon put us back on the right track for Antwerp.
Eamon offered his immediate apologies and did the right thing when he got home by posting the sugar dispenser back to the hotel from whence it came with a profuse apology.
Stereotypes are a kind of cultural weed: easily established and infuriatingly difficult to get rid of. They not only affect our own preconceptions of how ‘the other’ behaves, but also shape how others’ preconceptions of us reinforces our own ignorance.
Our minibus trip from Liverpool to Trier may not have fully transformed those young people’s perceptions of ‘the other’, they did at least get a glimpse of how ‘the other’ looked at them. And one hotel at least got its sugar dispenser returned.
The Nick Owen Banging On Channel 