Jack McLean
Culture, media and drivel

When Harold Wilson created the post of minister for the arts in his first government it was thought of as rather a gimmick at the time and considered even more so when he appointed Jennie Lee, widow of the legendary Aneurin Bevan, to the job. Lee was widely regarded throughout the Labour Party as a tiresome woman who had always ridden on the coat-tails of her famous husband. She turned out to be an inspired choice and undoubtedly the best minister for the arts ever. She fought tenaciously, in cabinet and in public, for all the arts, she brought together most of the horribly disparate organisations, she championed individual artists across the board, and she created an unprecedented profile for the arts among the electorate.
     Today the same ministry has a different title and indeed a different purpose. It is now called the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. In both political and economic terms it has little relationship with the arts as Jennie Lee would have thought them. That sport and what is called media are part of what is called culture is obvious but that sport and media are thought of as of equal importance to other areas of what we call culture is absurd.
     In this 'department' sport is by far the most dominant and thus the most heavily financed, not only in percentage terms but in real terms too. Media, over which government has but little influence, is much wooed by politicians of all hues but, when any form of it shows too great an independence or, worse in political eyes, a critical or oppositional stance, it is threatened. The BBC is always under threat. The Labour Party is ever in conflict with the independence of the BBC, the Conservatives less overtly but more insidiously so. In a recent 'Any Questions' show on Radio 4 I heard a prominent Tory politician insist that the BBC should be closed down and the licence fee system ended. The audience (this is almost always a deeply middle-class and rather staid grouping) booed him to the rafters.
     But it is not only the BBC which is under threat, from without and sadly also from within; the rest of what would loosely be called 'the media' is at risk. There was once a Monopolies Commission, though we have not heard of it for a very long time indeed. Newspapers are of course at risk and that is a longer question which must be addressed at a later time. But what about bookshops?
     Many of you will probably be surprised that a recent survey by the National Book League discovered that 69% of the British population had never read a book after leaving school (and a large proportion had never read a book at all). Yet just because we have a society of near-illiterates doesn't justify the monopoly of bookselling to a few conglomerates such as the appalling W H Smith, the ubiquitous supermarket bookselling, and what is now the only large-scale bookseller, and which now threatens every small-scale independent bookseller. Waterstones, ironically, was originally set up to counteract the monopoly which previous bookshops at one time possessed.
     But all of the above is as nothing to the pervasive influence of sport on the culture of Britain, and indeed elsewhere in the world. Let me give you two examples on my own doorstep. There was a time when a public house would have etched into its windows the legend 'Wine and Spirits'. A few months ago a pub near me refurbished itself. Sandblasted into its prominent window was the proud sign: 'All-day television football coverage!'. Most of the other pubs in the area had similar advertisements in their outdoor hoardings. If those real ale pub freaks had their disputes, and a great many non-freaks did too, about music in pubs, such a concern pales in the face of the destruction of the great British pub as a focus for discussion, argument, and social life in general caused by non-stop football.
     Then let me give another example. We no longer have the news and sport: we have the news and the sport. I am a radio listener and I can tell you that Radio Scotland is near unlistenable because it is obsessed with sport, especially football. Its football news frequently lasts longer than its national and international news. Its programming has more sport than almost anything else, especially about association football.
     There are those who tell me that I can always switch off. But why should I, or you come to that? The massive sums which television pays out to sport and especially football has meant that every other section of its industry has to suffer. I will tell you this: there will be no more expensive and splendid dramas such as 'Brideshead Revisited', few programmes such as Kenneth Clarke's 'Civilisation' or Bronowski's 'The Ascent of Man'. There will be more pap such as 'Big Brother' or other celebrity drivel. Along with non-stop sport. And all of this is coming from your licence fee, the one some politicians want to stop.
     But back to Jennie Lee and the arts ministry, now called 'culture, media, and sport'. The bulk of its financing now goes to sport. Such farragoes as the Olympic Games, and in Scotland, in poverty-stricken Glasgow, the Commonwealth Games, have diverted monies from not only the budgets for the arts, but from health and education and much else besides. Gibbon indicated that the decline and fall of Rome may have been, if not caused, certainly hastened by the sheer cost of the games much beloved by the now effete and debauched Roman populace. But it was Juvenal who said this rather more strongly. Panem et circences, he wrote. It is usually misquoted as 'bread and circuses', though in fact circences translates as 'games'. I am in favour of bread, and, in a small way, of circuses. But not of games, and especially the ones at which the Ministry of Culture, Media and Drivel are now expensively playing on our and the arts' expense.

Jack McLean, among his many other journalistic roles, was a prominent sports writer for the Herald, Scotland on Sunday, and the Scottish Daily Mail. His book, 'The Sporting Urban Voltaire', was first published in 1993