IN THE PAPERS - In The Times today, the Barbican chief John Tusa expresses his anger against 'ignorant bureaucrats and posturing barbarians'.

I’m sick to death of meddling philistines

Government arts policy is forged by ignorant bureaucrats and posturing barbarians, writes the furious Barbican chief John Tusa

I will put it simply and perhaps too directly. After more than a decade of direct involvement in the arts and the debate about them, there are many things of which I am sick to death. This is not just a spasm of impatience but represents my deep belief that if the attitudes behind the policies I describe did not exist, the arts would be better run, healthier, more effective, more varied and more enjoyable even than they are today. Does arts policymaking, in short, get in the way of creating the arts themselves?

In recent weeks there have been specific criticisms of government attitudes to the arts by Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Master of the Queen’s Music, and Charles Saumarez Smith, the outgoing director of the National Gallery. “Max” said that the Government’s attitude was “utterly philistine”, while Saumarez Smith criticised the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, for being “completely deaf” to the importance of saving major works of art for the nation.

I am as — or even more — concerned with the way that arts policy has become so heavily bureaucratised. It should not be necessary for a senior civil servant to spend weeks trying to persuade the Treasury that an additional £22 million will prevent the museums and galleries from spiralling into deficit, as has happened recently. It is a waste of time because £22 million in a national budget of some £560 billion is ignored as the big numbers are added up. The sum of £22 million is just rounded off. It’s loose change.

This is not a special plea for a privileged place for the arts. It is a plea for the application of common sense. Let’s be clear. If the Treasury holds on to that £22 million, it will not make any difference to its room for manoeuvre on any major item of government policy — not health, not education, not welfare, not defence. If it gives it to the museums and galleries, it heads off a looming crisis. What does common sense suggest is the wiser course, the more effective approach? Time spent in meetings arguing over such numbers as if they were life or death issues has wasted hours of time, for arts directors as well as policymakers.

Mine is also a plea for a serious approach to funding the arts. As Tony Blair made clear in his Tate Modern speech on March 6, new Labour is very proud of funding free access to museums and galleries, transforming attendances and hugely increasing audiences for museums and galleries. But we also know that this came about not because of a reasoned belief in the policy, still less from conviction in the values of free admission, but because the Treasury found a significant lump of money lying loose shortly before the Budget was finalised.

Funding free admission was judged to make a good political headline. The arts deserve better than this, a serious debate about arts funding rather than this mix of opportunism, point-scoring and gameplaying.
I’m sick to death, too, with justifying the arts as if there was something specially problematical about doing so, as if funding the arts is irrational or even unnatural. Thinking about the arts, judging their value, explaining particular trends in the arts — this is an essential part of a human activity that takes itself seriously. What is a waste of time is being required to justify the arts as if millennia of arts activity required justifying anew, as if a failure to justify them could — or should — lead to the end of the activity altogether.
This demand for an incontrovertible justification for the arts goes hand in hand with the further cry: “Yes, these reasons are familiar enough, but you cannot demonstrate that they add up numerically or financially.” No one has ever funded the arts because they have convinced the sceptical about their essential utility. Making the demand is an act of posturing only. I am sick to death of senior policymakers having to spend time presenting the record of the arts in detail to Treasury officials and being asked, almost incredulously: “So you’re saying the arts are a success story?” I’m certainly sick to death of being asked by friendly lobbying groups, such as the National Campaign for the Arts — it’s not their fault — to give them real instances of the arts making a difference to people or their society so that they, too, can try to persuade the Treasury. The cost of producing these papers is real.

I do want the Treasury and all politicians to know what the arts achieve. There is plenty to suggest that the mountains of evidence produced through this process are of scant value in the final decision-making process. Is this a policy of attrition? Of obstruction? Of postpone-ment? Probably all three.

Come to that, why is the demand for justification of the arts so often accompanied by the implied slur that those in the arts are engaged in a selfish activity — which they want others to pay for — by representing them as some kind of personal indulgence, constituting a private play-thing? All the evidence points to widespread use made of the arts, the overwhelming support for their funding and the enjoyment that they bring. Why is so much overt public debate founded apparently on such wilfully false assumptions?

I’m sick to death, too, that the arts play such a small part in the activities of local authorities. There are statutory responsibilities on local authorities to provide key services such as education, housing and the police. There is no equivalent statutory responsibility to provide for the arts. Perhaps inevitably, when local authorities do produce a cultural strategy — and more and more of them feel obliged to do so — there is no mention of anything truly recognisable as arts provision. Can you be surprised when the very word “culture” in local authority speak has been debased to include swimming, walking and enjoying parks almost to the deliberate exclusion of the visual and performing arts.

Why are we so supine in not rebutting the accusation that the market’s provision of entertainment makes subsidy of the arts unnecessary and probably unjustifiable? Why do we not challenge the sneer that there are the popular arts and then — wait for it — the unpopular arts? Why are we so weak in ramming home the fact that public subsidy and private funding are partners in creating a broad spectrum, from the most esoteric to the most banal, that actually unites us in the world of arts and entertainment?

The market benefits hugely from the actors, directors, designers, playwrights, nurtured, trained and developed by the subsidised sector. Has anyone ever suggested that the private entertainment sector should pay the state a return on the fruits of this investment in talent and creativity from which it benefits so hugely?
Arguably, this binary approach — state-subsidised arts bad, privately funded arts good — is one of the most damaging and destructive aspects of the public arts debate. It is untrue, it obfuscates, it is intended to damage, and it distracts attention from the fact that however we are funded, basically we are all in the same business.

Arts policymakers judge the education and outreach programme of a major arts institution not by whether it is of high quality and raises the creative awareness of the children it is aimed at, but only whether it is directed at socially targeted groups such as refugees or the socially marginalised.

Valuable as such activity may be, it is far from clear why an education programme dedicated to developing creative understanding in the broadest sense should be limited and defined in this way. Such may well be the priorities of social welfare departments. Why are they the priorities of arts policy-makers? The only possible answer can be that the arts policymakers themselves do not believe in the value of excellence of the arts as such and on their own.

Why do we allow the language of the arts to be bogged down in the impenetrable cant of social science? Why must every document be laden with words and phrases such as “pathways”, “entry points”, “direction of travel” and dozens of such like. If the language is vague, obscure, woolly, impenetrable, then the ideas lurking behind it will be equally vague and woolly.

The principle that those who spend publicly given money should be open about how they spend it is unquestionable. But the manner in which accountability is operated is crucial. Too often the cry of “accountability” is used as a none-too-transparent cloak for interference. The proliferating forms in which accountability is demanded only get in the way of the creation of the arts for which the money is given in the first place. This is not an accident, a byproduct of a bureaucratic tic for tidiness. It is usually a deliberate — and nontransparent — way of exerting control that would not be tolerated in other circumstances.
These attitudes get in the way, they make life more difficult for the artists, the real creators. They do not — to use a management cant phrase — “add value”.

What I love about the best arts organisations that help artists to flourish is the energy and curiosity with which ideas are turned into art. The best of these organisations are alert, intense, questing, dynamic and effective.

What value do the policymakers and their myriad questions truly add to the hard work of creating the new? Incoming governments have often trumpeted a policy of a “bonfire of regulations”. Perhaps a true coda to Tony Blair’s speech at Tate Modern would be for him to free the arts from so many of the supervisory bodies that restrict activity rather than freeing it. Or perhaps the new Gordon Brown Government can ask arts bureaucrats to really justify what they contribute to the health of the arts in the United Kingdom?
Sir John Tusa is the managing director of the Barbican Centre.

From The Times

James Delingpole tells us How to be Right

On Monday evening, author and journalist James Delingpole gave the NCF the benefit of his wisdom when he talked about his new book How to be Right: a Guide to making Lefty Liberals History. The event was held at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies in London, and drew a good crowd who put James’s A to Z guide to the test after he’d been interviewed by director Peter Whittle.

James and Anthony Browne, chief political correspondent of the Times

To order How to be Right on Amazon, press here

Gerard Baker has an excellent piece in today’s Times

Although it’s mostly concerned with the BBC, Baker's general point about the opinion-setting powers of a metropolitan elite, and their attitudes to the rest of the country, hits the target. As anybody who has worked in television will know, there is in fact little to choose in this respect between those who work in the BBC and most other areas of broadcasting now, but the crucial difference is that, as a public service, the BBC is paid for by us whether we like it on not.

Great City. Shame about the BBC

For someone who has not lived in the city for more than a decade, the occasional trip to London is a reminder of how richly it deserves its new reputation as the world’s capital.

As my colleague James Harding wrote in times2 this week, there’s a vibrancy about London these days that easily eclipses New York or Paris or Tokyo. To many residents, perhaps, life in London may be a struggle against rising crime and a crowded Tube and overpriced housing, but from an international perspective, it is truly the world’s preeminent urban locale.

In fact, in anything other than the most literal, geographic expression of the term, London is really no longer an English city at all. Its great economic dynamo, the City, powers corporations from Shanghai to Seattle. Its labour force, drawn to it by the opportunities of its free markets, is much more polyglot and multinational than any other urban concentration in the world.

But there’s salt to this strawberry. London’s political culture has been uprooted from its English heritage. It is run — if you can call it that — by a sort of postmodern communist Mayor, whose political voice — minus the annoying nasal whine — would sound right at home in Paris, Bologna or San Francisco. It hosts a metropolitan elite that loftily gazes three ways: outward, at the supposed superiority of anything not British; inward, at its own ineffable genius; and down its elegantly pampered nose, at the provincial trivialities that consume the dreary lives of the rest of the population.

But worst of all; much more, much more baleful than any of these irritations, is the political, cultural and intellectual hegemony exercised by the ultimate self-serving metropolitan monopoly, the BBC. Much worse because, unlike mayors and snobs, its domination of the rest of the country is so complete and so permanent.

On a recent trip back to Britain, I happened to hear on the BBC an interview with Helen Mirren, shortly before her Oscars triumph. Amid the usual probing sort of questioning that is the currency of celebrity journalism (“How do you manage to look so young? Is there anyone since Shakespeare who has come close to matching your talent?”) one particular gem caught my attention.

Dame Helen was asked how difficult it had been to play such an “unsympathetic character” as the Queen, the eponymous heroine of her recent film. She replied, quite tartly, that she didn’t find the Queen unsympathetic at all and launched into her now familiar riff about how she thought Elizabeth II really, surprisingly, quite agreeable.

It was a little incident, a small crystal in the battering hailstorm of drivel that pours daily through the airwaves. And yet to my mind it signified something so large. It had nothing to do with politics or Iraq or America. It was so telling in its revelation of prejudices and presumptions precisely because it was on such a slight matter as the sensibilities of an actress.

It betrayed an absolutely rock-solid assumption that the Queen is fundamentally unsympathetic, and that anyone who might still harbour some respect for the monarch — or indeed for that matter, the military or the Church, or the countryside or the joint stock company or any of the great English bequests to the world — must be some reactionary old buffer out in the sticks who has not had the benefit of the London media’s cultural enlightenment.

More than that, the question — all fawning and fraternal and friendly — contained within it an assumption that, of course, every thoughtful person shares the same view.

You really do have to leave the country to appreciate fully how pernicious the BBC’s grasp of the nation’s cultural and political soul has become. The groupthink and assumptions implicit in almost everything broadcast by BBC News, and even less explicitly by much else of the corporation’s output, lie like a suffocating blanket over the national consciousness.

This is the mindset that sees the effortless superiority, at every turn, of benign collectivism over selfish individualism, exploited worker over unscrupulous capitalist, enlightened European over brutish American, thoughtful atheist over dumb believer, persecuted Arab over callous Israeli; and that believes the West is the perpetrator of just about every ill that has ever befallen the world — from colonialism to global warming.

I’m often told, when I take on like this, that I’m ignoring the quality of BBC output. But I spent almost a decade in the employ of the BBC and I can say, without demeaning my gifted colleagues at The Times, that it has probably one of the highest concentrations of talent of any institution in the world. But that, of course, is the problem. It perpetuates its power by attracting and retaining an educated elite that is distinguished by its unstinting devotion to collectivist values. I’ve no doubt it does what it does very well. It is what it does I object to.

A necessary word here about our sponsor. Anything critical of the BBC written by an employee of Rupert Murdoch is instantly dismissed. It’s not an unreasonable instinct. Outside Murdochland it is solemnly assumed that each morning the drones of News Corporation are given their marching orders on how to interpret every event so that it conforms precisely to the commercial and political instincts of the proprietor.

In the real world, not only does the Murdoch media have only a fraction of the reach of the BBC, but a casual glance at its output demonstrates it is far less monolithic in its outlook than is the BBC.

Fortunately, in the US this week, I was struck by an article on the oped pages of The New York Times, the very citadel of leftish political correctness. Written by an apparently completely sane professor at a prestigious US university and entitled “Biased Broadcasting Corporation”, it assailed the BBC’s Middle Eastern services for their consistently antiWestern tone and content.

When the editorial pages of The New York Times accuse the BBC of anti-Western bias it is worth taking notice. It is a little like Osama bin Laden accusing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of being a bit harsh on the Jews. It suggests that in other, even pretty unlikely, parts of the world, people are waking up to the menace to our values represented by the BBC. The British sadly, seem curiously content to remain in thrall to it.

In the Times today

University is accused of censoring anti-Semitic Islam lecture, by Sean O'Neill

The University of Leeds was accused of infringing free speech last night when it cancelled a lecture on “Islamic anti-Semitism” by a German academic.

Matthias Köntzel arrived at the university yesterday morning to begin a three-day programme of lectures and seminars, but was told that it had been called off on “security grounds”.

Dr Köntzel, a political scientist who has lectured around the world on the antiSemitic ideology of Islamist groups, told The Times there were concerns that he would be attacked. He said that he was “outraged” that his meetings had been cancelled and had yet to receive an explanation.

The university, which acted after complaints from Muslim students, denied that it was interfering with the academic freedom of Dr Köntzel, and said that proper arrangements for stewarding the meeting had not been made.

The lecture, entitled “Hitler’s Legacy: Islamic antiSemitism in the Middle East”, was organised by the university’s German department and publicised three weeks ago. A large attendance had been expected.

Dr Köntzel, a former adviser to the German Green Party, said: “I have been told that it has had to be cancelled for security reasons. It seems there were concerns that there could be violence against my person.

“I have lectured in lots of countries on this subject. I gave the same talk at Yale University recently, and this is the first time I have been invited to lecture in the UK. Nothing like this has ever happened before – this is censorship.

“It is a controversial area but I am accustomed to debate. I value the integrity of academic debate and I feel that it really is in danger here. This is a very important subject and if you cannot address it on university property, then what is a university for?”

Dr Köntzel, a research associate at the Vidal Sassoon International Centre for the Study of Antisemitism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said that he had been shown two e-mails that had been received, which objected to his lecture.

One, apparently written by a student, said: “As a Muslim and an Arab this has come to me as a great shock. The only intention that you have for doing this is to increase hatred as I clearly regard it as an open racist attack.”

Ahmed Sawalem, president of the university’s student Islamic Society, confirmed that he had contacted the office of Professor Michael Arthur, the Vice-Chancellor, to register an official complaint.

“The title of the talk is provocative and I have searched the internet to read his writings and they are not very pleasant,” Mr Sawalem said. “We are not opposed to freedom of expression. We just sent a complaint, we did not ask for the talk to be cancelled.”

The university authorities contacted the German department on Tuesday and asked for a change in the title. The department agreed to relabel the talk as “The Nazi Legacy: the export of antiSemitism to the Middle East”.

Yesterday morning, the head of the German department, Professor Stuart Taberner, was called to a meeting with the Vice-Chancellor’s staff and the head of security. After the meeting, Dr Köntzel’s lecture and workshops were cancelled.

Annette Seidel Arpaci, an academic in the German department, said: “This is an academic talk by a scholar, it is not a political rally. The sudden cancellation is a sell-out of academic freedom, especially freedom of speech, at the University of Leeds.” A spokes-woman for the university said that it valued freedom of speech and added that the cancellation of the meeting had been a bureaucratic issue.

“The decision to cancel the meeting has nothing to do with academic freedom, freedom of speech, antiSemitism or Islam-ophobia, and those claiming that is the case are making mischief,” she said.

Culture Clash on 18 Doughty Street Talk TV

This week – everything you always wanted to ask about being conservative, but were too afraid to ask. We’ll be looking at the new book by journalist and author James Delingpole – How to be Right : The Essential Guide to making Lefty Liberals History. James – a regular and much valued guest on this programme – has written an A to B of all things right-wing – and left for that matter – from Edward Heath to Hunting, and smoking to sexism.

But first, we’ll be discussing a controversial new film about a group of urban vigilantes which has had many critics grinding their teeth in outrage. Director Nick Love, whose previous films include The Football Factory and The Business, was inspired by the true story of a random, violent attack on a Cambridge student, and here follows a group of frustrated and demoralised men who decide that when the forces of law and order break down, the time has come to take matters into their own hands.

With me tonight are the Radio 3 presenter Petroc Trelawny, Damian Thompson, leader writer for the Daily Telegraph and editor-in-chief of the Catholic Herald, and TV producer Michael Attwell.

Watch it Tonight – everything you always wanted to ask about being conservative, but were too afraid to ask. We’ll be looking at the new book by journalist and author James Delingpole – How to be Right : The Essential Guide to making Lefty Liberals History. James – a regular and much valued guest on this programme – has written an A to B of all things right-wing – and left for that matter – from Edward Heath to Hunting, and smoking to sexism.

But first, we’ll be discussing a controversial new film about a group of urban vigilantes which has had many critics grinding their teeth in outrage. Director Nick Love, whose previous films include The Football Factory and The Business, was inspired by the true story of a random, violent attack on a Cambridge student, and here follows a group of frustrated and demoralised men who decide that when the forces of law and order break down, the time has come to take matters into their own hands.

With me tonight are the Radio 3 presenter Petroc Trelawny, Damian Thompson, leader writer for the Daily Telegraph and editor-in-chief of the Catholic Herald, and TV producer Michael Attwell.

Watch it there

Culture Clash asks: Do you trust the BBC?

Can We Trust the BBC?, the much anticipated book by the former BBC reporter Robin Aitkin, has finally been published, and, despite being predictably ignored by the BBC itself, it has once again brought under the public spotlight the ongoing debate about liberal left-wing bias at the corporation.

Aitken was a news reporter for 25 years, and the book deals solely with the BBC’s news and current affairs output and his experience of working in it, but at the same time, he makes the point that the outlook of the whole corporation is influenced by the culture which exists there.

In the chapter ‘Blowing the Whistle’, one of Aitken’s anonymous interviewees sets out what he says are the core beliefs at the centre of this culture. They are: anti-racist, pro-abortion, pro-union and anti-big business, pro-United Nations, pro-government spending, pro-multiculturalism and ethnic minorities in general, anti-Monarchist, anti-American and anti-private education and healthcare.

If this is true, then what, if anything, should we do about the BBC? To discuss this I’m glad to have with me writer and commentator Douglas Murray, TV producer and journalist Carol Gould, Social Affairs Unit author Adam Smyth and journalist Tessa Mayes.

Watch it on 18 Doughty Street

Politics and the Theatre: What's Left - Watch the video

On Tuesday February 27th at The New Culture Forum, Chris Campbell, Shelley Silas, Minette Marrin and Richard Bean discussed 'Politics and the Theatre' with Peter Whittle. We're very grateful to our friend Alex Story who brings us the following videos of the event.



Watch Part II & Part III & Part IV & Part V

More on the event

Our next event - Monday, March 19th

You are invited to hear:

JAMES DELINGPOLE

on his new book

HOW TO BE RIGHT

The Essential Guide to Making Lefty Liberals History


Monday, 19th March, 6.30pm for 7pm

The Institute of Commonwealth Studies, 28 Russell Square, London WC1 (nearest tube Russell Square)

If you think modern Britain has gone mad, then James Delingpole’s How to be Right will confirm your view. Part polemic, part amusing opinion, but mostly hilarious rant, this is a journey into everything that’s wrong with our politically correct society.
As a journalist for the Sunday Telegraph and The Spectator, James Delingpole has expressed his thoughts - articulately and amusingly - on everything from politics to popular music, from school sports days to spliffs. If you’ve thought about it, he’s written about it. In this A-Z collection of brief essays he turns his lively mind to modern society gone mad. And what he discovers is that the older you get, the more mad it seems.Can’t understand why Coldplay are the biggest band in the world? Don’t see why there was such a fuss over Pete Burns’s `gorilla` coat? Wondering what ever happened to good, old-fashioned universities? Well, join James’s club. Pouring scorn on the state of Britain after a decade of Blair and Brown, How to be Right couldn’t have come along at a more appropriate time.

Come and join us, prepare to foam and splutter, and to be seriously entertained.

Please RSVP to events@newcultureforum.org.uk

We would kindly ask for a £5 donation on the evening.

Does Hollywood propagate a Liberal agenda? Culture Clash tonight at 8.30 on 18 Doughty Street

With the Oscars coming up, and Al Gore hotly tipped to walk away with a statuette for his documentary An Inconvenient Truth, tonight we’ll be looking at the broader picture and asking whether Hollywood and the film industry in general promotes a liberal, anti-republican, anti-conservative message.

This is not a new topic of course; more than a decade ago, the critic Michael Medved got many liberals hot under the collar with his book Hollywood vs America. In that he accused tinsletown of being anti-religion, anti-family and anti-patriotism – a case rigorously opposed by those who see cinema as the most right-wing of the arts. But are those who see Hollywood as being one of the main components in US cultural imperialism confusing the fact that Hollywood is the most commercial art form with the kind of messages it carries?

We’ve got used to the fact that whenever a President is portrayed in a movie, and he’s a sympathetic character, it’s invariably implied that he’s a Democrat. Corporations are usually villains too – in the recent remake of The Manchurian Candidate for example, communist brainwashers were replaced by the titans of big business. But what are we to make of the subtler social messages and political subtexts carried by Hollywood movies?

With me to discuss this are the producer and writer Carol Gould, Dr Steven King of Policy Exchange, Susan Shaw, producer of the South Bank Show, and 18 Doughty Street’s own Tim Montgomerie.

Watch it here

Answers on a postcard please

The New Culture Forum’s old friend, ex-BBC reporter Robin Aitken - who spoke at one of our meetings in September last year – has a piece in the Mail on Sunday today to coincide with the much-anticipated publication of his book, Can We Trust the BBC? It should be read by anybody who thinks that criticism of the corporation’s political coverage is the product of loony right-wing paranoia.

Remember Robin Aitken at the NCF

Watch Robin Aitken at the NCF on 18 Doughty Street
Read Daily Mail's piece

... and buy Robin's book here

Politics and the Theatre: What's Left? Tuesday, February 27th 6.30 for 7.00pm

You are invited to

‘POLITICS AND THE THEATRE: WHAT’S LEFT?’

A discussion with playwright Richard Bean, Associate Director of the Royal Court Ramin Gray, Sunday Times columnist Minette Marrin and playwright Shelley Silas

Tuesday, 27th February, 6.30 for 7pm

The Institute of Commonwealth Studies, 28 Russell Square, London WC1 (nearest tube Russell Square)


Last year, the National Theatre’s director Nicholas Hytner said that one thing he would really like to see there in the future would be a ‘good, mischievous, right-wing play.’

The implication in Hytner’s statement - that such a production would be an unusual occurrence, a naughty aberration, a guilty pleasure - would certainly have confirmed many in their conviction that when it comes to politics, the theatre stands firmly behind left-liberal lines. Recent productions in both the subsidised sector and the West End would seem to bare this out. My Name is Rachel Corrie, Drunk Enough to Say I Love You, Guantanamo, Stuff Happens, Playing with Fire…the political approach in these plays remains unvarying. And when there is criticism of the prevailing orthodoxy, it comes firmly from the Left.

But if this is all true, why are there no alternative voices? Is there, or should there be, such a thing as a right-of-centre play? Are there untouchable subjects in the theatre? Would different political approaches bring in new audiences? And why are voices on the Left apparently silent about important issues thrown up by radical Islam and the growing debate about multiculturalism?

Shelley Silas’s theatre plays include Calcutta Kosher and Falling. She has also written extensively for Radio Four - her plays include a co-adaptation of Paul Scott's The Raj Quartet (with John Harvey.) She compiled and edited an anthology of short stories, 12 Days. Her new play, Made in Glasgow, will be produced by Tamasha Theatre in 2008.

Richard Bean has had four plays produced at The Royal Court as well as plays at the National, Bush, Newcastle Live! and at Hull Truck. He was awarded the Critics' Circle Award for Best Play for "Harvest" last year. His political sex farce which looks at the accession of Turkey into the European Union will be produced by Hampstead Theatre in July this year.

Ramin Gray is Associate director of the Royal Court. He is director of Alastair Beaton’s King of Hearts, which opens this week at the Hampstead Theatre

Please RSVP at events@newcultureforum.org.uk
We would kindly ask for a £5 donation on the evening towards drinks.

Tonight on Culture Clash

Tonight on 18 Doughty Street we’re going to be looking at an art installation at Tate Britain which has certainly caught the eye of the media – artist Mark Wallinger’s recreation of Brian Haw’s so-called ‘peace protest’ which has been a permanent feature of Parliament Square for the past few years. A much-needed retort to a warmongering government, or a ghastly eyesore and the work of a misguided eccentric, depending on your point of view, the protest has been copied lock stock and barrel by Wallinger and stuck in a gallery with the aim of saying – well, what exactly?

But first we’re going to discuss an event which, oddly, received virtually no press coverage at all. A couple of Saturdays ago, the Mayor of London Ken Livingstone sponsored a one-day conference at the QE2 Conference Centre which asked the question World Civilization of Clash of Civilizations? 5,000 people came to attend seminars and meetings, and to listen to a debate between Livingstone and Respect party member Salma Yaqoob on the one hand, and Middle eastern expert Daniel Pipes and writer and Culture Clash regular Douglas Murray on the other, on whether the West and Islam were set on a collision course. No prizes for guessing who was arguing what – but the event certainly acted as a valuable barometer of the state of mind of the rainbow coalition which surrounds Red Ken.

Culture Clash, it's tonight at 8.30

Watch it on 18 Doughty Street talk TV

A media discussion about what is or isn’t racism, who should rightly be accused of it, and what, if anything, should be done about it, has dominated the news agenda over the past few weeks. The issue briefly broke out of the domestic arena last week when the events on Channel 4’s Big Brother threatened, surreally, to become an international diplomatic incident, before settling down into the perhaps more parochial issue of the future of the board at Channel 4.

During the furore, which seemed to take on an increasingly hysterical tone, the broadcaster Janet Street Porter had to answer accusations of racism by a neighbour, and while all this was going on Simone Clarke, the so-called BNP ballerina, continued to dance away at the English National Ballet. And just yesterday, Channel 4 was again faced with a possible racism problem after complaints were made about comments made on one of its other reality shows, Shipwrecked.

Should Channel 4 axe Big Brother? Or is it, as its apologists would claim, actually performing a public service? Perhaps, as somebody once said, human beings cannot stand too much reality. Or has the cry of racist – always a way of simply closing down debate in the political arena – now become something to be so feared that it can sweep away all reason? Should Jade Goody be systematically destroyed? Or are we in the middle of a McCarthyite type of witch-hunt?

Here to talk about these questions today are Michael Attwell, who has been a commissioning editor at the BBC, Channel 4 and Channel Five, Damian Thompson, leader writer for the Telegraph and editor-in-chief of the Catholic Herald, Marc Sidwell of the Henry Jackson Society and columnist Clive Davis.

Minette Marrin on Simone Clarke

Minette Marin has a good piece in the Sunday Times today about Simone Clarke, the so-called BNP ballerina, Sugar Plum Fairy vs forces of Darkness, in which she calls on the arts to protect all freedom of speech. She makes the point, quite rightly, that many creative figures have been apologists for disgusting regimes, such as Mao’s Communist China and the former Soviet Union. Nobody however would suggest that such names should have lost their jobs because of their views. You either have freedom of speech or you do not. However much one might disagree with somebody’s politics, it is an extremely dangerous situation to have arrived at when people with unpalatable views can be forced out of their livelihoods. The reason usually given – that the person’s political position could adversely affect the job they do – is often spurious, and is especially absurd in the case of Clarke, a classical dancer. Overall however, this case is yet another example of the totalitarian tendency which exists on the Left, which seeks to silence all dissenting voices.

Minette Marrin's piece in The Sunday Times, Sugar plum fairy v the forces of darkness
Also, Simone Clarke and Yat-Sen Chang's website

Update on French Philosopher Robert Redeker

Four months ago, we mentioned here Robert Redeker, the French philosopher forced to go into hiding after Le Figaro published a column by him, labelled by the usual suspects as very islamically incorrect.

Adil al Hyanne was deported to Morocco from Libya, where he was hoping to join the Jihad in Iraq. This young man in his early twenties, who could very reasonably be described as an aspiring islamist, if not an islamist, has admitted to calling for Robert Redeker to be murdered. He posted on the Internet pictures of the philosopher, as well as his personal and professional addresses in Toulouse, including all his contact details, email addresses and phone numbers.

Adil al Hyanne was calling for the 'French Lions' to follow the example of the 'Dutch Lion', Mohammed al-Bouyeri, who butchered director Théo Van Gogh in November 2005.

Many websites had his incitement to murder republished, and so Robert Redeker will stay in hiding.

One reader left a comment on the website of the French daily newspaper Libération, saying that, actually, it had not been a Fatwa and that Robert Redeker was probably disappointed not to have become a French Salman Rushdie.

Perhaps it was not technically speaking a Fatwa, but what counts is the result. Some are already trying to reduce the responsibility of Adil al Hyanne; they are implying that it was some kind of joke and that he was not really an islamist. If this is true, then we don't share his sense of humour.

FG

Wishful Thoughts for 2007

The New Culture Forum brings you the cultural news and events you can (not) expect to hear about in 2007, as brought to you by our contributors on the ground.

Let’s kick off with Christmas…

DEBENHAM ADMITS: WE DID NOT DESIGN CHRISTMAS”.

The retail giant Debenhams has retracted its “Christmas: Designed by Debenhams” television advert, after it decided it might be offensive to Christians. In the advert, a slim, sexy, modern-styled ‘DJ Santa’ glides and break-dances his way through rooms in his hi-tech grotto lined with robotic toys, perfumes, handbags, and other fashion accessories, before attractive women in stockings help send him out to deliver presents in a flying, high-powered snow ski. A company spokesman told reporters: “As soon as our executives viewed the ad, they realized that we had become so caught up in all the commercial opportunities of the festive season that we had lost sight of the true Christian message of charity and compassion. … We also recognized that some Christians might find our transformation of their beloved Saint Nicholas into a sex-crazed fashion victim, and our claim to have been the true originators of their historic religious festival, offensive.” The spokesman confirmed, however, that an equivalent advert,
“Eid: Designed by Debenhams”, with a similarly sexy, break-dancing ‘MC Muhammad’, would still go ahead in their stores in Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia: “The Islamic world is famed for its sense of gentle good-humour, and we foresee no problems there.”

[View ad here: http://www.visit4info.com/details.cfm?adid=39607]

(from David Brescia)

JANUARY

BBC News press release

Head of BBC News Peter Horrocks today banned the use of three key terms on BBC global news output - ‘suicide bombers’ ‘martyrs’ and ‘freedom fighters’. Horrocks made this unusual statement at the inaugural BBC Friends of Israel fundraising dinner. As well as raising thousands of shekels for Israel to spend on reinforcing the controversial security fence, Horrocks said in his after dinner speech ‘it is time the BBC recognises that homicide bombers in the middle east have the same motives as homicide bombers in the west’ and ‘are nothing but barbaric murderous scumbags acting under a veil of pseudo religious nonsense’. Horrocks then sang the Israeli national anthem as a solo before inviting Baroness Jenny Tongue onto the dance floor for the first Chassidic dancing number ‘We want moshiach now!’.

(from Jonathan Levi)


To celebrate the West's abolition of slavery 200 years earlier, Islam decides to join in, apologising for enslaving more people than the West ever managed and for perpetuating slavery into the present day in countries such as Mauritania. 'This one's been on the books a bit too long,' laugh Ayatollah Khamenei and Yusuf Al-Qaradawi at a joint press conference.

(from Mark Sidwell)

FEBRUARY

BBC, CHANNEL 4 ANNOUNCE FACTUAL PROGRAMMING HIGHLIGHTS

BBC Panorama, tonight, 'teaching sex to kids': how a half-century of UK sex-education has pushed us to the top of Europe's teen pregnancy tables. We ask the Department of Education why it thinks more of the same will now produce different results?

- C4 'Unreported world', 'Castro's Gulag': We get unique access to Cuban dissident groups inside Cuba who show us the true extent of the dictator's repression of writers, thinkers and journalists.

Also 'A Bolivarian blunder', Is Chavez driving Venezuela to ruin and isolation?

- Dispatches: 'A Comprehensive failure': with childhood illiteracy increasing - and entry of poorer students to top universities at a post-War low - we ask whether it's now time to 'permanently exclude' Britain's greatest educational mistake - the comprehensive school.

- C4 News special, 'The Bush tax miracle': how American economic growth has been powered by tax cuts.

- BBC File on four, 'The end of the road for the Human Rights Act?': In order to cope with the terrorist threat, is it time to admit the damage caused by the Human Rights Act, scrap it and re-introduce effective national treason laws?

(from Alan Smithee)

MARCH

THOUSANDS CONVERGE ON WEMBLEY AS ROCK STARS RAIL AGAINST CHINA

Madonna last night led a glittering array of stars from the world of rock and pop in a massive protest concert at the continuing of human rights violations in China. She told the crowd: ‘Chairman Mao caused the deaths of 70 million of his own people. Well Communism is dead but the torture goes on! Make torture history! Rock against China!

(from PW)

APRIL

In an astonishing new play at the National about multiculturalism which looks set to draw angry protests from Muslim groups, a white couple in a largely Asian town see their gay son sacked from his job as a teacher because Islamic fundamentalist parents do not want him teaching their children. Terrified of causing offence, the local council fails to intervene, leaving the angry and frustrated family to deal with a media firestorm. The play, which opened this week, has already sold out, and the theatre has also been encouraged by the proportion of so-called ‘first-time’ ticket buyers. ‘This play is bringing in a whole new audience to the National’, said a spokesman. ‘We’ve been trying to widen our audience over the years with the £10 ticket scheme, and that’s been a real success especially with students, but for some reason the subject of this production has really struck a chord with people who would not otherwise go to the theatre.’

(from PW)

MAY

Leading figures from the arts and media address huge London rally
A massive crowd of moderate Muslims, estimated at nearly half a million, yesterday heard stars of stage, screen and the literary world call for an end to the subjugation of woman and gay men under fundamentalist Islam. Carrying banners declaring ‘Not in Our Name!’, thousands of protesters listened peacefully in the capital’s Hyde Park as figures including feminist Germaine Greer, National Theatre director Nicholas Hytner and Oscar-winning actor Sir Ian McKellen made impassioned speeches condemning the wearing of the burkha, the execution of thousands of gay men in Iran and the increasing tolerance in Britain of what Sir Ian dubbed in his speech ‘vicious attacks on our liberty’.
Interviewed after the event, Germaine Greer underlined how important it was that women in the West stood up to such reactionary forces. ‘It’s the duty of feminists everywhere to speak out in support of women who live lives of total subservience – women whose voices will never otherwise be heard.’

(from PW)

JUNE

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown admits that juvenile relocation to Mayfair, and its attendant reduced knowledge of traditional Malawian songs, dances and agricultural techniques, may be preferable to dying alone, disease-riddled and abandoned in an African orphanage.

(from Emma French)

JULY

Carbon neutral is a load of hippie bollocks," announced Chris Martin, last night, to a stunned audience of Coldplay fans.
"Sorry guys, but the fact is I got it all wrong. This save the planet stuff I've been preaching at you for the last five years - it was just hot air. Al Gore is a mendacious loser twat. Michael Moore is a fat, lying, treacherous c***. An Inconvenient Truth is the worst film ever, worse even than Love Actually or that other terrible Richard Curtis one about the Scottish girl at the G8 summit who converts everyone to eco-fascism. The Rainbow Warrior had it coming. Greenpeace are tossers. Global warming is due primarily to solar activity, perfectly normal and nothing to worry about. Wind turbines are crap. Nuclear is our only hope."
After a climactic performance of Yellow, Martin further shocked fans by urinating on a copy of Kyoto agreement, before driving off in a 4 x 4 with wife Gwyneth Paltrow chic in pure sable fur) and chums Thom Yorke and Michael Stipe (both engrossed in Douglas Murray's Neo-Conservatism: Why We Need It?)

(from James Delingpole)

AUGUST

Gwyneth Paltrow abandons her ‘macrobiotic diet’ in favour of a new diet dependant exclusively on conventionally grown Genetically Modified Organisms.

(from Dawn Steeves)

SEPTEMBER

Ekow Eshun says something cogent and to the point on Newsnight Review

Male character on advert/in sitcom shown not to be a bumbling fool; female character revealed to be something other than a long-suffering omnicompetent.

(from James Delingpole)

OCTOBER

Spooks finally broadcasts an episode in which it really is the Islamists who are baddies and not Christians/Big Business/Jews masquerading as Islamists so as to give these peace-loving people a warlike reputation they SO do not deserve.

Bono admits: "What do I know? I'm just a rock star."

(from James Delingpole)

NOVEMBER

‘We are a waste of taxpayer’s money’, declares Disability Rights Commission

‘There’s a lot to be said for the occasional slap’, NSPCC counsels parents

Muslim Council of Britain condemns suicide bombers

Arts Council launches new fund for middle class whites

(from Nick Seddon).

DECEMBER

Channel 4 announces that it’s Alternative Christmas Message this year will be given by Dr John Sentamu, the Ugandan-born Archbishop of York known for his outspoken support of Christianity and the celebration of British Culture. When questioned about this unusual choice, a Channel 4 spokesman said candidly: ‘We always aim to be provocative, and so we thought it would be really daring to use the Archbishop. Frankly, all the old counter-culture ‘alternatives’ are pretty much mainstream culture now, and rather than just be known as one of Oriana Fallaci’s ‘phoney revolutionaries’, we thought we’d really try to stir things up.’

Stephan Shakespeare talks to The New Culture Forum

Stephan Shakespeare, founder of YouGov, is the man behind the creation of 18 Doughty Street Talk TV, the first British TV channel on the Internet.

18 Doughty Street was launched in October this year. Unencumbered by the traditional requirements of so-called 'balance', it promised to offer something completely new. So has it?

Peter Whittle (who hosts the channel's Culture Clash programme) talked to Stephan about the first months 'on air.'

NCF: Stephan, on its launch literature 18 Doughty Street had the following quote from Orwell: ‘In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.’ Do you think that 18 Doughty Street is telling the truth?

S: I don’t think that anybody can know that they are telling the truth in that way, but I think that people being able to speak without constraint will get us closer to it. I think the nearest we can get to the truth is if people with different points of view, and different experience, can discuss things in a context where they feel really they can say whatever they like, where they don’t have to play up to an audience, or play up to a regulator, where they don’t have to worry who they please and who they don’t please. I don’t think anybody can pronounce on what’s true and what’s not true. I think any consensus is going to be right 70% of the time and wrong 30% of the time. The best way you can counteract that is to have lots of voices, and lots of people choosing which voices they want to hear, which voices they want to balance, and how, and you have this collective wisdom of crowds that determines the best guess. Doughty Street is just another place where people can talk and discuss, but what can be different is that they don’t have a false concept of balance and boundaries.

P: So do you think it is being different?

S: We are at the very early days of 18 Doughty Street. When we started this, we had some ideas about how we wanted it to be. Then we came up against the constraints of production teams, and so on, saying this is possible, that is not possible, and they’ve come from their own background in TV production and they put constraints on us of a different kind, which we are just learning how to go beyond. When we started this, I always had the view that you can spend six months or a year planning how this would be, and then launch, or you can just launch without any idea how it’s going to work and then look at it after six months and do it again, as it were. And that second route is very much what we’ve gone down. We just said ‘Let’s get started, we don’t really know how this is going to work’. It’s actually unknowable how it is going to work, because people are not used at watching TV on the Internet. Let’s just get started, and as we go along, we will make some mistakes. It will become more obvious in the doing that it would ever have been planning in the abstract.

P: 18 Doughty Street was mooted as ‘anti-establishment television’, and I think my immediate reaction when I looked at this was that it would be against the kind of vaguely left/ liberal orthodoxy which dominates. Is that how you see it?

S: I think that is how I see it. I think an establishment orthodoxy certainly does exist. I don’t think it’s all powerful, and I don’t pretend we live in a world where there are no platforms for alternative voices. But there is such a magnetic pole to the mainstream, and that mainstream is dominated by, as you say, a sort of leftist liberal outlook. I don’t mean leftist as in socialist, but I would say it is a set of attitudes. I would say there’s a need for something which is outside of that, and that plays against that.

What I find extraordinary is the degree to which there has been outside interest in this, and favourable reviews of it. The output at the moment is terrific, as far as it goes, but it is early days, and the most notable thing about it is how generous everybody else has been prepared to be about it. Probably it’s because they do perceive a striking need for this.

P: Have you any idea of how many people are actually watching it?

S: I don’t think the audience on any particular night breaks beyond a thousand. It’s a small audience - very much the sort of political media world - but we’re not going to push it, or market it until we are ready, until we’ve found our feet, so that’s exactly what we would expect, and what we would have assumed. At the moment, the website, for example, is an embarrassment, it is not only a not very good website, it is a terrible website – you can’t do the basic things, blogging alongside watching and having links to all the things you can download in a clear, simple way. To be fair to the people who designed it, we probably gave conflicting messages as to what we wanted, and it’s resulted in this. On the 8th of January, all that will be re-launched, it will now be designed on the basis of what we know about what we want to do, and at that point, we will be able to market this out beyond the niche audience we have at the moment, and that is very clear in our minds, that in a way we don’t want to drive lots of people to it at the moment, when the look of the studio is changing, the websites are changing, and the schedule is going to be changing. We are treating this as a sort of Beta phase, and then on the 8th March we are going to be much clearer about what the whole thing looks like, and how it functions, and at that point, we can push it out and go for a wider audience.

P: Will it be markedly different in term of the presentation, apart from the website?

S: I don’t think it’ll be markedly different in term of what you see. There will just be a lot more, and a lot of different things, in addition. That’s to say, I don’t think that anything that we’ve done hasn’t worked. I think the pre-recorded programmes (ie those in the 8.30 slot such as World View and Culture Clash) have all been terrific discussions, bar none. Any one of those discussions, if you heard them on Radio 4 in the afternoon would have been at the very least as good as anything you hear there, and at the most, markedly different. For example, the discussion on Culture Clash on what was described as cowardice in the face of Islamic fundamentalism had a passion and yet a rationality, a fairness about it, that really attacked a certain attitude that’s prevalent in the media, and you wouldn’t have heard that anywhere else in the media because there, even if you had had one person advocating that point of view, you would have had to have a balance with two or three people saying what a lot of nonsense. I think it’s terrific if you have a discussion if people take different points of view and challenge each others points of view – but if that challenge is always coming from a predictable ‘bring it back to the safe area’ position, you are never going to get a proper discussion, because what happens, and we see it on Newsnight, night after night, is that everybody involved entrenches very quickly to their predetermined positions, because that is what happens with all human beings when you challenge their position. You know, you make a point and I immediately say ‘That’s completely wrong, it should be this’. Instead of going to a next point and exploring those ideas, you are going to start justifying what you’ve said, trying to make the viewer think that you are right, and the other person is wrong. Now if you don’t need to do that, if the rest of the people in the discussion perhaps disagree with you but actually do so in a way which you welcome because you want to develop your idea, that discussion becomes more exploratory, discursive, and ends up in a different place. You really feel you’ve been around the subject, rather than watching two or three people who are intent on pushing each other into their original corners.

P: I’ve stopped watching Question Time because there’s this kind of monolithic, predictable viewpoint which come across from the whole panel. I wonder, with 18 Doughty Street, would there be views that you wouldn’t have on? How free do you want to be? We’ve heard this week that the BBC was thinking of putting on extreme voices – they mentioned the Taliban, and the BNP as examples. Would you do that?

S: Number One, I wouldn’t design it that way, and I think there’s something fundamentally wrong with that design where what you’re saying is ‘yes, we do have a narrow channel of conventional discussions, and to balance that we’re going to have two outriders to have a go at each other.’ That doesn’t work, so I wouldn’t begin with that design.

I have to say in practical terms, if somebody said we would like to invite the leader of the BNP, I would say ‘Let’s not’. Somebody else can do that, it’s not a voice that I think I would want to give a platform to. What Doughty Street isn’t doing is saying, this is a place for all other voices. We are free to make our choice, and we are free to say actually I don’t want to hear from a certain position, and that goes back to my first point, about lots of different platforms among which you can make your choice about. Somebody else can start their own Internet TV – and they will – and if they want to have the BNP on it that is up to them, but I don’t feel that I need to do that. It is not something I would feel comfortable with. The beauty is we don’t have a responsibility to something else, we don’t have a responsibility to say ‘the BBC doesn’t do that, so therefore we will do all the things that the BBC doesn’t do.’ We only have a responsibility to do the things that we want to do, because it pleases us.

P: 18 Doughty Street made it clear it didn’t want to be Tory TV. But – not that you should care – do you know how the Tory party views it?

S: It can’t be Tory TV for the simple reason that not all of us there are card carrying Tories, and even if we were, we wouldn’t necessary want to add to this centralization of power that is already existing in politics. I am a Conservative Party member, and I would much rather see a Conservative government than a Labour government, but I wouldn’t want to add to the disproportionate strength of party hierarchies. I think that is part of the problem. It’s completely reasonable – I am not making an attack on that in this sense and I wouldn’t expect them to do anything different from what they are doing, because that is why they are leading a party. But it is up to the rest of us to make sure that there are other platforms, other voices, other strands of discussion that people can join.

P: If you’re talking about anti-establishment TV, especially from right of centre viewpoint, it would seem to imply that it is sort of against, or looking at a another kind of conservatism that is not necessarily Cameroonist if you like. Do you think that this is a voice for dissent for conservatives?

S: In as much as it is a voice for any kind of dissent, yes. In as much as it is, as what you’re suggesting, an anti-Cameron thing, absolutely not. We have lots of people on who are 100% loyal to David Cameron, or indeed to Menzies Campbell or Brown or Blair. And we have people who are not. That seems to me the right thing that a discussion platform, a media platform would seek to do. I hope it will never be a home for discontent with any particular leader or politician or whatever and I don’t think when you view it, it is that at all. The vast majority of people who come on to the programme do wish David Cameron every success, they probably just wish he would be successful in slightly different ways or in slightly different areas. We hear a lot about what a modern political party is now, and a modern political party, it seems to me, would, yes, try to provide leadership and some discipline but also accept that they’re functioning in a world in which the audience, the public, is distrustful of politicians, and feels patronised and manipulated. Therefore they should welcome other voices. And to be fair, they have done exactly that. ConservativeHome which is related to 18 Doughty Street has had a huge amount of, I won’t say support, but cooperation from the Party, which doesn’t seek to make it change its views, nor does it do the opposite, of accepting it as being part of themselves. They see it exactly for what it is, which is another voice, broadly supportive but there to widen the discussion.

P: Going right back to the beginning, can you just explain how you first came up with the idea for 18 Doughty?

S: A number of things I was watching came together at the same time. I was in America flicking around channels as one does, and came across some very obscure channel - I have no memory of what it is or what they were talking about – but what struck me was the way it was done. It was in fact a radio station, in which they set up a single camera in the corner of the room to beam as it were as a TV station permanently what was going on in the studio. So you listened to it as a radio station but you could look up and see who the people were who were talking, you could have a bit of the behind-the-scenes feel. And I thought this was terrific, it really worked, because if I wanted to be sitting for an evening television, I would not watch a single camera on a radio station, but if I was moving around the room doing stuff, it is almost a different way of watching radio – and I thought that must be very low cost, and it works really well. So that was one thing which was in my mind. I had been interested for some time in Big Brother obviously, and my conception of Doughty Street would be a little bit like a Big Brother house – I’m exaggerating the comparison massively - but what I mean by that is that you would be watching in and be able to interact with people in the room having a discussion, and I think as time goes on we are going to increase the sort of coverage of what goes on in the house - not just increase programme as such.

P: So the house at 18 Doughty Street will be more than a TV station?

S: I think that is what is going to happen. We are looking at putting a camera in the kitchen, a camera in the green room, as it were, to be able to switch to a discussion that is going on there. I think if you were to have a conventional editorial meeting that ought to be beamed live to whoever’s there. People could be watching and come in with suggestions as well.

P; what are the other things you are planning to do?

S: We are looking to increase audience participation greatly by bringing in the creativity and the critical intelligence of our audience in the designing and making of products for Doughty Street. It will be, this is what we are thinking of doing, we would love suggestions from you, then we will discuss the suggestions, have input on the discussion, come to some sort of agreement about what this new format should look like, start doing it, get feedback on it, change it, so that in other words the audience is absolutely a part of making the programme, not just through interacting with the programme once it exists, but actually from the conception through to the final product.

P: 18 Doughty is the first of his kind in this country, isn’t it?

S: I think it is the first of its kind, anywhere, in this way. Clearly it picks up on strands that have existed on the Internet, but I can’t think of anything that is like Doughty Street – or that is like what Doughty Street intends to be. We are nowhere near the place that we will be, I think, within six months.

P: The US still has a culture war, with its shock jocks, but here there’s been something of a rout. Is 18 Doughty a first shot across the bow?

S: Certainly quite of few of us at Doughty are big admirers of Fox News, big admirers precisely because of what you’ve just described, of someone coming along and saying actually we don’t need to accept ABC, CBS and NBC news as the only way of doing this. It is a cultural monopoly that needs to be challenged and, obviously, they have been big winners in that cultural war. What we are doing is not unrelated to that, but it is not the same. You talk about America. We will be looking, certainly, as we develop, to be facing America quite a bit more as well – if we are to be going out after midnight, we can actually quite explicitly face an American audience in the small hours. And we already of course had Fox News do an experimental programme from Doughty Street. It is an interesting thread.

P: Compared to the US, there are so few alternative voices here and in Europe, there seems to be nothing.

S: I wouldn’t quite say nothing. I was really on the edge of my seat the other day in the back of a cab. The driver had on I think it was Talk Sport in the middle of the morning and there was this guy, obviously the presenter, who was in a five minute diatribe about everything that was happening in London. There was a bit of the ‘political correctness gone mad’ cliché but actually it was beyond that, there was a raw anger in it, and a willingness to say exactly what was on his mind as it came into his mind. But I thought, that actually is an authentic voice, which fits in with the American Shock Jock thing. And one of the things we want to do with Doughty is to get much more involvement from the students – we are right next door to UCL, and there are lots of young people around there. When we feel that we are more established in our production, we will be really sending a big invitation to anyone out there who wants to come on and have a go. I see a revolving door with lots of people coming in and getting a chance to do their bit – and some of those turning out to be new stars. Some of those will be ‘thank you very much and see you next year’ of course, but we hope that from it will emerge people who will just suddenly take to the camera, take to the sofa if you like, and knock our socks off. We have this fantastic opportunity to be that open.

P. Stephan, thanks very much.

Tonight on Culture Clash

Hello and welcome to Culture Clash.

The only shock delivered by the Turner Prize this year was that it was won by a painter. Tooma Abts, a 34-year-old German artist of contemporary abstract paintings won against competition from sculptural installations consisting of displays of found objects, a ‘live’ exhibit of a TV production office complete with live workers, a computer designed billboard and a film installation of former participants in reality TV.
When the winner was announced last week, art critics commented that the competition had inspired only indifference, and had failed to get people talking. Well we’re going to fill that gap today and ask whether this annual artistic bunfest means anything to anybody outside the art world.

It was 1993 when Channel 4 launched its so-called Alternative Christmas message, and since then Sharon Osbourne, Jesse Jackson and Ali G are among those you’ve gone head to head with Her Majesty. Often its been played simply for laughs, but this year the channel has chosen Khadija Ravat, a Muslim woman in a niqab, that’s a full veil, to deliver her perspective on the events of the past year. Ravat, a part time primary school teacher in Leicester, was born in Zimbabwe, is a convert to Islam and says that her 6 minute broadcast would celebrate British values and the multi-cultural society. We’ll be asking whether this is a timely celebration of our vibrant diversity, or whether it’s a simply a stunt too far.

My guest today are Michael Attwell, producer and former chairman of BAFTA, Dawn Steeves of The New Criterion Magazine, James Delingpole, TV critic of the Spectator, and journalist Franck Guillory.

They are talking about us

In this week’s Spectator, James Delingpole has written a piece about Culture Clash, 18 Doughty Street’s weekly cultural review show, hosted by NCF’S Peter Whittle.

Funny Girls by James Delingpole
Watch againCulture Clash - Tuesday 28 November on 18 Doughty Street

In the papers...

A Children's Christmas tale starring Pete (Doherty) and Kate (Moss), reveals Adam Sherwin in today's Times.

Pete plays guitar, eats special sweets and falls over a lot. Pete met a famous girl called Kate and the pair went ballistic on Class A drugs.
The cautionary tale of Pete Doherty has been turned into an
illustrated children’s book that is becoming a Christmas bestseller.
A Boy Called Pete details the rise to fame of the notorious rock singer who “sings
songs and wears hats”. But his predilection for “mind-bending drugs” means that
Pete and his friend Kate are “always getting into trouble”.
The book claims to be a moral story and warns children that “Class A drugs are not very good for you. They make you smelly and a bit untidy-looking.” Pete finds that he is no longer famous for singing songs and is made to stay in “a very big house
with high walls” because “London has lots of rules and lots of authority”

Is it just me or is there something really wrong in offering this adorable couple as role-models for children? If a society gets the role-models it deserves, it is even more worrying.

(from The Times)

Cartoon of the Year: The Independent's Dave Brown's Tale of Two Leaders

The Political Cartoon Society awarded him the honour for his
cartoon "Venus Substitute" at a ceremony hosted by The Economist in central London.
The Independent on Sunday's Peter Schrank was named runner-up in the same category at the awards.

(from The Independent)

Janet Street-Porter in The Independent: 'Ignore these killjoys - and happy Christmas '

Celebrating Christmas in a traditional manner seems increasingly unfashionable, as a wave of political correctness has resulted in an increasing number of offices all over the country banning decorations in case non-Christian staff members are offended.
I can cope with my festive feast of goose being under attack from turkey-lover Nigella Lawson, but it's time for ordinary citizens to demand the right to enjoy Christmas in the way we always have, with carols on the radio, paper chains in the living room, drunken office parties, twinkling fairy lights and a marathon of television watching. Gordon Brown is always banging on about "Britishness", whatever that might be, and there's no other time of year which so perfectly sums up what's unique about this country.

(from The Independent)

Readers from The Guardian's Art & Architecture blog have selected the 50 masterpieces they wouldn't miss for the world. It's here. What do you think of it?