Arts Council chairman Gerry Robinson has been badgering the Government for 100 million for the arts. Now he's got it, explains Norman Lebrecht
THE Granada headquarters, next to St James's Palace, is ringed with military metaphors. All executive leave has reportedly been cancelled. The City awaits the next thrust in the ITV merger wars, and the chairman is pacing the floor.
Gerry Robinson is still aggrieved over something I wrote which he took to mean that he has turned into a New Labour stooge. This is a touchy topic. Robinson was rewarded for his support at the last election with the chairmanship of the Arts Council of England, but he has been striving lately to assert the ACE's autonomy and has been forcefully demanding a huge increase in arts subsidy.
In a Whitehall lecture last month, he declared that he had gone through the arts with his formidable business skills and found very little slack. The arts, he concluded, "are fundamentally under-resourced". They needed an extra 100 million a year, he declared, a raise of around 40 per cent - "a tiny sum", said Robinson, "in the context of government spending".
He badgered the Prime Minister and Chancellor to the point where, he believes, "I seriously p***ed people off." Brown, he reckons, got the message: "Gordon unusually said in the Commons, '...and the arts will benefit'."
Just how effective his hectoring has been was revealed yesterday with the announcement of the Government's spending plans for the arts. Robinson has got his 100 million, though he will have to wait three years for the full amount.
"Making the arts a bit more important, putting more passion into it - that for me is the starting point," Robinson told me. On the morning of Brown's speech in the Commons, the ACE chairman stepped up the pressure by putting his case on the front page of the Mirror. "At the end of the day," he believes, "someone like Blair or Brown will say, 'Oh, for Chrissakes just give them the money.' "
This is a striking change of style for an Arts Council chairman. For the past 30 years, men in his position have gone to Downing Street to beg or wheedle, and have been sent away with a peerage and an empty promise.
Robinson is less easily appeased. An ice-eyed strategist who hides his takeover toughness behind an effusion of Irish charm, Robinson spends four days a week with his family in a distant Donegal mansion and has announced his intention to retire from Granada in 2003 at the age of 55. He can afford to go for broke.
Reports that he will step down from the ACE after a single three-year term have been misguided. "I haven't been asked yet," he clarifies, "but I'd be surprised if they didn't want me to do a second term. It would be very shortsighted not to. I certainly want to do it, because we have changed things. We have given serious money to the orchestras to sort out their past problems. We put serious additional money into the visual arts and 10 million quid into touring. We have now tackled the issue of [regional] theatres, which is our biggest single issue - but we can't do that from our own resources. We turned to the Government and said, pay up."
Robinson believes that he has the artistic community "by and large on our side", but his reform of the ACE has been painful, and trust in the organisation is low. It is hard to find an arts manager who retains much faith in the ACE's goodwill. They complain that political correctness has taken precedence over artistic goals and that the strings attached to monetary grants have grown tangled, irrelevant and impossibly time-consuming.
Much of the discontent is focused on Peter Hewitt, the doctrinaire chief executive whose decrees have all the wit and warmth of a mobile-phone manual. Robinson, not a man to admit doubt in himself or his close associates, defends Hewitt, while softening the core script. "It is right that, if you are building a wonderful museum, we should talk about disabled access," he argues. "It's also right to talk about education and availability to all.
"But that's not the fundamental thrust. The fundamental thrust is about getting good facilities with good content. In the end, content matters. Who would have imagined that a museum of modern art in London would almost have to shut its doors for the rush? When people are exposed to art in a way that makes it approachable, they like it. We must find ways of making people feel more comfortable about going to music and theatre as well."
The Arts Council's role is, he feels, to defend the arts with an influence and a persistence the Culture Department cannot. Its central task, he argues, "is to get the arts funded properly. Our role is to be very unreasonable about that, and I think we are. Any attempt by the Government, and there have been a lot of noises, to dictate how arts money is spent, I would resist. I would resign." What he brings to the job is a businessman's impatience for getting things done. "I am not a Labour luvvie," he insists. "I supported Labour at the last election and I continue to support them, for one simple reason: I passionately believe it is enormously important to have two potential choices of government in the UK that are both realistic about business.
"That's it. To have a Labour party that was union-driven and a Tory party that was anti-union was very harmful. Blair promised this was going to change. Be fair to him, it has changed dramatically. That's where my support comes from."
As well as the extra funding he has secured, Robinson has succeeded in persuading a culturally indifferent chancellor to improve tax breaks on arts donations and give the arts a better chance.
"I honestly can't think of a time," he says, "when you had a statement coming out of the Treasury saying that the arts are going to be looked after."
While pushing the case for art with all the passion he can muster, Robinson is well aware that his own firm, Granada, has all but abandoned the performing arts - that the space once filled by high-quality drama serials such as The Jewel in the Crown is now occupied by Pleasure Island and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?.
That's business, says Robinson. In a two-channel world, ITV could pitch high; with multiple channels, it has to play for market share. "We cannot put out a programme at eight o'clock for an audience of two million. That's not what commercial television is about.
"The capacity to say to people, 'You may not like this but it's good for you and you'll grow to like it,' is gone when there are 50 other channels to watch. That's irreversible."
The dichotomy between personal preference and business practice is something many people in public life have to bridge. It does not, however, diminish Robinson's fervour in telling Blair and Brown that they must plough money into a field that will never yield a mass vote. The arts, notoriously self-interested, are unlikely to show much gratitude when the cash begins to flow; but some in the know are starting to acknowledge that Gerry Robinson might have made a difference, and that the pain might be about to ease
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