Rising East Online

Creative London

Creationist Fantasy

—Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson

The creative industries still feature heavily in government propaganda. Shortly after the last election, DCMS minister James Purnell noted that the UK was ‘arguably the world’s most creative nation.’ NESTA’s report on how Britain could develop world-class creative industries said: ‘The UK film industry has been described as “the most important in the world after the US”.’ You have to go to the footnotes to find out who was responsible for this assessment. It was, in fact, the UK Film Council, hardly an unbiased judge, one might think.

A large number of people work in the creative industries, broadly defined, although not nearly as many as the hype would suggest. There are three times as many people working in domestic service as there are in advertising, television, video games, film, the music business and design combined; the creative industries represent around one in 20 of the people working in Britain today. Between them they account for 4 per cent of all UK exports of goods and services, but as the NESTA report made clear, it is hard to make serious money:

‘The UK’s creative industries are facing increasing international competition. In particular, creative businesses and policymakers need to appreciate the scale of the competitive challenges now facing the sectors in the UK. From film production to design, new international centres for creative businesses are developing rapidly. These are challenging established businesses, including those based in the UK. UK television exports have fallen for the second year running (despite an overall increase since 1998). In design, overseas earnings have halved since 2001, while the value of exports in music, the visual and performing arts in 2003 was down 20 per cent from 2000.’ (NESTA 2006)

The report then goes on to say that employment in advertising had fallen by 20 000 in three years, after reaching a high in 2001. Film production spending was nearly a third lower in 2005 than in the previous year (including international productions filming in the UK). The number of people working in games development had fallen by 6 per cent since 2000, despite the continued growth in the market.

Despite repeated attempts to use Hugh Grant romantic comedies to revive the British film industry, there is not the remotest sign of Hollywood’s stranglehold on the UK market being weakened. In 2004, American-financed films accounted for almost three-quarters of UK box office receipts, while the number of UK films released in 2005 stood at 37, well down on the peak of 84 in the late 1990s. ‘The UK’s creative and technical talent in film has not created a strong domestic industrial sector that produces sustainable commercial growth,’ concluded NESTA. ‘This is because the UK industry is vulnerable in structural terms. It is organised primarily around individual film projects rather than sustainable production and distribution companies, as in the US.’

That is, perhaps, one way of looking at it. Another way is to draw the conclusion that Hollywood operates like a proper film industry; it makes films it thinks punters will want to watch. The UK industry, as James Heartfield noted in 2000, is dominated by dilettantes who make films they think punters ought to want to watch.

‘Amazingly, 68 per cent of UK-based films remain unreleased a year after being made. Until 1989, the percentage unreleased had not gone into double figures. The two-thirds of UK films that are not released are a reminder that what we call a film ‘industry’ is no such thing. For the most part, it is a hobby for inspired geniuses who have no real expectation that their films will be distributed. The United States has a film industry – a ‘mass civilisation’ film industry in which a wealthy elite makes films for the working classes. In Britain we have a ‘minority culture’ film industry. Down-at-heel bohemians make films about the working classes. Unsurprisingly mass audiences find these patronising diatribes uniquely unappealing.’ (Heartfield 2000)

The idea that the same may be true of British television has gradually been percolating in the national consciousness over the past few years. The proliferation of channels as a result of satellite and cable was touted as an extension of consumer choice; what was not mentioned was that the increase in the quantity of programmes would come at the expense of quality. Spreading the money available for programmes ever more thinly has resulted in a collapse of standards. True, there is still the occasional lavish costume drama, to deflect criticism of dumbing down, but they look increasingly like forlorn relics of a bygone age. This is the age of Big Brother, shows where middle-class and working-class couples exchange partners and a seemingly indistinguishable clutch of programmes giving advice on how to add value to houses.

Jimmy McGovern, who created one of the better TV series of the past two decades, Cracker, went on the attack in a speech at the 2006 Edinburgh Festival against ‘latte drinking, pesto-eating middle-class’ TV executives for their patronising and offensive treatment of Britain’s working classes. ‘I am delighted to see the state ITV are in,’ Mr McGovern said:

‘It is simply because they have utter contempt for their audience. These executives don’t sit around and say “what kind of intelligent, informative, thought-provoking programmes would we like to watch?” They think: “what will the ignorant plebs that watch our channel want to see?” They have total contempt for their audience, which is largely working class.’

When TV executives are not pushing at the boundaries of trash TV, they are importing programmes from abroad to fill the gaps in the schedules. Although the UK television industry employed more than 111 000 people in 2004 and spent more than £2.6 billion on original programmes, it was still not enough to meet demand. In 2005, Britain had run up a deficit of £332 million in TV (although it did run a surplus of £163 million in film).

Finally, there is music, a sector that has been a real breadwinner for the UK ever since the Beatles arrived in New York in February 1964. Here, too, the recent signs have not been encouraging. A month after they appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show, the Beatles filled the top five places in the US charts; in 2002, for the first time in the subsequent 38 years, a year went by without one British artist making it into the US top 100. The same trend applied to albums. Somewhat surprisingly, perhaps, the peak year for British dominance was not the heyday of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in the mid-1960s, or even the early 1970s when Led Zeppelin and The Who were in their pomp, but 1986, a time when the early UK lead in music videos resulted in a 32 per cent market share. By the early part of the current decade that had fallen to 0.2 per cent, with no particularly strong evidence of imminent recovery. Of the top 10 UK albums in the United States in 2005, two were by the Rolling Stones, two were by Rod Stewart, one was by the Bee Gees, and one was by Def Leppard. Coldplay, Gorillaz, Joss Stone and Keane made up the rest.

With a touch of understatement, NESTA admits the Brits have a problem. Total music sales are down, as are exports and employees in the music business, while import penetration from the United States is up:

‘The UK industry has been struggling in the US market. The market traditionally accounts for more than a third of global sales revenues and has been one of the cornerstones of the UK music industry’s success. However, from the mid-1990s onwards the UK has failed to produce a major international act of comparable stature as rap, soul and R’n’B became leading music forms among young American consumers.’ (NESTA 2006)

So, to sum up, the film industry is in trouble, the television industry is in trouble and the music industry is in trouble. The creative industries, for all the attention lavished on them by New Labour, were actually in a much healthier state when Harold Wilson and James Callaghan were in Downing Street. That, after all, was the era of David Bowie, Basil Fawlty and Martin Amis. One way of looking at the British economy of today is to say that there are clusters of excellence around science, finance and the arts. Another way of looking at the economy is to say that the pharmaceutical industry will eventually migrate to the United States, where the money is; that big finance would come a cropper in the event of a bursting of the debt-driven speculative bubble; and that Bullshit Britain reaches its apotheosis in the lionisation of the cultural industries.

It is conceivable, just, that Bullshit Britain really is the future, but that those of us wedded to traditional measures are not sufficiently hip to cotton on to the fact. But consider: China and India are churning out more graduates than the UK; science departments in British universities are being closed down; the British band that attracted the most attention in the United States last year was not the Arctic Monkeys but The Who. It would be comforting to think that Sir Paul McCartney had passed on responsibility for fixing the balance of payments to his fashion-designer daughter, Stella. The reality, though, is that the iconic figure in modern Britain is neither Sir Paul nor his daughter, but his second wife Lady Heather Mills McCartney. She managed to woo one of Britain’s richest men into marriage and claimed a share of his £800 million fortune when the blissful partnership strangely went sour after four years. And she understands the essence of the bullshit economy: with luck and attitude, you can make a tiny amount of talent go a long very way.

This is an extract from ‘Bullshit Britain’, Chapter 4 in Fantasy Island: waking up to the incredible economic, political and social illusions of the Blair legacy, by Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson. The extract is reproduced here by kind permission of Larry Elliott, who is economics editor of the Guardian. Fantasy Island is published by Constable at £7.99.

Bibliography

• Heartfield, J (2000) Great Expectations: the creative industries in the new economy Design Agenda
• NESTA (2006) The Innovation Gap: why policy needs to reflect the reality of innovation in the UK National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts

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