Pointing the way

If a list of ‘the great and the good’ exists, you can be sure Sir John Tusa is on it. His working life at the BBC and at the helm of the Barbican has led to, among other things, the Tories asking him to head a policy task force (despite – or perhaps because of – his political neutrality), and the Clore Leadership Programme to appoint him as Chair. He also chairs the Wigmore Hall Trust and the Court of Governors for the University of the Arts, London, and is a Vice-Chair of the British Museum. His achievements, his intellect and his humanity make it difficult to find anyone to say a bad word about him – unusual indeed for someone who has flown so high for so long.
Leading edge
The Clore programme was set up in 2002, in order to “make a significant contribution to cultural leadership training in the United Kingdom”. Has it done so? Sir John has absolutely no doubt. The 156 people who have gone or are going through the programme as Fellows (a process of at least a year) and the more than 400 attenders of the two-week short courses represent “some very powerful and closely connected networks within particular arts sectors, but almost more importantly, networks across the sectors”. He believes that the programme has broken down the compartmentalisation of the arts, heritage and culture sectors, and identifies the programme’s greatest strength as having become “far more systematic about working on the transition between arts management and arts leadership”. The most important impact on the participants, however, has been to gain “an understanding of what kind of leader you might be” – exploring different leadership styles and simply learning more about oneself. Sir John insists it’s an approach, rather than a system, and that “it’s not a business course. It is a course where people discover about themselves.”
Clore is now exporting UK arts leadership to the world, through three annual Chevening Scholarships, supported by the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, and a Hong Kong Scholarship supported by the Government of Hong Kong. Sir John is amazed by the lack of arts policies and cultural ministries elsewhere in the world. “One of the Fellows from India said to me, we have no arts or culture ministry, we have no arts council, we have no idea of what arts policy might be. For the first time it’s occurred to me that maybe having a bit of arts policy is quite a good idea,” he says, dissolving into laughter. His belief that the UK, and England in particular, have too much arts policy, is well known.

Policy fatigue
I ask him about the most recent movements – mostly from outside Government – towards a new arts policy landscape, including his own report for the Conservative party, ‘A New Landscape for the Arts’, ERA21, Tim Joss’s ‘New Flow’, and the recent, widely criticised report from the New Culture Foundation proposing the abolition of Arts Council England (ACE). “You can be policied to death,” he points out. “If all people have to do is spend their time thinking about arts policies, and then trying to impose arts policies on arts organisations, that is not a helpful process – it takes you too far away from the actual business of putting on plays, music, exhibitions, and all the things that are simply the stuff of arts.” He is broadly supportive of Alan Davey and Liz Forgan (respectively Chief Executive and Chair of ACE), saying he suspects they are on the right lines, but admits he hasn’t absorbed the detail. That is perhaps not surprising, given that neither the Barbican nor the BBC has had a particularly close relationship with ACE. Yet he has also been vocal in encouraging other forms of funding.
Public conscience
In a Times article in April 2007, he wrote with some passion that “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”. Although he’s aware that the recession is creating challenges for arts leaders, and that any move towards the US model – so often held up by politicians as an ideal – has its drawbacks, he is optimistic. The US, he says, has “a very skewed funding policy – there’s hardly any public funding and it’s almost all reliant on private funding or corporates and foundations”. In the UK’s public funding-based model he is sure that “even under these difficult circumstances... there is an upside to private giving, if the Treasury could get over its obsession with hating giving tax concessions to people during their lifetimes”. He is “modestly confident” that changes allowing donations to the arts and culture to be tax-deductible will come eventually.
Courage and confidence
I press Sir John on another major interest – broadcasting and the arts. Arts professionals have watched with dismay as the level and quality of arts coverage has declined rapidly, particularly on terrestrial television. He agrees. “I have no doubt that a rediscovery of courage about the arts on the part of BBC channel controllers, particularly BBC2 and to a lesser extent BBC4, is the biggest contribution that could be made,” he asserts. “After all, the BBC has a special responsibility and a special place to do this – you can’t expect anything very much from ITV, though Channel 5 and Sky Arts do a certain amount.” He identifies a lack of confidence on the part of the BBC, and a belief among producers that there has to be a young audience for arts and culture programming. However, he suggests that one reason why consideration is being given to top-slicing the licence fee – “which I think would be a great disaster” – is that there are some aspects of public service provision, including the arts, in which the BBC does not deliver.
We jointly bemoan the lack of arts knowledge among producers and newspaper editors – such as the editor of a well-known daily who, on being told he should be covering the 200th anniversary of Haydn’s death, asked “who is Haydn?” Sir John, while holding up BBC Radios 3 and 4 as “shining lights” believes that “there is too little knowledge, and where there is, there is a tendency to feel guilty about having it. You then say, ‘why should I put on programmes about the arts? – it’s only because I’m interested in it’. Well, no decent editor... has ever done that job properly without reflecting what they are interested in.”
This leads back to the issue of arts leadership, and the point that building confidence is a key factor for the Clore Fellows. “There is a really broad range of very, very talented, committed and able people moving into all parts of the arts and culture leadership world,” Sir John says. He hopes that this confidence will spread. “Not apologising for what you believe is a very good starting point, or, to put it the other way round, constantly apologising for what you believe in is no basis for arts leadership.”