New Statesman Scotland
The Edinburgh Festival is the only sustained period of time in the calendar when the cultural focus of this country shifts decisively away from London. For those four weeks, columns, diaries, reviews and even leaders for the London papers all passed through the overheated fax machines of the Caledonian, George or Balmoral hotels. Television crews normally patrolling Westminster, the City or the South Bank send their researchers searching frantically through the Fringe Club for stories, celebrities or the latest sighting of Sean Connery's brother Neil. And because of Edinburgh's smallness, journalists, radio and TV people from London see more of each other than they ever do in the capital. Even though they bring cartloads of condescension with them (their patronising wonderment that Edinburgh's food, wine, whisky and water are neither poisonous nor even impossibly unfashionable, darling, can be head-shakingly infuriating), it can only be good to see London's linen suits lift their collective gaze to the north to talk and write about something different.
What really pulls the attention of the arts world northwards is the extraordinary cultural soup that is the Edinburgh Festival. The sheer scale (it is by far the largest arts festival in the world) and diversity of its ingredients make it unique. The Official Festival lends it international respectability (and some initial credibility); the wonderful Festival Fringe gives it diversity and a near-limitless ability to surprise; and the Film Festival ensures a mix of international, commercial and Scottish work. This is without mentioning all manner of diverse delights - from the Jazz Festival, the Book Festival and several other close cousins. The Edinburgh Festival is a life-enhancing, intoxicating event that opens the world like a cultural encyclopaedia to anyone who comes to the city - if only to walk the streets and drink in the atmosphere. Hundreds of events are free, many take place in the street and the Fringe has historically recognised the vital need to involve people with no money and no preconceptions about the arts.
That beguiling openness and internationalism is muted, however, by one event that takes place in Edinburgh at the same time. Like a cuckoo in the nest of festivals, the Television Festival is closed to the public and, far from being international, brings north its own metrocentric agenda.
A depressingly familiar cast of characters discuss depressingly familiar items in halls, churches and hotels, which only happen to be in Edinburgh. For all the impact made by the festival and the beautiful city that surrounds them, they might as well hire a big hotel in London and save the airfares and some of the angst.
When the Television Festival does try to recognise where it is, the tone becomes worryingly colonial. "Local" television and "local" issues are sometimes included in the programme, but the sessions where they are discussed tend to offer the heavy-hitters from the south the chance of some time out to buy whisky and shortbread.
The central difficulty rumbling around inside all this is, of course, a cultural one. Television in Britain is now run from London. The BBC always was, Channel 4 chose a Soho location and thereby set its metropolitan tone. Channel 5 didn't hesitate (after some strange notions about settling in Sheffield) and Sky is symbolically positioned between the City and Heathrow airport. And now ITV, the traditional bastion of regional and therefore truly national values, is beginning the last stages of its consolidation. Its network programmes are now all commissioned in London and, with some honourable exceptions, already showing signs of retreating behind the cultural ramparts of the M25.
With justification, ITV used to boast that its regional system, where hundreds of hours of local programmes are made every week and where real control over the network schedule was exerted from Manchester, Leeds, Glasgow, Birmingham, Bristol and Norwich as well as London, ensured that Britain would broadcast to Britain. Sadly that is now a very difficult characterisation to sustain, when every network channel is centred in London, where 85 per cent of the population of our country does not live, but where 100 per cent of the people who decide what our networks will show do. If London increasingly broadcasts to Britain, then agendas of all sorts will begin to be set that will support a trend, often by unexpected routes, to even more pressure to devolve political power. A clear historical process is in train here.
At least this government understands something of the enormous power of television and how even in areas that seem entirely unrelated to the political, it can make the sort of changeable weather that swings votes. But the government needs to recognise how quickly the control of network television has passed so completely into a set of London-based sensitivities. And how destructive that could be for the United Kingdom.
Alistair Moffat
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