Tainted by Experience
John Drummond
Faber, £25, 384pp
Buy it at BOL
Theatre@Risk
Michael Kustow
Methuen, £16.99,288pp
Buy it at BOL
What kind of cultural life do we want in Britain? One that is diverse, ambitious, internationalist and open to the shock of the new? Or one that is bland, populist, commodified and dominated by management and marketing? Both these books are passionate, rousing defences of the appetite for excellence in a conformist, commercialised age. Far from being snobbish or high-handed, they remind me of the truth of Matthew Arnold's dictum that "the men of culture are the true apostles of equality".
John Drummond's book is a polemical memoir charting his sometimes erratic ascent through British public life: BBC television's arts department in its golden age, the Edinburgh Festival, Controller of Radio 3 and director of the Proms. What strikes me is his genetic and environmental good luck. The son of a Scottish mariner and an Australian soprano, he inherited a quick intelligence, a restless curiosity, a phenomenal memory.
Although brought up modestly in Bournemouth before moving on to the National Service Russian course and Cambridge, Drummond was part of a generation that experienced first-hand the post-war renewal of British artistic life: the Third Programme, cheap paperback books, susidised theatre, opera and ballet. Exactly like contemporaries such as John Tusa, Jeremy Isaacs and Joan Bakewell, he brought to broadcasting and public life firm values and a wide frame of cultural reference: a stark contrast to the modern media brats who seem to know nothing outside the narrow, goldfish-bowl world of television.
Drummond was also endowed with the priceless gift of impatience: there's a hilarious moment in the book when a BBC superior apologises for saying of him in a report that "he does not suffer fools gladly". Drummond takes it as a compliment but is sternly told: "Not in the BBC it's not."
Among the many fools chastised in this book are bone-headed bureaucrats, egotistic conductors (Bernstein especially) and philistine politicians (headed by David Mellor and John Patten). But Drummond's bête noire is John Birt - for his assault on Reithian values, his reverence for overpaid consultants and his unbelievable management-speak. Asked by Drummond what he thought of BBC orchestras, Birt replied they were "a variable resource centre whose viability depends on the business plan of the Controller of Radio 3".
Behind Drummond's testiness, however, lies a horror at the vandalisation of a once-great institution and a belief that those placed in positions of power, in broadcasting and the arts, have a mission to inform. Planning a series of architectural programmes for BBC Television, Drummond hired expert presenters such as Alec Clifton-Taylor, John Summerson and Mark Girouard: today, as he wearily says, it's more likely to be Janet Street-Porter.
As director of the Edinburgh Festival, Drummond redressed the imbalance between music and drama and achieved thematic unity, as in his unsurpassed "Vienna 1900" year. And, as head of Radio 3, he constantly related the speech output to the music, though I'd question his drastic diminution of radio plays.
Some might accuse Drummond of paternalism or even - to invoke the silliest of all words - elitism. But this shows the confusion of an age in which a proper scepticism about authority leads to a distrust of all professional knowledge and skill. Drummond, as a confessed generalist, readily admits that throughout life he has learned from people who know more than he does.
What he has, as I can testify, is the ability to transmit his own enthusiasms. At one Edinburgh Festival he berated me for rigidly sticking, like all critics, to my own discipline: "Go to some concerts and opera," he advised, "and tell the Press Office I said so." I went that night to hear Simon Rattle conduct Stravinsky, Ravel and Fauré, and, though I wasn't exactly a musical innocent, I would say Drummond's exhortation changed my life: I have been haunting opera-houses and concert-halls ever since. And, at its best, what this invigorating roller-coaster of a book does, apart from settling old scores, is introduce you to composers who create new ones and remind you of the unending richness of what, with misplaced reverse snobbery, we crudely dub "high art."
Michael Kustow is cut from the same cloth as Drummond: having worked at different times for the RSC, the ICA, the National and Channel 4, he is a cultural impresario rather than a creator. His new, vital, vehemently argued book is partly an account of the hectic travails involved in bringing John Barton's epic 15-hour saga about the Trojan war, Tantalus, to theatrical fruition, and partly a highly personal apologia for theatre in an age of global capitalism, technology and cultural relativism.
Kustow's book is full of wise saws and modern instances. He reminds us of Britain's debt to the amateur tradition of university drama - "so rare in other countries". He compares The Lion King to Inigo Jones's 17th-century masques in which pageantry replaced poetry. And, although his focus is ostensibly narrower than Drummond's, he sees the arts in a wider socio-political context: he not only assails Thatcherite market-driven madness but attends an IT conference in Amsterdam, where he discovers that "play, the very soil of theatre, is being appropriated by a new breed of designers and gamesters".
What is heartening is that neither of these two books, finally, is apocalyptic. Kustow ends with a richly descriptive and highly moving account of Ariane Mnouchkine's Paris production of Drums on the Dam that embodies the mix of intoxicating theatricality and urgent actuality in which he strongly believes. And Drummond, in a postscript, pays tribute to the wealth of emerging talent in the arts that rejects the gross materialism of the past two decades.
The right is always pessimistic: the left is congenitally optimistic. And I too believe that, as human beings, we will eventually crave more than television's steady diet of consumerism and voyeurism, cinema's procession of soul-deadening movies or the transformation of the London theatre into an outer suburb of Hollywood. Taken together, these two books amount to a passionate defence of innovation, authenticity and hand-made excellence in art, and a necessary assault on a prevalent junk culture that denies us real richness of choice.
