In any contest between the football World Cup and the Olympic Games, Simon Barnes was of the opinion that the latter remained the greatest show on earth. For all its passion and drama, he found ‘the monoculture of football dispiriting’. Its commercialism only inflated its sense of self-importance and covering the World Cup often involved observing a succession of similar narratives. In contrast, he believed that ‘the Olympics represent the search for greatness in such a variety of forms’, adding, ‘and with twice the number of sexes’.33 Throughout these years – far removed from the overt idolatry, huge salaries and satellite television coverage that was transforming football – the rower Steve Redgrave was winning Olympic gold. At the Atlanta Games in 1996 his performance with Matthew Pinsent in a coxless pair proved to be the only gold medal Britain gained in any discipline in what was, in all other respects, a dismal display of the nation’s sporting prowess that left Great Britain on a par with Burundi and Ecuador. Some blamed the poor performance on Britain’s seemingly insatiable obsession with football to the exclusion of other sports. Others blamed the lack of funding available for those other sports – although the two points were not mutually exclusive. The sale of school playing fields also came in for particular scrutiny. Yet Barnes refused to join the national browbeating. He pointing out how, but for a millimetre here and a bit of bad luck there, Britain might easily have performed creditably at Atlanta and he doubted that money alone was the key. After all, because of Wimbledon’s profitability, ‘Tennis gets more than three times as much money as the rest of all the governing bodies of sport put together receive from the Sports Council, and there are more than 100 of them. Henman apart, tennis has for years been a disaster area.’34 Nonetheless, when Team GB went on to gain eleven gold medals four years later at the Sydney Olympics, many cited the increased funds made available through the National Lottery as a reason. It was there, at Sydney that Redgrave, having transferred with Pinsent to a coxless four, rowed into sporting legend by winning his fifth gold in successive Olympics, a record in an endurance sport. The timing of the race ensured that Barnes had to sprint for the line too, since he only had twenty minutes to file eight hundred words to catch Wapping’s printing deadline. It proved a rare occasion in which the expectation was so high he pre-prepared some of his lines, including the opening sentences parodying the hero’s previous request to be shot if ever he returned to the river: ‘Anyone who sees Steve Redgrave in a boat again has my full permission to knight him. He won his fifth gold medal in five Olympic Games this morning in the greatest five-and-a-bit minutes of sport any of us will ever see.’35 This remained Barnes’s conviction in the sober light of day. Reflecting on his thirty years in sports journalism in 2004, he still considered Redgrave’s feat the finest moment of them all.36
V
It was not just in the sporting arena that the National Lottery made its mark. Despite the moral objections to the state promotion of gambling and the potential repercussions for hooking some of the most socially disadvantaged and desperate, it proved a popular success. Twenty-five million tickets were sold at its launch in November 1994. Indeed, The Times even pondered whether it might prove the most popular development of the Major years.37 For every pound the punter spent, a little over five pence went to each of five causes – sport, the arts, national heritage, charities and a fund to celebrate the millennium. Such was its popularity – at one stage more than thirty million people indulged in a weekly flutter – that by the summer of 1997, over £3.5 billion had been raised for these five causes.38 Less surprisingly, the distribution of the largesse provoked a succession of resentments especially among those who claimed to speak for the generally less affluent gamblers who wanted their money to go to children’s homes and animal sanctuaries rather than the deep and badly holed pockets of the Royal Opera House. Thanks to a number of grants to high-profile arts and heritage projects, it looked like one of the most effective mechanisms ever developed to take from the poor in order to give to the more cultured elements within the middle class. The truth, however, was that most of the money went not to grand assertions of high culture but towards helping relatively small projects, not least in deprived parts of the country.
The Times and the ‘arts lobby’ had long since ceased to be natural partners because of the latter’s unending pleas for Government subsidies. The persistent proffering of the begging bowl did not greatly prick the conscience of a newspaper given to free market strictures. It was naturally attractive to the paper that the funds pouring in from the National Lottery could offer a means through which the arts might be given a boost without persistently beggaring the taxpayer. There remained, however, a problem. The Lottery’s cultural largesse was targeted at capital projects – like the construction or upgrading of theatres or art galleries – but not at underwriting ongoing running costs. All was well where the new cultural facilities generated an increased market to support its output. Tate Modern proved perhaps the most prominent success in this regard and a museum of pop music in Sheffield the greatest failure. The number of potential white elephants alarmed The Times and it pointed out that ‘there is no point in building splendid new venues if they place an intolerable strain on a subsidy system that can barely cope with present demands’.39 The danger was that artistic dreams were running ahead of the market to sustain them. Despite the investment in improving auditoria and related facilities, the patronage of classical concerts was not obviously larger in 2002 than it had been in 1982. Many theatre companies experienced similar fortunes.
It was the financial difficulties of the Royal Opera House that placed The Times in a particular dilemma. On the one hand it represented the sort of high culture the paper’s more refined writers wanted to see promoted. On the other hand, the paper could not easily sustain its criticism of the arts lobby’s benefit dependency while making an exception for what was a fringe interest of – for the most part – the more exulted social classes. Furthermore, ‘the House’ appeared to have lost its way artistically and was trailing behind the English National Opera based at the Coliseum. The will of the arts editor, Richard Morrison, prevailed in the paper, with his argument that if Rome and Milan could only afford one opera house each there was little hope that London could successfully sustain two. Thus, the Coliseum (also in need of investment), should be sold and the ENO could share Covent Garden with the Royal Opera.40 This line continued to fuel the ongoing correspondence in The Times letters’ page. In the end, the Royal Opera House benefited from a large – and controversial – £78 million cheque from the National Lottery as part of a £214 million restoration project. By the end of the decade, it had regained the artistic initiative and had, in the overused pun, put ‘the House’ back in order.
Being a critic for The Times had long been among the most prized positions on the paper. Yet, as in so many other areas, the scope for complacency had been squeezed in 1986 by the advent of the Independent. In terms of space provided for arts coverage, the ingénue trumped the past master. While the erudite John Higgins had presided over the arts coverage, The Times continued to hold its own in quality, but after he was moved to the obituaries department in 1988, the paper faced intense competition from its new rival which was making vigorous attempts to poach key reviewers. Richard Williams’s focus was sharpest at culture’s more popular end and for a while Mary Ann Sieghart had the impossible task of trying to run both Op-Ed and the arts coverage. It took a heated discussion between Charlie Wilson and Higgins’s protégé, Richard Morrison, for the editor – whose recreations were more the Turf than the Tate – to appreciate that greater investment in covering the arts had become an urgent priority. An orchestral trombonist and organist and Cambridge music graduate, Morrison got his way and, having joined the paper as a classical music reviewer in 1984, he was rewarded on the arrival of Simon Jenkins with the post of arts editor. The rank conferred upon him generalissimo powers over everything from the visual arts to theatre, dance and music. Not given to wanton idleness, he combined th
is marshalling task with continuing to file reviews himself.
Whether for a concert or the theatre, attending the first night of a performance that might go on past ten o’clock created tremendous pressure on the critic to file before the copy deadline – which was usually around 10.30 p.m. If there was time, the theatre critic Benedict Nightingale would dash into his car and hurtle from the West End to Wapping where he would file his piece and oversee it being subbed onto the page. Sometimes there was not even time for this and he would sit in his parked car typing up his judgment, a communication problem made easier by the advent of the laptop computer and e-mail. Yet, even if the review could be filed by 10.30 p.m., the early editions going up to Scotland, the North or abroad had long since left the presses. Their readers would receive the critics’ verdict a day after the more privileged browsers of London and the Southeast who got the first-night review the morning after it had happened. Those who lived on the distribution boundaries between the different editions were often the worst served by this unfortunate but inevitable arrangement. They might miss the expected review on the Monday by receiving an earlier edition and then miss it on its second showing if they were sold a later edition on the Tuesday. Morrison regularly found himself soothing miffed readers who had unwittingly been caught by this hazard and wanted to know why the paper had not covered an important occasion at the Barbican or the first night of a new and much-heralded production at the National.
Indeed, readers in the provinces often felt that the paper’s artistic coverage was too focused upon events in London. The Times was sensitive to this complaint although it was constrained in its reaction by the greater consideration that most important works were premiered in London, a city that was by a considerable margin the country’s cultural megalopolis. Rather than using regional reviewers, the paper believed it was necessary to judge provincial productions by more easily verifiable metropolitan standards. The result was a large bill for rail fares and overnight accommodation but this was probably better than being reliant on unverifiable opinions and the possibility of regional pride clouding judgments. Certainly there was much to applaud. This was the period in which Simon Rattle, the conductor of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, became one of the most discussed figures in the British arts scene. It was during the summer – when the Proms, the Edinburgh Festival and Bayreuth coincided – that the critics found themselves at their most peripatetic. The really intensive challenge was provided by the Proms since every concert had to be reviewed. Increasingly, this amounted to covering two separate concerts at the Royal Albert Hall each night. The reviewer just had time to nip out for a sandwich and file a review for the first concert before having to return to the auditorium for the second concert – which almost invariably went on past the copy deadline, ensuring publication in the following edition.
The knowledge and dedication of the classical music reviewers was peerless. Barry Millington and Noel Goodwin filed throughout the period covered in this book as did Hilary Finch who began reviewing in 1980 and was, in particular, a discerning writer on chamber music. Debra Craine began her career as the paper’s dance critic in 1989. John Allison began filing in 1994 and Geoff Brown switched from watching the silver screen to the orchestral stage in 1999. Fortunately, reviewing was an area of journalistic activity that involved making highly personal and subjective comments without obedience to the same libel laws that operated over other parts of the paper. While the regular critics betrayed their own tastes, they proved to be above the sort of suspicions that occasionally animated the literary world, especially in the non-fiction market, of giving favourable reviews to the works of friends. Certainly there were a number of caustic remarks that caused injury over the period, but generally artists of whatever discipline held back from responding directly to a poor review. There were a few exceptions. A Higgins review of Jonathan Miller’s production of Tosca did provoke the good doctor’s immortal riposte that it was ‘impertinent in the eighteenth-century sense of the term’. Meanwhile, the meaning of at least one review got lost in translation. Having spent the evening attending an indifferent operatic performance, Stephen Pettitt filed his column down the telephone line referring to what the Innererklang Music Theatre Company had billed as ‘Mouth Music’. Unfortunately, the copy taker miss-heard and typed ‘Mouse Music’. The misunderstanding was then compounded when the review appeared the next morning under the headline ‘I can smell a rat’.41
Ideologically, the great battle concerned whether the critic’s primary duty was to explore and interpret the cultural cutting edge or to review performances that were of interest to a wider range of Times readers. Certainly, Paul Griffiths felt most at ease when analysing works that were ‘difficult’. A brilliant and insightful critic who started reviewing classical concerts for the paper in 1973, Griffiths maintained an extraordinary turnover until 1996 when he departed for the New York Times. He was an extoller of the cutting edge, interpreting for a knowing readership the works of Stockhausen and Boulez in the manner of Aaron expounding the thoughts of Moses. The fading allure of these heroes from the concert hall repertoire did not dim his admiration for them and he also championed Harrison Birtwistle. Attending the premiere in the Coliseum of Birtwistle’s The Mask of Orpheus, Griffiths could not contain his excitement: ‘I remarked here a couple of years ago that Birtwistle’s earlier Punch and Judy was the one perfectly satisfactory reinvention of opera since Stravinsky. Now there is another,’ he crooned, before concluding, ‘the world afterwards is different’.42
Hailing Birtwistle certainly suggested The Times was not diverted by the popularizing tendencies manifested in the phenomenon of mass-selling compilations of the Three Tenors, the injection of sex appeal through the marketing techniques of the pop world or the advent of a commercially viable radio station, Classic FM. While moving away from the belief that the challenging work was almost by definition the most demanding of attention, The Times did not feel called upon to cover whatever was popular. If there was dumbing down in the paper it did not happen in the arts pages. For those interested in culture as a challenging experience the problem, in so far as there was one, was not of The Times’s making. During the nineties, British composers of the calibre of Judith Weir, John Tavener and James MacMillan continued to write exciting – even inspirational – works. Yet, in matters of international renown, the country could not quite summon a composer of the stature of Benjamin Britten. Indeed, by the last years of the twentieth century, the most ambitious modern composers were to be found in the United States rather than Europe. It was American minimalists like Philip Glass, John Adams and Steve Reich who demonstrated that there was no necessary contradiction between the avant-garde and the popular.
When it came to opera, Simon Jenkins had been determined that The Times could only afford the best. The best was Rodney Milnes, the esteemed editor of Opera magazine who had translated the libretti for the ENO’s productions of Dvorák’s Rusalka and Janácek’s Osud as well as Tannhauser for Opera North, and was probably London’s only working journalist to be a Knight of the Order of the White Rose of Finland (unfortunately he was only allowed to wear the decoration when in the Finnish President’s presence). There was, however, a hitch. Milnes was unsure whether the newspaper that opposed increased state funding of the arts was where he would feel at ease. ‘Do you really want a 1950s leftie?’ he queried. Jenkins and Morrison insisted that indeed they did and Milnes duly came on board. It was a great moment for the paper’s critical credentials. It certainly proved well worth the ensuing periodic disagreements over arts funding policy, with Milnes later admitting, ‘My eight years working with Richard Morrison were among the happiest in my life.’43 True, there was the wearisome saga of the Royal Opera House’s difficulties prior to its triumphant reopening in 1999 but on a sweeter note, there was also much to celebrate at the ENO and in the emerging talents of David McVicar, Deborah Warner and Richard Jones.
Milnes was certainly not a critic whose enthusiasm for
the arts’ cause clouded his critical judgment. He was generally underwhelmed by the emergence of country house opera during the 1990s, believing that Garsington and the Grange were as much about social class as about artistic quality and, as such, were turning the clock back to a dimmer period in the country’s cultural history. He had a far higher opinion of what Glyndebourne offered, especially after 1994 when its Michael Hopkins-designed auditorium provided it with facilities that finally surpassed the better sort of boarding-school pantomime. There were extensive trips, too, across the United States, Russia and Europe in order to bring his judicious observations of the world’s great performances within the reach of every reader of The Times. His audience, indeed, stretched far beyond the confines of the paper. The Italian press’s timidity towards criticizing La Scala meant that – on the sham pretext of displaying British journalism’s impertinent streak – they contrived instead to reprint Milnes’s forthright demolition when Milan’s great opera house failed to meet the mark. At La Scala for a production of Gluck’s Armide, he wrote, in a review more memorable than the performance, that it had been an evening of ‘witless operatic baroquery’ contrived at such expense that it tested even his patience with limitless subsidy. The qualities of the opera itself were totally lost in the ostentatious display of wealth. He took one look at the array of costumes on La Scala’s stage and assured his readers ‘there cannot be an ostrich left in all of Africa with a feather on its hind quarters’.44
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