Maybe it takes me perilously close to breaching our impartiality guidelines, or just makes me sound dismally sycophantic, but I've recently experienced something wonderful about the UK City of Culture scheme. It was launched by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport to build upon the success of Liverpool's year as European Capital of Culture in 2008. Two trips in the last fortnight, to Northern Ireland and Hull, have made me keenly aware of the positive impact it can have on local arts scenes, including the BBC.
Derry-Londonderry beat mighty Birmingham and avant-garde Sheffield to launch the scheme in 2013. Metropolitan types might have sniffed a little about the point of another city of culture, but Derry-Londonderry showed how the arts can play a central role in transforming a city's fortunes. Visiting in autumn last year, it was easy to feel the city's pride at hosting major events like the Lumiere festival, Radio 1's Big Weekend and a brilliant retrospective of artist Willie Doherty. Once known for the Troubles, Derry-Londonderry was suddenly known for Turner Prize. But what was also clear was the rejuvenating impact being there had on those events. I've been going to the Turner Prize for twenty years, but never seen people queuing round the block to get in. Gone were the pockets of jaded and half-interested Londoners, replaced by engaged and interested crowds.
2013 wasn't a series of one-off events, but a catalyst for long-term change and growth. Nothing made me more aware of this than arriving in Belfast yesterday to see the arts team at BBC Northern Ireland. Marie-Louise Muir has been broadcasting Arts Extra four nights a week on Radio Ulster for the last ten years. In 2012, she was asked to present The Arts Show, a brand new monthly television strand that capitalised on the spotlight pointed at Derry-Londonderry. Well, 2013 has been and gone, attention already focusing on Hull (which takes the City of Culture mantel in three years time), but The Arts Show is still going, doing brilliant work capturing the vibrant culture of Northern Ireland.
In a recent poetry special, The Arts Show team looked at the impact Seamus Heaney's death has had on Northern Irish poetry. In an insightful and lovingly-crafted programme featuring interviews and readings from Michael Longley, Sinead Morrissey and Leontia Flynn, The Arts Show proved that there is life after Heaney, and that verse and spoken word are as strong as ever.
The Arts Show wouldn't exist if it weren't for Derry-Londonderry winning UK City of Culture. Coupled with the small but perfectly-formed team behind Radio Ulster's Arts Extra, Belfast has emerged through its own endeavours as a skilled and powerful base for arts broadcasting.
So it's exciting to think what impact City of Culture will have on Hull, and the part the BBC can play in it all. I visited two weeks ago and was deeply struck by the exciting work already going on. For a smallish city, Hull has a surprisingly large and unruly countercultural scene. The Fruitmarket is a little piece of Brooklyn dropped onto Humberside: a few streets of pop-up galleries, bars and music venues, including the UK's only Museum of Club Culture. Hull also has one of the most under-rated city museums anywhere in Britain - complete with the best Roman mosaics I've seen in these shores (and I've seen a few) and some beautifully sculpted if alarmingly pagan Bronze Age fertility statues. Across the road is the original home of abolitionist William Wilberforce, now an unsettling museum looking at the 18th Century slave trade and Wilberforce's central role in the abolitionist movement.
Wilberforce did more than anybody else in his time for the cause of human liberty, so it's no accident that Andrew Dixon and the Hull City of Culture team have made freedom a central theme in their plans for 2017. It's that same spirit that drew poets Andrew Marvell and Philip Larkin (some three hundred years apart), allowing them to escape the political and academic claustrophobia of the south. And it's that feeling of being set apart from the Establishment that underpins the antics of the Fruitmarket today, ensuring that creators of all ilk who settle in Hull rarely want to leave.
In anticipation of what is likely to be an extraordinary year, the BBC in Hull has already made the inspired decision to appoint Anne-Marie Tasker as Culture Correspondent. Just another reminder how much UK City of Culture has done to shift the focus in the arts, both outside and within the BBC, away from the metropolis.
Jonty Claypole is Director, BBC Arts.
- Read Jonty's blog 'Introducing BBC Arts'.
- Find out more about the arts on the BBC at the Arts and Culture website.
- Read Executive Producer Martin Smith's blog about the Dylan Thomas Season.
