JANUARY/FEBRUARY, 2023
National Portfolio Organisations are those whose conformity the Arts Council has decided it can rely on sufficiently to allocate annual grants three years ahead of time. Getting on the NPO roster constitutes the blue riband of subsidy. Under normal circumstances once you’re in, and you follow orders to the letter, it’s doubles all round. This year, however, under pressure from Government to spread its money more widely than the usual suspects, and in the cause of the slogan Levelling Up, the Arts Council had to throw some reliable, treasured recipients under the bus, decisions the poor old President-for-Life found ‘invidious’. London and the South East having customarily gobbled up more than their fair portion of the national wedge, Levelling Up means more cash for other areas of the country which are said hitherto to have been financially and therefore culturally neglected. If you wish to understand fully how this nebulous idea works in practice don’t bother reading the ‘Levelling Up White Paper’. It is dense with vague drivel divorced from reality of the sort only the BBC takes seriously, such as “giving everyone the opportunity to flourishâ€. The penpushers who write this guff must live in a parallel universe to the rest of us.
Thus 276 of the 990 on the latest roster of NPOs are first-timers and qualify for a share of £446 million. Many of these newcomers indicate a dangerous move away from serious art into the realms of popular culture. Being interested in Art as I am, I wouldn’t have given a farthing to most of them because they are more concerned with ephemeral community entertainment than they are organisations likely to produce anything serious and lasting.
One of these lucky recipients is Blackpool Illuminations, or ‘The Lights’ as Lancastrians like myself know them. They will get £700,000 over three years – which represents a sizeable pile of coloured bulbs. Since 1879 The Lights have been a popular annual escape for working people chasing a few hours of release. They run from the end of September to early November and were a shrewd tactic devised by the local council to extend the holiday season six weeks beyond the traditional summer holidays, so exploiting earlier evenings of darkness. I’ve been going to The Lights every few years since my first trip in 1956. Coaches, weighed down with rattling crates of Light Ale for blokes and Babycham for the girls, were run from Pennine mill towns specifically to see The Lights. An afternoon at the funfair or in the bar (different towns were allocated their own pubs to avoid punch-ups) would be followed by fish and chips – the Blue Lagoon at South Shore opposite the Pleasure Beach is my personal recommendation. Traditionally, and with faces flashing, there was the stroll up the Golden Mile prom, buying daft stuff and teeth-rotting confectionery while enjoying animated lights telling familiar stories … Then home into the night carousing all the way across Belmont Moor. Illuminated Art Deco trams clanking past, dressed up as Spanish galleons or Mississippi riverboats with turning wheels, were a special treat, unforgettable. I loved it all, and still do.
The importance of The Lights in Lancashire tradition and lore should not be underestimated. In the late ’60s I worked on a Bolton building site helping a craftsman joiner of mesmerising skill called Pete – honestly, he could hang a door complete with hinges, handles and double locks inside five minutes so it fitted like a glove. One morning sat on wood shavings having a brew and reading the horses, Pete suddenly broke the silence. He mused slowly out loud about the suspiciously large number of ‘legovers’, as he put it, he was currently enjoying from his wife. Then, revelation, he jabbed his finger at me, winked and confided “She’ll be after a trip t’t Lights!â€
Blackpool’s seven hundred grand is to be used to commission ‘Light Artists’ – don’t you find that phrase alone sufficient to make you groan and die inside? The one thing The Lights do not need is an Arts Council grant arriving in the form of pretentious artists messing with something whose pleasurable simplicity they couldn’t fathom in a million years. The Lights are one of few examples of popular culture whose purity can only be poisoned by AC interference, and especially by those ‘artists’ trained (if at all) only in peddling the most feeble of ‘concepts’. And I don’t doubt there are many other companies in the north, also newly appointed NPOs, for whom the same is true. They will all get used to having a few quid to spend on what they have always done anyway, and then the blackmail will start.
Blackpool should reconsider and tell the President-for-Life where he can shove his stick of rock.
