What is the point of the arts? Last week, it appeared it is to create accessible mainstream drama that highlights and threatens to actually resolve an injustice that the government ignored, while at the same time increasing advertising revenue for a commercial broadcaster because of massive viewing figures – a double win for both big business and bleeding-heart liberals who don’t want to see the lives of hundreds of innocent people destroyed for ever!
There are concerns that the pressure generated by Mr Bates Vs the Post Office to overturn legal processes and deliver swift justice may set a dangerous precedent, but Rishi Sunak must resolve to act as decisively and fearlessly as he did when he used parliament to overrule the supreme court’s findings and declare Rwanda a safe country. Sunak must simply dare to dream.
It seems all it took was bold commissioning and beloved TV faces to start to stem the scandal, which must irk all the journalists in sidelined liberal outlets who’ve been writing about it for years. But what next for woke ITV? For example, Eton school is unable to open because undermaintained sewers have flooded it with human excrement. One could argue the school itself has, in the shape of David Cameron, Boris Johnson, Kwasi Kwarteng and the Daily Telegraph’s Charles Moore, done much the same to Britain itself. But should the sewage scandal be woke ITV drama’s next target?
In Filthy Vengeance, Danny Dyer plays a sentient piece of woke excrement with a cockney accent, discharged into a chalk stream by a corrupt privatised utility company, who learns at first-hand of the damage being done and vows to take woke revenge on the network of international financiers and free-market politicians who facilitate it, by any means necessary. Rob Brydon cameos as a lecherous water bailiff.
The woke punk-fisher Feargal Sharkey can play himself in a scene where he meets the woke Dyer faeces in a sewer and agrees to team up to smash capitalism. Hopefully, it will be more convincing than the disgraced horse-warming tax-avoider Nadhim Zahawi MP’s performance in Mr Bates, who mouthed things he had actually said previously in such a hammy way it appeared he had been replaced by his own Spitting Image puppet.
Zahawi’s bum note aside, Mr Bates was a win for acting, writing, filming, recorded sound, design, costume and the arts generally, showing how the arts can excite the collective imagination and the national conscience, give voice to the voiceless and bring the whole country together by the power of storytelling. Has there ever been a worse time then for the backward fenland swamp of Suffolk to announce that it is cutting its entire arts budget? No art for fen folk. Shut up and eat your turnips.
Conventional wisdom says arts funding doubles its return by drawing in visitors and increasing spending in businesses that benefit from their patronage (I say with some pride that the age and gender demographic of my audience means it regularly breaks bar-takings records in provincial theatres, hard-drinking fans of the low art of standup thus subsidising more worthwhile forms such as dance, theatre and Fleetwood Mac tribute bands). The fact is, Suffolk’s £500,000 arts cut could actually mean a million pounds Suffolk can ill-afford to lose will now not be spent in the darkening region as cultural consumers stay in their wattle and daub huts to stream Mr Bates on TV instead.
Sadly, Suffolk’s value as a cultural destination has barely begun to be exploited. Metalheads the world over would flock to Ipswich, if only it had the wisdom to open a shrine to its most famous sons, the Luciferian innovators Cradle of Filth, while fans of early 70s commune jam rock would surely pay homage at the Sotherton farmhouse that housed the Global Village Trucking Company, especially if there were an animatronic diorama showing men playing 20-minute guitar solos while wives and girlfriends washed up and changed nappies.
Joking apart, the ghostly tales of MR James draw millions of Christmas viewers and at Livermere rectory, where he spent his childhood, you can marvel at the gravestones that supplied him with character names, and the churchyard just as he described it in his final story, A Vignette; Aldeburgh is obviously the “Seaburgh” seaside town of the timelessly chilling A Warning to the Curious. Elsewhere, Great Barton church has beautiful Edward Burne-Jones glass; the Halesworth Gallery’s outdoor sculpture trail last summer was the most fun I’ve had with ceramics; and the suddenly decimated Eastern Angles theatre company has spent decades embodying rural working-class experiences in flexible mobile productions that can fill village halls, or transfer to London venues when metropolitan elitists deign to notice them. Even Lowestoft’s the Darkness are quite good, really.
A cultural exodus from costly London means Suffolk is benefiting from an influx of displaced artists, but if Suffolk rejects them, they will take their talents elsewhere. Suffolk’s historic enemy Norfolk will instead become a cultural powerhouse akin to Paris’s Rive Gauche in the 50s and 60s, with Cromer, Ormesby St Margaret and Eccles-on-Sea emerging as centres of new ways of seeing, new ways of feeling, new ways of loving and new ways of being, new Sartres, new Camus and new De Beauvoirs rising from the culverts and ha-has.
But is it any wonder that the party that profits by turning people against one another, and that busted Brexit through only because people were too ill-informed to see through it, has no incentive to fund anything that fosters understanding and compassion. Suffolk’s overwhelming support for leave in the Brexit referendum shows how vulnerable its inhabitants are to manipulation and misinformation. Suffolk needs the illuminating beam of the arts to save it from itself.
Stewart Lee appears with Celya AB, Fern Brady, Rob Brydon, Rob Delaney, Kevin Eldon, Rosie Holt, Athena Kugblenu and Nish Kumar in Belter for the Shelter, in aid of Hackney Night Shelter, at the Hackney Empire, London, on 1 February
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