Culture shock

9:59am Monday 7th July 2008

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Stockton-born Alan Davey quit the civil service to reform the arts world. He talks to Steve Pratt about what the North-East needs

I SHOULD have been asking probing questions about the state of the arts in Britain, but was distracted by attempts to locate the small fluffy creatures that a previous interviewer from The Guardian had noted were scattered around this office.

Leaving Alan Davey's office at Arts Council England (ACE) I spotted some on a ledge and was relieved to see that my hero, Shaun the Sheep, of Wallace and Gromit fame, was among them. This marks him out as a man of good taste who deserved a warmer welcome than the frosty hello that greeted this former top civil servant from Stockton as he arrived to take up the role of chief executive.

That puts him in charge of the purse strings of the nation's artistic money, responsible for funding 881 companies and handing out smaller amounts to thousands of other projects through the National Lottery (a major piece of legislation he helped design while at the Department of Culture, Media and Sport).

Money was the root of the problem when he took up his post in the wake of ACE cutting off funding to nearly 200 of its clients without prior warning.

"Everything was very calm when I applied for the job," says Davey whose appearance suggests - and I don't mean to be rude - civil servant more than artistic lovey.

But he doesn't divorce himself from that action, talking of "we" rather than "they" when reflecting on the heated situation with which he had to deal. "What we had done was radical in changing the portfolio of organisation that we fund and, arguably, we should have done it a long time ago," he says.

"It took people by surprise because it's not the thing ACE does normally. It was an interesting time, but I think what we did was the right thing to do."

One of his first actions was to order a report on the lessons to be learnt from what happened, but he knows the future won't be easy. "The next review will be hard because public finances are under a lot of pressure and, with the wider economic climate, there will be less public money about.

"What I want to do is realise the ambitions of the arts in a big way. What I don't think we should be about is settling for second best and only having a small amount of vision.

"We are saving 50 per cent of our administration costs. We will have to work differently to achieve that and we have to be open and exchange ideas with the outside world, talk to artists more and talk about the arts more."

An electrician's son, his own artistic education growing up in the North-East was centred around the Dovecot Arts Centre in Stockton.

There were also visits to the Royal Shakespeare Company's Newcastle seasons, where the Ian McKellen/Judi Dench Macbeth and The Histories ("which I saw in a day") made a big impression.

Pantomime at the old Hippodrome and Billingham Forum arouse fond memories too.

His interest in the arts was fostered by several inspirational teachers at The Grange School, Billingham. One encouraged him to think about going to university, something no one else in his family had done.

He sang in the school choir but was "more of a receiver, an engager" than a participant in the arts. That extends to football. A Middlesbrough supporter as a boy when his dad used to take him to matches, he's been a Spurs supporter since moving to London, although says in his defence: "When it's Middlesbrough versus Spurs, I wear my Middlesbrough socks."

His musical and theatre education continued at university in Birmingham, where he studied medieval and modern English. He could see Shakespeare at nearby Stratford and went to his first "proper concert"

conducted by Simon Rattle in Birmingham. "I'd never heard a professional orchestra before, so I was just bowled over and went every week in the two-quid seats,"

he recalls.

"Later, I discovered modern dance, which is one of my favourite art forms now. What I like is the way you have live music and the language of the body. It's something I'd never appreciated while watching football matches. I realised there was a whole new art form I knew nothing about."

After completing a post-graduate degree, he joined the civil service "because I thought Whitehall was interesting". He worked in the Department of Health where, in his second year, he was sent up to the Cleveland Child Abuse inquiry in Middlesbrough - "their reasoning being you will know where to go and what it's like".

He then moved to the Department of Heritage, which became the Department of Culture, Media and Sport. He was head of culture when he applied for the post of ACE chief executive, a move he sees as logical in a sense.

"I'd probably got as far as I can in the culture side of things in the civil service and anything else I was going to do was going to be boring by comparison," he explains.

The difference of working outside the civil service is that he's running an organisation and it feels much freer. "You make decisions and things happen. You don't have to second guess politicians," he says.

ACE will be a very different organisation in two years' time, he promises. The regional work needs to be better defined, which means clarity of leadership from the national office but with regional delivery. He wants to overcome the feeling of national and regional offices to create a sense of one organisation.

"The thing my jobs have in common is about changing the world for the better. I have a strong feeling that social services have a strong part to play in people's life because what it gives people is a sense of possibility. That's particularly important for the North-East that it has a sense of aspiration," he says.

"Because one of the things people say in the North-East is that something that's good is not for them. I heard someone say isn't this too good for Middlesbrough?' That's the wrong attitude.

Of course, it's what Middlesbrough wants, needs and should have and is a big statement by Middlesbrough that it aspires to something."

ACE isn't just about money. He feels "we have to start leading the debate on the arts in the country." Nationally, the arts tend to make the headlines when something is seen as sensational, something goes wrong with a national company or a work of art proves controversial.

Things can be learnt from the regions, he feels.

"Look at the debates that go on there and see how we can replicate nationally."

People who think the arts aren't for them need to be reminded that's not true. "The arts can be for anyone with an open mind, an inquiring mind," he says.

He's been touring the regions in recent months and in Newcastle, for instance, was struck by the potential of the new Northern Stage building to become the cornerstone of civic life.

Above all, he wants to promote great art for everybody. Execute, innovate and react are his watchwords. "I want to get us not to be so selfconscious talking about arts," says this artistic ex-civil servant.