Culture: Cinema

Viscount Falkland Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd April 2014 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Falkland (CB)]

My Lords, I apologise to the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, for having arrived a few moments late. I will look at Hansard to see what I missed. The business of culture is a difficult subject which is far too involved to be dealt with in this evening’s debate, an issue which a number of noble Lords have already addressed. My own view was implied by the noble Baroness, Lady Bakewell, in that the showing of opera productions in cinemas shows that we are actually taking a step towards creating a film culture. To me, a film culture exists when film rates on a par with all the other activities in our cultural life. That is what happens in France, as mentioned by the noble Earl, Lord Glasgow. It is called the seventh art in France because the French taxpayer will stand the subsidy that goes to French cinema. People value the heritage of film and it ranks with equal importance to all the other cultural activities of music, literature and so on. Unfortunately, that is not the case here.

I think it was the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron—I apologise if it was not—who, in an excellent speech, talked about the Government’s attitude. I rather hesitate to tell noble Lords when I made my first speech on film in this House, but it was when we were debating the Films Act in the 1980s. The attitude of the then Government was absolutely extraordinary but, of course, films came under the Department of Trade and Industry at that time, and anything that was not consistent with the criteria of trade and industry did not really make much impression on them. In fact, the Government were what one might call indifferent, sometimes bordering on the hostile, to any suggestion that cinema should have special treatment of any kind, even though at no time were we begging for special treatment apart from a few tax breaks. That has all changed. I have recently been quite encouraged, certainly by the Chancellor of the Exchequer. The Treasury governs everything in terms of subsidy and all the rest, and the Chancellor has made some quite intelligent adjustments to the tax regime for film, although that does not solve all our problems.

The noble Earl, Lord Glasgow, mentioned American cinema, in whose shadow we have always been. The Americans have always made it quite clear that they want it to continue that way—they see us as a threat. In any case, with a British film, it is very difficult to get the kind of returns you expect if you do not get American distribution, so they have a lot of power.

We have to thank the television companies for keeping our film industry alive, as it is the BBC and Channel 4 that have held this country’s film-making activity together. Audience numbers were down until the multiplexes came in and extended their range of cinemas, after which numbers increased from 84 million per year to what we have today, somewhere in the high hundreds of millions. There is a lot of activity going on and the hybrid productions made as a result of the work done by television and film companies have provided a great deal of employment for actors, technicians and all the others who work in the film industry. Raising money is the main problem. When Stephen Frears came to talk to us he told us that film producers mostly scrabble round for money. The situation is unlikely to change so far as creating a film culture is concerned, but the number of interesting and excellent speeches tonight shows that there is some hope.

I do have one concern. Although no one seems aware of it, the cultural impact of the new education policy for dealing with recalcitrant children who do not conform is absolutely deplorable. Both in the new academies and in the existing state sector people are urging that there be a great increase in discipline and so on, and large numbers of children are being excluded. I have three close relatives—my wife and two children—who work in the industry. One of my daughters, a video editor, teaches excluded children when she is not working on an editing project. She asks the children who she teaches to think up a story and to film it. She then edits it, and teaches them how to edit. I can say without exaggeration that the results have been astonishing. The children become fascinated by and involved in the activity. The exclusion of such children is idiotic because they are the kind of people who go into the film industry.

I shall finish with a short anecdote to illustrate the point. My son was working on a television series in America with a very well known British actor. I shall not name the actor because, should he ever pick up the Hansard report and read it, which he probably will not, he would recognise himself. This actor appeared one day to talk to my son about the work that they were doing and my son said by way of conversation, “What drama school did you go to?”. He said, with probably a rather affected London thing, “I didn’t go to no drama school. Hang on a minute, I broke into one once”. He said that the drama school had high skylight windows and he came in with a friend, and it so happened that Alan Bennett was giving a tutorial on writing. Alan Bennett said, “Oh, where did you come from?”. They said, “We was interested in what was going on”. He said, “Well, you had better come in and sit down then”. They did, and that was the start of his career.

I reckon that among those excluded children there is talent. There is always talent with children. They are difficult for all kinds of reasons. Not everybody wants to be a solicitor or a diplomat. There are a lot of people who have talents that need to be exposed, and that is the additional point that I would like to add to this most interesting debate.