Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Tables and Figures
- Preface
- Part I Background
- Part II Agenda for the UK Film Council
- 3 The Creation of the Film Council
- 4 From ‘Sustainability’ to ‘Competitive Industry’
- Part III Impact
- Part IV Strategic Lessons
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Appendix: UKFC ‘Family’ of Partner Organisations
- Index
3 - The Creation of the Film Council
from Part II - Agenda for the UK Film Council
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2016
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Tables and Figures
- Preface
- Part I Background
- Part II Agenda for the UK Film Council
- 3 The Creation of the Film Council
- 4 From ‘Sustainability’ to ‘Competitive Industry’
- Part III Impact
- Part IV Strategic Lessons
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Appendix: UKFC ‘Family’ of Partner Organisations
- Index
Summary
Rationalisation of Government Support Machinery
In the longer term, the roles of the Government support bodies will be reviewed in order to ensure that their strategies are coherent and well-targeted, with a stronger emphasis on developing the film industry.
(FPRG 1998: 7)But the worst thing, in my view, is that there … was a pluralism and a very effective British way of working that got lost. The fact of having activity in an unorganised or not over-organised way I think is … very helpful. And the British are very good at kind of ad hoc structures, much better than trying to design the overall body that will run everything.
(Simon Perry, film producer and formerly CEO of British Screen Finance, Telephone interview, September 2014)Introduction
Cultural agencies such as the Film Council may be conjured into life by governments of one colour and unceremoniously interred by those of another. The Film Council's creation owed much to the personal commitment of Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport Lord (Chris) Smith in the ‘New’ Labour Government that took office in May 1997.1 As we shall later recount in more detail, another Culture Secretary – the Conservative Jeremy Hunt – was responsible for its peremptory demise, as a member of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat cabinet installed in May 2010.2 These individuals’ actions need to be set in the broader context of the history of British film policy outlined in Chapter 2, as well as the particular conjunctures in which they took their decisions.
The present chapter focuses on the creation of the Film Council and its immediate pre-history. In significant measure, it is a tale of the role of policy-making elites and the use of favoured forms of expertise in determining the function of public bodies in shaping the film industry. As we have seen, film policy has a distinctive, long history, in line with two persistent governing assumptions: first, an emphasis on promoting national identity through cultural expression and, second, a need to keep inventing new forms of economic intervention in order to keep the film industry alive (Magor and Schlesinger 2009). Immediately after the May 1997 election, film became a special case of a wider creative industries policy (Schlesinger 2009).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Rise and Fall of the UK Film Council , pp. 35 - 52Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2015