Access to culture

Access to culture

The Oldham Coliseum theatre closed on March 31 and the radio broadcast an interview which Chris Eccleston gave, after attending the farewell ceremony. A report said : "Eccleston said, as an aspiring actor, he secured a grant to attend a drama school with no academic qualifications which is now necessary “so there’s no more of actors like me coming through”, he said.
The former Doctor Who star claimed it would be “impossible” for somebody from his background to become an actor today.
He said: “The pathway into the arts is not there for them in the way that it was for me… now you’ve got to go to public school, you’ve got to be Oxbridge otherwise you can’t act.
“It’s a lot harder for people of my background to get in.
“It’s got worse, not better.”
“If you want to be an actor, you’re going to have to put up with the unemployment, you’re going have to put up with the rejection, and that’s going to be double if you’re from a working class background, ethnic minority.
“It’s still an elitist organisation, television, theatre, is incredibly elitist, and getting more so, which is why it’s the North West that is losing its theatres.”

I went to the RADA site and looked up their analysis of the social status, based on income, of their students:

The data dashboard shows a mixed position for RADA in relation to the Index of Multiple Deprivation. Over a five-year period, RADA’s intake of those in the two quintiles of highest deprivation has been between 62% of the student population and 25% of the student population. The trend over three years suggests that we are taking fewer students from more deprived quintiles (1 and 2).

This is a text very hard to deliver emotively and Eccleston evidently would not take it on. However, it does not support what he said. The Coliseum has lost arts council (ACE) funding but they are going to build a new theatre in Oldham to replace it. “ACE is investing £1.85 million in the borough and Oldham Council recently announced plans for a new theatre, reportedly costing £24 million, which is scheduled to open in 2026.” An Oldham Council representative said that the building had come to the end of its life. The sense of disaster is not founded on fact. I understand that Eccleston was saying he got into drama school without A-levels because he passed an audition, but (he thinks) children from housing estates never get A-levels and so (in his reasoning) they can never go to drama school.
he wrapped things up in a histrionic way. The interest for me is that social mobility is the most interesting topic and that it is attractive to make the social mobility actually happening disappear by making your language more emotive and less numerical. I just wonder if Eccleston’s mind has better data than his interviews or whether his thinking is as simplistic. If the state school system is not delivering social mobility, then our society is in a terrible state and we should march out and start again. But in reality the State schools have improved massively since inspection started and most students at our universities studied at State schools. The situation is more that the most radical voices are suppressing the evidence for the success of teachers, and (as is so often pointed out) of pupils and of parents supporting the pupils, for emotive effect. I find it unkind to erase the achievements of 100,000 teachers at comprehensives and allege that they are not delivering anything. This seems to be untrue as well as malicious.
I am not optimistic about equality of wealth. But a large part of that is perceiving that inflation in rents and in house prices is taking away the disposable income of young people who have done very well in the school system and got highly demanding jobs as the outcome of that. I think schools are delivering upward mobility, universities are delivering it, but there are other levels of the economic system which are multiplying the wealth of the wealthy and distracting the wages of the salariate. Generated wealth is going far less to salaried workers, far more to shareholders and lenders, than when I was growing up. The rules have been painstakingly redesigned to produce less fairness. I am NOT happy at someone taking the sector of public endeavour which is delivering more equality and opportunity and writing its success off to make a rhetorical point.
Equality of wealth is not increasing. Part of that is the growth in value of houses, which is so huge and so unequally shared that it outweighs anything else. Also you have de-industrialisation and deskilling. Many households are going downhill, people moving into badly paid jobs. But State education is also delivering greater equality, individuals (future households) are moving uphill and getting good jobs through education.
I find it doubtful that all the successful actors who have trained in the past ten years went to public schools. Probably there has been a shift since the advent of “austerity” and since the financial crisis of 2007-8, but it is a matter of a percentage shift, not a complete “wipe out and monopoly”.
This issue is important for poetry because it is something poets think about a lot. I am unwilling to write about sociology in poetry because the economic rewards are too slight and success does not mean economic prosperity, as it would do for a star actor. The money aspect is not very interesting because there is too little result to talk about. Clearly people who write poetry have normally had higher education, so access to that is critical to poetry, but I don’t see a collapse of that upward current in the way that Eccleston describes. A little studied subject is what aspirant poets (or actors) do while learning their craft. Surely it is beneficial for a poet to have a break between working hard at university and working hard at a full-time job... a period of practising writing without too many distractions. You need some kind of income… maybe State benefits, maybe something even more nebulous. Academic study doesn't teach you how to write poems. It is credible that a more pressurised economy removes the unmonitored free areas where someone with no money can find a space to sleep and maybe a part-time job that provides the bare essentials. Areas of low pressure are benign for people working hard at poetry. They are fragile.