To stand on the meridian line at Greenwich will now cost you 10 quid. The charge came in on Tuesday without — hardly surprisingly — much fanfare. The National Maritime Museum has introduced the fee to help its coffers, although the museum itself remains free.
Charging and selling works are now the elephants in the room for museums and galleries as financial pressure mounts nationally and regionally. The world-famous Potteries Museum, in Stoke-on-Trent, has just introduced a voluntary donation, having been free since it was opened 30 years ago. If this does not work, it will bring in a fixed charge of £2.50 in July. Others will probably follow as local-authority cuts bite; rumours are already rife about galleries in Birmingham, Hertfordshire, Surrey and Cornwall.
One controversial solution offered by the MP for Stoke-on-Trent Central, Labour’s Tristram Hunt, is that museums and galleries in London should start charging, with a proportion siphoned off to the regions. Somehow, I don’t think the Tate or the British Museum would want to bring in charges, let alone hand over some of that revenue to the provinces.
Other local authorities are selling works to raise money. Four years ago, Bury council was red-carded by the museum world for flogging a Lowry for £1.4m. Its crime was to use the gain simply to bolster its coffers. Now Bolton Museum is to sell some minor works by Picasso, Sickert and Millais. It hopes to raise £500,000, and will use the money to help fund developments at the museum. Fair enough. Leicestershire, too, is selling some paintings, including some by Frederick Gore, kept for years in its vaults. The proceeds will go to the county’s arts and heritage services. Again, fair enough.
Chris Patten, ever the canny operator, has had a little help for his interviews for the BBC Trust chairmanship and last Thursday’s Commons culture and media select committee. Tim Gardam, a former senior executive at both the BBC and Channel 4, did some coaching. His current job is principal of St Anne’s College, Oxford. Patten is, of course, chancellor of the university.
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We’ve had sexy celluloid Jane, Hanoi Jane, aerobics Jane and loyal Ted Turner wife Jane. Next we could have Jane Fonda the London stage actress. Having starred last year on Broadway (her first role there for 46 years) in 33 Variations, and currently performing the play, about a dying music professor, in LA, Fonda is in talks about bringing it to Shaftesbury Avenue. She would be following in the footsteps of Hollywood stars such as Madonna, Glenn Close and Nicole Kidman. Yet the one star I’d really love to see in the West End is Meryl Streep. Sadly, she rarely performs on the stage now; only a couple of roles in America over the past decade. Maybe a London producer can grab her while she is in town shooting The Iron Lady, a movie about Mrs T.
There was extensive coverage of World Book Day and World Book Night on the BBC. In the run-up, we saw Sebastian Faulks’s series on literature and other book shows, including Anne Robinson’s. Radio is also playing its part, with Chris Evans’s Radio 2 competition to get children to write stories. But has this avalanche of goodies been guilt-driven? Though the BBC calls 2011 its Year of Books, its two main television channels have shamefully ignored literature for years. The corporation really ought to have a regular books show on BBC1 or 2.
Kevin Spacey, Ian McKellen, Tom Stoppard, Jude Law and Sienna Miller have all been put on a blacklist in Belarus. Their “crime” was to give support to the threatened Belarus Free Theatre in a campaign organised by Index on Censorship. This ban now means that films written by Stoppard, and those starring Spacey, McKellen, Law or Miller, cannot be shown in the country regarded as Europe’s last dictatorship. How pathetic of Minsk.
I’m glad that, at last, Pinewood/Shepperton studios are to invest in low-budget British films. The more sources, the better to fund movies such as Joanna Hogg’s highlywatchable Archipelago.
richard.brooks@sunday-times.co.uk