'Will you come down? There's this class band playing and they're really good." A teenage girl outside the brewery in Dingle in west Kerry, which for the weekend became an impromptu all-ages venue, was on the phone to her friend on Saturday, extolling the virtues of a band she happened across.
Other Voices took over Dingle at the weekend, once again providing a platform for international and local musicians, and exposing young and old around the town to real-life music experiences, from concertina playing to electronic pop, blues, country, post- rock, and everything else in between. This is important, not just for the programme's eventual audience on RTÉ, but for people all around the world watching the live stream online, and also for the teenage girls telling their friends about interesting bands in a brewery on a country road.
Underfunded
The importance of being exposed to as eclectic a selection of music as possible for young people cannot be understated. Yet in the wider culture of arts funding, independent popular music artists remain criminally underfunded, so much so that acts don't even ask for money.
First Music Contact (FMC) and Music From Ireland have done a stellar job in building a support infrastructure for musicians, but compare a young theatre-maker versed in the skill of grant applications and funding schemes, to a young lad in a band who would never imagine to expect that kind of support. It's a strange situation, because popular music is probably our greatest contemporary arts export: U2, Glen Hansard, The Script, Two Door Cinema Club, Kodaline, The Corrs, Thin Lizzy, Rory Gallagher, Van Morrison, Snow Patrol, Westlife, Boyzone, The Cranberries, Damien Rice, Sinéad O'Connor, Enya, Villagers. I'm not sure how many of these acts asked for a few quid from the Arts Council, but I'd imagine the figure is quite low.
Perhaps Other Voices' greatest triumph is managing to last on RTÉ, which takes a trapdoor approach to its arts programming on television. RTÉ's radio coverage of arts is great, with music colouring many daytime programmes, Arena providing some great reporting and The Book Show would stand up on any national radio station anywhere in the world if you ask me. But on television, entertainment takes over, and programmes such as The Works are shunted into late night scheduling lest any viewer accidentally learn anything about culture.
There's a common look of recognition shared between those who make arts programmes. It's a visual cue that lies somewhere between sympathy and pain. Arts programmes are a labour of love. I'm not hypothesising from the sidelines here, because I make one too. Ceol ar an Imeall (Music on the Edge) will broadcast our fifth series on TG4 in January. Over five series we've managed to secure interviews with some of the biggest names in music internationally: The xx, Ellie Goulding, The Strokes, MGMT, Marina & the Diamonds, Bloc Party, Alabama Shakes, Vampire Weekend, Grizzly Bear, St Vincent, the list goes on.
We’ve also recorded live sessions with more than 100 Irish bands, most of whom had never been on television before, thus providing them with the invaluable experience of performing in a television studio for a few hours.
But it’s hard, and each series of 10 half-hour episodes takes months and months to make. Still, TG4 does a much better job in providing airtime for the arts, ironically because their budgets are smaller and therefore briefs wider.
Supporting the arts is one thing, consistently reporting on it is another. RTÉ will point to commercial interests and number crunchers continue to proclaim, "nobody watches arts programmes".
Audience figures
But it's a chicken and egg situation. You won't know how many people will potentially watch when you don't actually give viewers the opportunity. Presumably many TV executives thought that no one would really watch a competitive baking show on BBC, until The Great British Bake Off became a colossal hit, also awakening a new off-air interest in baking. The relegation of "arts" to cheesy reality TV programming commodifies art in a juvenile way and repositions it as something to win as opposed to something to make.
Arts programming isn’t just important for entertainment value, but exposing people to a diverse range of art has massive real-life implications. When a kid picks up a guitar or installs some music-making software on their computer, it opens up a world of expression and creativity so intense that it can change lives. In a country that has one of the richest heritages of arts and culture in the world, it’s bizarre that we don’t see that not just represented on television, but prioritised in the schedules.
