Well, I want to rush in and stick exhortatory labels on the photos such as “Thank capitalism that our poor people are fat, not skinny” or “The welfare state is killing me: it’s paying for my Special Brew” or “I’m playing truant because I don’t want to study Maya Angelou’s boring poetry”. You get the idea, cocking a snook at the easy leftie assumptions of the arts world.
The luvvie world drives me nuts. I’m forever chewing the Axminster in impotent fury at the latest gibbering left-wing inanity - whether the clunking pharma-bashing of The Constant Gardener or the anti-Israeli hooey of My Name is Rachel Corrie. And I’m convinced that there is a Channel 4 docudrama in the pipeline that reveals that we went to war so that the profiteers of Tesco could put Iraq’s souks out of business.
Now, concentrate: try to think of a contemporary piece of art that made a right-wing point? Or a British film, or TV drama, or play? No bells ringing, yet. Nope, there’s no risk of tinnitus. Well, I suppose conservatives might be able to enjoy Thatcher: The Musical (step forward Power Suit Maggie, Military Maggie, Britannia Maggie, Diva Maggie), but it’s just a romp. Roger Scruton, the most erudite conservative in Britain, was able to come up with David Mamet ’s Oleanna (more than a decade old), a trenchant attack on political correctness and feminism in universities. (Note to Mr Mamet’s lawyers: I’m not accusing him of being right-wing.) David Lee, the small-C conservative editor of The Jackdaw and an hilarious critic of Brit Art, could not name one piece of blue agitprop. So why are right-wingers in the arts as rare as Saudi snowballs?
Things might be about to get better. Nicholas Hytner, the director of the National Theatre, recently declared that he wanted to commission “a good, mischievous right-wing play”. (Not from David Hare, obviously.) This provoked a yelp of joy from Julian Fellowes, who won an Oscar for his script for Gosford Park and is one of the few “out” conservatives in drama. “There needs to be a challenge to the self-regarding, ‘we know, don’t we, darling’ arts establishment,” he says. “British drama is flaccid, it constantly examines the same sort of issues - it thinks that it’s cutting edge to attack McCarthyism or apartheid: who’s in favour of either?”
Fellowes believes that British theatre is in a time warp. He left drama school in 1973, and even then it was still 1956, the year of Look Back in Anger and the Royal Court revolution. Overnight John Osborne and Co made the old plays that patronised the working classes as blowsy chambermaids, jolly jack tars and chirpy Cockneys look geriatric. Now it was the turn of the bourgeoisie and its values to be patronised.
Fifty years on, “the adolescent moral polemic”, as Fellowes puts it, against the middle-classes drones on. “There is an assumption that theatre should be all about championing the underdog. No, that’s the job of social services.” Rather, good theatre should be about conflict - it can be between desire and duty, man and woman, it can be hidden in our bosom, but it doesn’t have to be class war, or Israel v Palestine, or black v white.
Ian Curteis, one of the happy few of right-wing dramatists, agrees that there is something out of kilter. “There was always Left and Right in the theatre world until the 1960s - plays that celebrated the values of the nation’s culture and plays that questioned, probed and doubted those values.” His neat theory pits George Bernard Shaw (in the red corner) against James Barrie and (Arthur Wing) Pinero in the blue; John Webster against Shakespeare; Sophocles against Aeschylus. Now, however, the consensus is “that plays that question are the only serious art”.
It took 15 years for Curteis to see his The Falklands Play (most definitely “celebratory” of Britain and Margaret Thatcher’s resolution) broadcast on the BBC because it was so “politically sensitive” (ie, they disagreed with Curteis’s politics). Curteis is certain that the label right-wing is a huge drawback and once you have it “no villainy is too great to lay at your door”.
But let’s not get too Tebbitish; right-wing voices aren’t being consciously censored. Rather, the arts establishment regards conservatives as if they were suffering from a brain disorder; it’s a bit like in Woody Allen’s Everyone Says I Love You when the hyper-liberal Upper West Side couple (played by Alan Alda and Goldie Hawn) are perplexed about how their son could have turned into a staunch Republican until their doctor reveals that a fluke medical condition was blocking the supply of oxygen to his brain. The boy was cured and his compulsion to read the National Review ceased.
Peter Briffa, a playwright and blogger (can you guess where he stands from his catchphrase, “Reactionary and proud of it”?) tellingly described how at a read-through of one of his scripts, two of the actresses walked out muttering about sexism and his rebarbative language. They just couldn’t understand where he was coming from. Anyway, the director got cold feet and the play was never performed.
But sometimes funny right-wingery squeaks on to telly. Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister were written by the left-leaning Jonathan Lynn and Anthony Jay, a self-described radical right-winger. If you want an amusing lesson in public choice theory - the notion that bureaucrats exist to further their own interests - then just watch Sir Humphrey in action. And the problem with Whitehall is pretty much the same as with the BBC. “If there is censorship (of free-market views) it is unconscious,” Jay believes. “They don’t realise that there are seriously held different views. They don’t realise that they have a corporatist mindset. It should not be the business of government to patronise the creative arts: the arts should fight its corner at the box office or by finding patrons.”
So if the dead hand of the Arts Council and all the other committees that dole out cash and influence was lifted and the BBC was privatised or trimmed back, would there be an efflorescence of right- wingery? I doubt it. There is something hard-wired into conservatives to make us very suspicious of the arts.
