If, a year after Will Gompertz’s first appearance next January on BBC News as its first arts editor, the nation still stumbles over his name, something will have gone wrong. If this visibly high-browed arts enthusiast with a Professor Brainstorm reverse fringe has not earned at least one Rory Bremner impersonation he will have been on screen too little.
In his modest office at the uncool end of Tate Britain, where he is wrapping up his job as director of media, I ask him if he is prepared for waspish Fleet Street columnists to ask: “What’s this bald bloke on about?”
“I get that every day anyway,” he says with the timing of someone who spent his August in Edinburgh doing stand-up comedy on the Fringe. “I don’t think,” he adds, “you stick your head above the parapet if you don’t expect people to have a go, and that is entirely right and appropriate. But I don’t see this role as about becoming a personality. It is about delivering great arts stories to an interested public. It is not about me; it’s about the stories.”
There have been hits and there have been misses among the BBC specialist editors, those personality journalists whose brief is to go beyond reporting and pass a running but considered commentary, à la Andrew Marr and Nick Robinson, on the unrelenting news cycle. Polly Toynbee was effective at pushing social affairs up the agenda and politically controversial because her beat was in itself regarded by some as Guardian-esque. Jeff Randall, the BBC’s first business editor, did the same for commerce and the Right, reversing the BBC newsroom’s tacit assumption that profit was bad. His successor Robert Peston has won most of the awards going for reporting on the financial meltdown. On the other hand, Mihir Bose, who resigned recently, made little mark as sports news editor — when the Allen Stanford story broke, the cricket impresario’s dubious finances appeared to be news to Bose.
Gompertz, 44, a former holiday camp redcoat who is also editor-in-chief of the website culturecritic.co.uk, which aggregates critics’ reviews, knows he has a fair wind behind him at the BBC. The corporation this year announced that it intended to deepen its commitment to the arts and the new post was created by the Director General, Mark Thompson, who Gompertz personally knows “through Oxford”, where they both live. But the appointment is controversial even within the BBC newsroom, where his lack of reporting experience has been noted.
The arts correspondent Razia Iqbal was said to be deeply disappointed at not getting the job, advertised at a salary of about £150,000. A letter in a recent issue of the BBC’s internal newspaper Ariel expressed astonishment at Gompertz’s appointment when the post of crime correspondent has been axed altogether, implying that priorities had been skewed. The Daily Mail has been on his case, reporting the unease with the headline: “He’s never reported or presented TV and he needs three months’ training.” The Liberal Democrat arts spokesman Don Foster said: “It would be reasonable to expect somebody in a senior position to have experience of television presentation. Appointing somebody with a very limited track record of television journalism should cause concern." What is most likely to go wrong, I suggest to him, is that he will not have the clout to push the arts far enough up the news list for him to become a regular face on the BBC’s News at Ten. “That is a valid point possibly,” Gompertz says, “but there is no doubt in my mind that the arts are a fundamental part of our national life and that they reflect and inform it. I think they are newsworthy and so does the BBC. It has been doing arts stories ever since it was founded.”
I am told that in real life Gompertz is an amusing as well as well-connected gossip. Chaperoned today by a BBC PR, his language is cautious and corporate. But after the positive reception his one-man art history lecture received on the Edinburgh Fringe, he can hardly be accused of lacking flair. Nor does he always say the expected in public. In a recent newspaper column he wrote: “The traditionalists won’t like it, but Strictly Come Dancing is the new gold standard of what makes a very, very successful arts programme on mainstream TV.”
Yet as head of Tate Media, in his articles for Times Online, Time Out and The Guardian and, previously, as the owner of an arts magazine, he has always been a cheerleader for the arts. A reporter’s job is the opposite: to find out where things have gone wrong.
“I think the reporter’s role is to define what is news,” he counters. “I think that as soon as one leaves an institution one walks out and picks up critical distance. You do the job you are asked to do and here, at the Tate, the job is actually crystal clear because it is in the Parliamentary Act. It is to increase public knowledge and appreciation of art. The BBC job is equally specific: to report on art to the nation and explain why it is important. That absolutely requires critical distance, but I have been a writer and a publisher for a long time. I know what critical distance is.”
He is making an uncommon switch, the usual flow of talent being from journalism to PR. Twenty years ago, for example, Michael Cole, the BBC arts correspondent, left to become Mohamed Al Fayed’s spokesman. His best-known successor was Rosie Millard (back-announced from the Oscars by the newsreader Michael Buerk as Rosie Millard in “best supporting dress”). We will soon see if it matters that Gompertz never attended a murder scene or dashed shorthand into a reporter’s notebook. What we cannot doubt is that his contacts book is bulging.
The son of a doctor (the surname is Dutch), he was brought up in Kent. Having “unceremoniously” left school at 16 “for being a pain in the butt”, he worked in an Our Price record store and then as a redcoat at a Warner’s holiday camp in Harwich (where the Eighties TV sitcom Hi-Di-Hi was shot). His middle-class voice and blond fringe (then at the front) made him the target of Brideshead Revisited jokes.
From there he became a stagehand at Sadler’s Wells, alternately working alongside sailors who hauled the ropes that held the backdrops and drinking wine with Frederick Ashton, the choreographer. He left to work as a runner at the Moving Picture Company, where he spotted a gap in the market for a VHS magazine of video shorts and commercials. After selling Shots to the publishing house Emap he founded Purple House, the publisher of Zoo (the arts quarterly rather than the lads’ mag).
Selling Shots was a “pleasant moment”, he admits, but any fortune he made has long since been spent bringing up four children. He lives with them and his wife in a “suburban shack on an arterial road” in North Oxford. He refuses to say whether the move to the BBC from the Tate, which he joined in 2002, means a salary cut or an increase, but points out that no one works in the arts to get rich.
When, just after Edinburgh, he was offered the BBC job, the Tate’s director Nicholas Serota agreed with him that it was not an opportunity to be missed. Tate Modern was, of course, one of the success stories of the Millennium public building spree. Other new galleries have faced financial crises and top-level resignations. Would their problems, I ask, make a nice anniversary package for him at the BBC? He stumbles a little. I am trying to discover, I explain, if he will be prepared to go in for the kill.
“I don’t know what the kill means, but I absolutely will not shy away from proper public interest news stories,” he says. “That will mean stories about things that have not been doing well and we will need to report that thoroughly and fairly.”
When I turn my recorder off, he mockingly wipes his brow. “That was quite a grilling,” he says. But no worse, I feel like saying, than those he will be expected to conduct in his new role as gamekeeper turned poacher. The ultimate test will be if he makes enemies of some old friends.
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