Panto is a vital ingredient in our cultural mix. For many thousands of people, from one year to the next, it’s their only regular experience of live theatre. For quite a few, no doubt, it’s their only experience of any kind of live show. And of course, for most theatres, it’s a crucial opportunity to […]

Press articles regularly feature complaints about the poor coverage of music on television. You can see the point when the BBC even treats its own Choir of the Year competition so meanly, squeezing a pre-recorded and edited version of the final into a 90 minute slot on BBC 4.

When I was in Glasgow last month for a Creative Scotland meeting, I had an hour spare before it started, and took the chance to have a wander, and survey the present state of the ‘Merchant City’.

An ageing arts bureaucrat surveys the scene and wonders where the new generation will come from

Whenever, as now, there’s the prospect of serious cuts in arts funding, there will always be someone who’ll say ‘no matter what happens to the funding, artists won’t stop making art’.

Last Friday to the HISEZ conference at the Centre for Health Sciences, which, incidentally, is one of the many remarkable new buildings which now grace Inverness.

I was travelling for most of last week, and so it was only while surfing the Internet on the train back from Edinburgh that, in the space of an hour, I learned of the deaths of two of my favourite writers, Frank Kermode and Edwin Morgan, both, coincidentally, aged 90.

I worked in Edinburgh for five years before moving to HI~Arts and I always enjoy going back. Too often, though, I tread a short path from station to meeting room and back again, and miss the many cultural delights the city offers.

It’s that time of year, and I’ve been doing my bit again at the Nairn Book and Arts Festival. This year I was off the hook as a judge for the Open Art Competition, so I could enjoy the final outcome just as a member of the public. But of course I couldn’t help making comparisons: would I have ‘passed’ all the works included this year, if I’d been a judge?

Documentaries are the new black. At a time when reporting is dominated by the rolling bulletin and breaking news, we need documentary-makers to take the long view, to get behind the headlines, to tell the stories that can change our view of the world forever. On BBC2 last night, Julien Temple’s film ‘Requiem for Detroit’ achieved just such a paradigm shift.