Scotsman Bulletin Tuesday 28 January

The Scotsman

8 months ago

Transcript

00:00Hello, welcome to the Scotsman's daily video bulletin for this Tuesday. My name is Dale

00:11Miller. I'm deputy editor of the Scotsman and I'm joined by our arts and culture correspondent,

00:16Brian Ferguson. Brian, we're going to get to talking about a couple of stories that you've

00:21got today up at Scotsman.com. But just firstly, front page of today's Scotsman. And we led on

00:29the SNP being accused of hypocrisy as their wage bill increases by £42 million. So this is

00:36effectively Scottish government workers' confirmation that the wage bill rose £42

00:43million over a period from 2022 to 2024. So a significant rise and approaching 1400 workers

00:56in the top pay bracket. Now, Shona Robison was saying that they have effectively reduced

01:04contract work and they've reduced the overall number of staff employed by the Scottish

01:10government. But this figure does not take into account wage inflation as well. So naturally,

01:16there has been criticism at a time where savings have been found in the budget and councils have

01:22been warned not to raise council tax by too much, that the wage bill that the government does

01:27continue to rise. Note that this is up until the latter half of 2024, which is just a couple of

01:33months away, a couple of months ago, sorry. Brian, there's a couple of good stories from yourself as

01:40well there at Scotsman.com to read. The first is a fringe venue that's joining the list, shall we

01:50say, for August. Can you tell us a bit about it? Yeah, believe it or not, this is a very busy year

01:55and behind the scenes in the fringe world, a lot of the big venue operators are nailing down the

02:01venues and also you can now register, you know, registrations are very much open for shows at the

02:09fringe, which isn't really that far away in the great scheme of things. But I think the first

02:14shows will be going on sale within the next few weeks. So a lot of the venue operators are keen

02:19to get the word out of what they're up to this year. Guilded Balloon have had a bit of a difficult

02:24period. They were without their biggest venue at Teviot Row House last year. There was a big

02:30refurbishment underway just after the festival the previous year. It was meant to be finished

02:35for the summer, but they heard quite late in the autumn that that wasn't going to be available

02:41again. The work was running a bit late. You know, it's a very, very old building, I think,

02:47from the 19th century. So, you know, there's a big multi-million pound redevelopment happening

02:52of that building. So it's not going to be available this year, but they have just managed

02:56to pin down a deal with the university, I think, has played a big part in to use Appleton Tower,

03:04which a lot of people will know. It was a very controversial building when it was built in the

03:091960s as part of the kind of large scale redevelopment of the kind of George Square area,

03:14a lot of really old Georgian buildings were knocked down in that period. So it has been,

03:22certainly, even in modern times, you know, a lot of people see it as one of the kind of

03:26ISO buildings of Edinburgh. But as ever, in August, people are looking for spaces to try

03:33and transform into venues. So it's definitely going to be one of the biggest venues in town.

03:39Guilded Balloon are going to be running seven different spaces in there. And I've been in a

03:44fair bit. The Fringe Society used it as a kind of temporary home for quite a number of years

03:50and had some of their events there, especially a really big event, Meet the Media at the start of

03:56the Fringe. So they've used it a fair bit. It's got quite a number of

04:00lecture theatres, obviously, that are fairly easy, I think, to adapt into theatre spaces. So

04:07they really had to scale back Guilded Balloon in the summer just past. So

04:12they are very ambitious these days. They're trying to do more and more things. Like a lot

04:17of operators, they're keen to have a year-round presence in the city, but they also, you know,

04:22it's very competitive during August. So, you know, they really do need a certain number of

04:27venue spaces to kind of maintain that level of competition with the other kind of really

04:33three or four big venues. So I think it's good news that they're coming back to a reasonable

04:39and big scale this summer. And we obviously had the news recently about the return of Summer Hall

04:47this summer, again, after a very difficult period for that particular venue. So yeah,

04:52and there'll be a lot more Fringe news to come in the coming weeks and months.

04:58And Brian, I'm just circling around to another story from you,

05:01some fresh donations made to, was it Glasgow School of Art?

05:06Yeah, absolutely. This is a really interesting story. I have to hold my hands up. I've never

05:10heard of the guy who's made a donation. He's actually a novelist, author and art historian

05:15from Devon, who had been up to Glasgow School of Art quite a number of times, going right back to

05:21when he was studying art history at Cambridge University. He obviously studied Charles Rennie

05:28McIntosh, came up to see that his building, his art school building, which obviously was,

05:32you know, within the last decade, obviously has had a couple of really big fires, but he was up

05:39there quite a lot. He really followed the careers of a lot of the young artists that emerged from

05:43there. And that really came out of a period where he moved to the white interior of London

05:49in the mid 80s. And he was really in that area when a lot of artists like Gilbert George and

05:57Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst were emerging in that area, in and around that area and in London

06:02in general, in the kind of late 80s, early 90s. They were actually known as the young

06:07British artists or the YBAs. And he was very much part of that scene. He was living there and he

06:14wrote about a lot of them. And he became very close friends with a lot of these artists. So

06:19what he has donated, there's a mix of things that he obviously has been a big collector of books,

06:24so he's donated a lot of books, but he also has acquired, you know, through a lot of these

06:29personal relationships and friendships, you know, a huge number of, you know, the Glasgow School of

06:36Art is calling it ephemera. It's really a lot of personal material. There's a lot of really limited

06:42edition invitations to events. A lot of the exhibition launches, there could be parties,

06:49there could be private dinners. There's a lot of, you know, a lot of these are signed by the

06:53individual artists, so they're very, very rare. One of the things Glasgow School of Art was saying

06:58was that that kind of stuff has not really been collected by many people over the years.

07:04People obviously collect works of art and people obviously do collect art books, but these kind of

07:10very personal, you know, objects, you know, they don't really, there's not that many of them.

07:17And obviously a lot of them relate to some very well-known artists. There's a couple of

07:23Scottish artists in there that I can see at the moment, Ian Hamilton Finlay and Anja Galacio,

07:29two very well-known Scottish artists that are in there. And again, I think the crucial thing

07:34really is that a lot of the material that's been donated was from a period where these

07:41artists were relatively unknown, and almost certainly no one has really seen any of this

07:47material in a kind of public before. So, you know, there's something like 2,000 different

07:54objects or pieces of material that Jeremy Cooper has donated to Glasgow School of Art, so it'll be

08:00really interesting to see what comes out of that. You know, like all these big donations, it

08:07takes a long time to catalogue them and, you know, I think Glasgow School of Art will be hoping

08:12that there'll be kind of real discoveries in there that they don't know about yet. And, you know,

08:18it's the kind of thing you can imagine that in future years they'll be able to do some exhibitions

08:25to really kind of bring that collection to life. But yeah, it was a really interesting story and

08:29it just makes you wonder what else is out there in private collections around the country.

08:35Yeah, it'd be amazing if we knew even half of what was out there and whether it could be

08:40re-put on display for the public, Brian. You can read both those stories that Brian's

08:46been talking about at scotsman.com, and please follow us for all the very latest

08:51arts and culture news as well as reviews from our full team. You'll be able to find that in

08:58the relevant sections of the site. Thanks to you, Brian, and thanks everyone else for joining us.

Scotsman Bulletin Tuesday 28 January

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