Springer Ban Y'all

It’s just two weeks now until the wonderous musical extravaganza that is Jerry Springer: The Opera comes to town, amidst ecclesiastical heckling from the Archbishop of Wales and various Christian groups.

So far the Culture Minister in the Assembly Alan Pugh has stayed out of the affair, leaving the Wales Millennium Centre to make their own ‘artistic decision’ to let the show come to town.

But it’s a useful little example to illustrate the problems with the new funding system the Assembly Government will bring in for the arts I wrote about a couple of weeks ago (Arts with a Capital F).

Arts Council Wales currently gets money from the government to allocate to the arts organisations. But the government is setting up a new system that will mean they control the pursestrings to the major arts bodies in Wales.

The new system would mean that it would be incredibly hard to create anything that raises as much controversy as Jerry in Wales, be it through literary agency Academi or the national theatre organisations.

The government could threaten the future of funding for an organisation that tried to do anything risky. Or, in the more likely scenario, the bodies wouldn’t even attempt to stage anything controversial for fear of what it might mean.

It would pretty much guarantee the end of anything Jerry Springer-esque being made in Wales. Instead we can expect plenty of touring around schools and the Valleys in the name of equality to access. It’s a triumph of social engineering over any intrinsic value of art.

In the meantime, the government has been forced to carry out a review of the future of the Arts Council, to try and suss out what’s going on. But it’s worth going to see Jerry in the meantime; if the government gets its way, Wales is unlikely to produce anything similarly challenging out of sheer fear.