Tom Harvey, Chief Executive of Northern Film & Media (Newcastle), explores the similarities between the creative economies of the North East of England and Beirut.

British Council Lebanon

'In the UK we have the huge privilege of public money being available to invest in the early development of projects, the most risky bit.'

Newcastle to Beirut: Lessons from the edge

'Sitting in a café looking out onto the Med, having spent the day talking mostly about film, I feel like I could be Cannes.  However, a short distance inland looms the ghostly tower of the Beirut Holiday Inn; the gaping black holes from shell fire at its summit a shocking legacy of the grim ‘hotel wars’ where civil war snipers fought to occupy the highest points in town.

I’m here to deliver some master classes on investment for the creative industries on behalf of the British Council.  The British Council is the UK's organisation for international cultural relations; they have over 100 offices around the world, and they teach English and give other countries the benefit of the lessons we have learnt on all sorts of stuff.  It’s an extraordinary programme and, sadly, could never be invented now.  Perhaps in years to come we will benefit from the Chinese Council or Indian Council giving us the benefit of their transformations.

My experience lies across the public sector in the UK as well as the private sector.  The public sector in the UK has played an important role in creative industry growth and capacity building outside London.  Regionally, my experience lies within the North East of England, a region which I think shares some similarities with Beirut in terms of population, isolation and distance from creative centers. In particular, we share the problem of existing in the shadow of bigger creative hubs - Turkey and Egypt for Beirut; London and Manchester for the North East.

My job here is to explain the process of content generation and exploitation and how to invest for revenue and sector growth. The public sector in the UK is very good at talent spotting, developing early careers and connecting people up, a kind of capacity building role.  It is on the whole pretty bad at fostering commercial investment (which is best done in partnership with the real VCs). In hubs like London there is a robust set of creative industry networks and a real depth of experience and contacts. Further away from London there is less and less sector specialism and a real thinness to the creative industry expertise and networks within both the public and private sectors. 

Things have to be done differently outside London, and things have to be done differently in Beirut.

Day one was meetings mostly financiers and bankers.  There were a lot of blank faces as they bravely tried to grasp content development, production and distribution models and the entry and exit points for investment. When we got into specifics of film they were appalled at the translucent recoupment structures, the range of recipients, most coming out before their finance got a look in, and the fee levels for almost everyone involved except themselves.  For anyone thinking about a money raising trip to Beirut, let me assure you, the banks are definitely not interested in financing film… and I don’t blame them.

British Council Lebanon

'No artist in history would ever have picked up a brush if he or she had to guarantee commercial success at the outset'.

It was enlightening to try to explain the reasons why they should think about investing in film.  The more I tried to convince them that they should, the more they convinced me that they shouldn’t , and the more I believed them.

Film is not a business to get rich in, though like gambling there is always someone who appears to be winning and that keeps everyone else at the table.

In a big city like London there are a thousand deals happening every day and a myriad of people to work with.  Failure is all part of the mix and everyone moves on. In Beirut I found the opposite; a much smaller, more static economy, particularly in the creative sector.  Reputational risk and therefore the cost of failure is much higher.  There are far more reasons not to do a deal than there are to actually do it.  It feels like a permission culture, where somehow everyone is waiting for someone else to tell them what to do.  I have to say this is remarkably similar to a lot of the challenges in the creative sectors outside London.

One of the biggest differences between both is of course the role of public money.  In the UK we have the huge privilege of public money being available to invest in the early development of projects, the most risky bit.  The point when projects are least defined, partners yet to be found and most of the money still missing.  It is the point when most projects are uninvestible.

Here in the UK we have the extraordinary advantage of public agencies like Arts Council, NESTA, Technology Strategy Board, the BFI, Creative England, Access to Finance support, tax credits, VCTs, EIS and a plethora of schemes, services and agencies that mitigate the terrifying risks of being creative in a commercial space.  These public agencies and schemes are part of the reason why we have such a hugely successful creative economy.  The public money helps create an environment where we are more relaxed about dreaming, experimenting, risking, failing and therefore succeeding to a level only exceeded in the US.

In Beirut I witnessed the inertia of a creative economy without public money support, where people's ability to experiment, to test and to risk have been removed.  No artist in history would ever have picked up a brush if he or she had to guarantee commercial success at the outset. Henri Matisse once said that 'things must always be judged by the goal they aim at and by their future'. He understood the creative journey. Public money in the UK has allowed millions of projects and people to begin this journey, to get a tiny bit of seed money to turn a dream into a project and into a reality.  Beirut is full of creative people but there is no money to kick-start projects and businesses and a sparse structure to encourage creativity and careers.

A lack of public money also means a lack of politics.  For the most part politicians in the UK are differentiated by their convictions over whether to spend more or less public money on the public and whether to raise more or less money from the public.  Without these rarified arguments, there appears to be precious little Politics at all. Why vote for anyone when the result has no effect whatsoever on the hardships you face in your everyday life?  As my taxi driver told me, as he squeezed through a gap no wider than a bicycle, going at 70mph through central Beirut, with one hand on the wheel as he passed the taxi chit for me to sign over his shoulder with the other, ‘the people run Beirut; not the government’.

Apparently fast broadband is coming to Beirut on Monday.  This seems to be a constant government promise, i.e. that at some defined point in the very near future a switch will be thrown and fast broadband will surge throughout Lebanon.  Quite a promise for a country with four hours of imposed power cuts every day.  By day two I had learnt to just keep talking when the blackout hit; within thirty seconds the generators have kicked in and the lights came back on, and no one misses a beat.

Commercial creative sectors in the UK are film, television, web, mobile, games and music.  In Beirut they do not include the web, as interactive media content does not really exist as there is no broadband infrastructure to run it on.

British Council Lebanon

'I’m asked at one of my sessions if fast broadband can create better revenue systems for film. Yes, I say, it can... but it doesn’t - yet.'

I’m old enough to remember the days when we thought, hoped and then prayed that BT would drive broadband in the UK.  In the end they didn’t, it was probably too risky.  Yet again it was the public sector around the country that put incentives in place to cover off the risk of building fast broadband infrastructure in the UK. In Beirut, they see fast connectivity as being a prerequisite for creative industry growth.  They are half right. The fact that fast connectivity means in theory that content can be created, distributed and consumed differently does not mean that it will.

In the UK I can catch up with pretty much any TV or radio programme through the various online platforms from the broadcasters.  I can find what’s on now, tomorrow or next week on hundreds of different channels via most search engines and Electronic Programming Guides.  However, when it comes to film, I’m stuffed. There is no single source of what films are on the various small and big screens I have access to, most films I want to see are only on at places called ‘cinemas’, which are clearly a London invention as most ‘cinemas’ outside London, except the publicly funded ones, are strange affairs where the film you want always seems to be on in a twelve seater with a screen smaller than my TV.  At the last film I saw at the Gate in Newcastle we had to turn the house lights on ourselves at the end.  Yes, a decent cinema is the best place to see a film, but Concord was the best way to fly as well.  Cinemas are not the most convenient place to watch a film outside London; day on date digital download is the best distribution model for audiences.  Long windows and drawn out release schedules across different platforms at different times for gradually reducing cost are the best way of releasing a film for the studios.

To add to the disconnect in this country, there are a lot of pretty decent films being made with new digital technologies and a sensible cost that should be available to view and make their small budgets back through smart online marketing and distribution at £1 a download, but as that doesn’t exist, they have to compete with studio fare made and marketing at 100 times the budget.

I’m asked at one of my sessions if fast broadband can create better revenue systems for film.  Yes, I say, it can... but it doesn’t - yet. My advice to the content creators in Beirut is to forget about fast connectivity and concentrate on digital production technology to produce content for less.

Beirut is an extraordinary experience.  For someone who has never lived through war in its own soil its enlightening to talk to people who have dodged sniper fire on their way to school. Though the wars are over, the war makers are in power - as Churchill said, ‘better jaw jaw than war war’.

I realize how much we have taken for granted the public money that has been available to the creative industries, and how little we seem to have learnt from the many years of investing it.  And how we have failed to use it to transform things, and how often it's been used merely to perpetuate.

But how magical it is to have it at all.'

Tom Harvey’s the Chief Executive of Nothern Film & Media in Newcastle. His presentation ‘Investing in Creative Industries – Lessons from the Edge – Newcastle to Beirut’ is available at here.