Arts Editor Terry Grimley's Birmingham Post years - Part I
played a season, fresh out of drama school, at the Rep. And there was the electrifying 17- year-old in the long-defunct Birmingham Youth Theatre’s production of Welcome Home Jacko who went on to co-star with John Travolta in a Hollywood movie, play Hamlet for the legendary Peter Brook in Paris and become the first black actor to play Henry V at the National Theatre: Adrian Lester.
Apart from the people who passed through, there were the fixtures – people running major companies in the West Midlands.
My time at the Post has spanned four RSC artistic directors (Trevor Nunn, Terry Hands, Adrian Noble and Michael Boyd), six at the Rep (Michael Simpson, Clive Perry, John Adams, Bill Alexander, Jonathan Church and Rachel Kavanaugh) and four CBSO conductors (Louis Fremaux, Simon Rattle, Sakari Oramo and Andris Nelsons). With the exceptions of Simpson and Fremaux, I’ve interviewed them all on numerous occasions.
Of all these, Rattle was undoubtedly the biggest phenomenon. His arrival, aged 25, in 1980 coincided with the disastrous impact on Birmingham of the Thatcher recession, and the realisation that the council had to do some hard thinking about the future direction of the city.
That, ironically, was what opened the door for the arts in the city to become politically important, as opposed to something nice to have or useful for councillors to complain about.
As the CBSO emerged from regional obscurity to become recognised as an international pacesetter, things started to get interesting.
During the decade I reported on the orchestra’s first-ever appearances in Paris and Berlin, New York and Boston – still some of my most cherished professional experiences.
By the end of the decade, work was under way on one of the world’s finest concert halls and Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet was packing its bags to move up from London and become Birmingham Royal Ballet.
These were heady days – the pioneering era of regeneration through culture. It was an exciting time to be an arts journalist in the city, and for a time I found myself being courted by London media looking for someone to explain the Birmingham effect.
But the greatest regret of my years at the Post also belongs to this time. I’ve been kicking myself, off and on, for 20 years for not writing an article arguing that Sadler’s Wells Royal Ballet, which was then facing considerable practical difficulties at its London home, should move to Birmingham.
You’ll just have to take my word for it that I thought about it, and even drafted the article in my head, before I heard the suggestion from anyone else. Sadly I allowed myself to be distracted and the piece never appeared.
My one consolation is that I talked it through with Richard Johnson, then the director of the Birmingham Hippodrome. So maybe it was my idea after all.
In the mid-to-late 1980s I also started writing about architecture and planning. Noticing that no one ever wrote about buildings in Birmingham except under the heading “Property”, I wrote a series of pieces criticising the poor quality of postwar architecture in the city.
This didn’t impress the then president of the Birmingham Architectural Association, who wrote to the editor complaining that I was a “naive and ignorant critic”.
It seemed to me that if what we saw around us in the mid-80s was the result of sophistication and knowledge, we might as well give naivety and ignorance a whirl.
These were times of real opportunity, thanks to local politicians from the pragmatic wing of the Labour Party. The same people who were actively promoting the arts, not only as an economic driver but because they believed their fellow citizens deserved them.
I found myself drawn into the Birmingham Good Design Initiative, which in a busy first two years organised an international conference and a competition for young architects (sadly, none of the winning designs was built).
This exhilarating period culminated in the Highbury Initiative symposium, held in March 1988, which drew up the blueprint which has guided city centre development over the past 20 years, with the downgrading of the inner ring road and the development of distinctive quarters ringing it. I’m particularly proud to have been a participant in this landmark event, as well as reporting on it.
