The House magazine, 8th February 2016

“Ten days ago, the government published a set of figures which revealed the UK’s creative industries as being worth over £84bn a year and growing at almost twice the rate of the rest of the UK economy.

The sector is generating almost £9.6m an hour, and providing 1.8 million jobs in exactly the type of careers ambitious young people yearn for.

In every sense the days when anyone could credibly claim that are our creative industries lie in the margins of the economy are, thankfully, long gone.

The belief that Britain’s future prosperity was inextricably tied to its creativity was developed in the early 1990s by Chris Smith, and energetically put into practice as soon as the Labour Party came to power.

Today it’s one of the few areas of policy that commands support right across the political divide.”

Read Lord Puttnam’s article in full here.

According to the Commercial Broadcasters Association (COBA), there has been ‘a dramatic increase in investment in original content from non PSB broadcasters, who have increased spending on first-run UK programming by 43% since 2008’, making the investment by non PSBs in first run UK content nearly £600m a year. Read COBA’s submission in full here.

Date: 22nd March 2016, 6 – 8 pm

Venue: Professor Stuart Hall (PSH LG02), Goldsmiths, University of London

Confirmed speakers:

Sir Lenny Henry (Actor, Writer and TV Presenter)

Pat Younge (MD of Sugar Films; former BBC Chief Creative Officer)

Bev Skeggs (Professor of Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London)

Dawn Foster (Writer on politics, social affairs and economics for The Guardian, London Review of Books, Independent and Times Literary Supplement)

Dr Rupa Huq (MP for Ealing Central and Acton)

The event is free but registration is necessary. Please register here to attend the event.

‘We need to treat our television system less as a discrete set of services and more as a complex ecology in which individual components have a material impact on each other’. A Future for Public Service Television Inquiry’s project lead, Des Freedman, in Broadcast (published 4th February 2016).

Using the case study of the BBC economic and business news, Gary Merrill (Goldsmiths, University of London) takes a critical look at the impartiality of the BBC journalism. He observes that journalistic practices tend to ‘follow elite opinion an exclude other credible perspectives’, and calls for the need to include broader sources of opinion, beyond confines of Westminster and the City of London. Read Merrill’s submission in full here