Sky Arts Pavilion – Hay on Sky

Is this the way forward for Lisa Jardine’s manifesto for the humanities?
Sky Arts – the arts section of Murdoch’s infamous Sky TV channel (there is also Sky1, SkyNews, SkySports, SkyMovies and SkyHD) – has been one of the major sponsors of the Hay Festival for a few years. They report about the festival at 7pm daily with one of their main anchorwomen, Mariella Frostrup, also known for her fashion and lifestyle columns in the Guardian. The show is shot around lunch-time every day and to gain access you must pay £ 3 for a ticket, but this is supposedly for a good purpose –Sky’s Global Action Plan. The studio holds around 150 people and it fills quickly, but is not packed. The show is timed for 12:30, but it only gets going around 13:00. Prior to that, the audience is shown a couple of Sky-arts’ ‘own’ commercials, including one on the new 3D technology (for which we have to put on our 3D glasses – I missed the opportunity to pick up mine, so I cannot report about the ‘experience’). Then we are given instructions – primarily that we have to clap when the floor manager puts his hands together and tells us to do so. We must also stop clapping when he says so. In other words, we are the orchestra and he is the conductor. Then Mariella comes in, welcomes us with one of those sunshine smiles, reads from the teleprompter and takes a sit on the sofa to receive her guests. Today her three guests are David Starky, Markus Zusak and Dave Gorman. David Starky has recently published a popular biography of the young Henry VIII and is delighted to tell us that what was so special about Henry was that he was brought up by women and that, in his youth, he was actually quite a charmer and a virtuous prince. His reign was also quite effective, albeit somewhat harsh – especially as far as his wives were concerned. Markus Zusak has written a children’s book entitled The Book Thief, which also hit the bestseller lists for adult fiction. He is an Australian and his parents fled from Nazi Germany. The book is based on their recollections and is narrated by Death. Dave Gorman is a comic writer who has written a travel diary about rural America entitled America Unchained. He is the funniest of the three and has some nice / nasty stories to tell about Mormons.

You get the picture? The Sky Arts media consumer likes it, let us say, ‘light’. The authors featured are ones who write popular commercial historical fiction or travel diaries and are invited if they can keep their comments succinct, lively and funny. Asked what they would recommend for summer holiday reading, they mention other bestsellers, which they have not read, but which they think they should read, since everybody else is talking about them (?!). And for a writer, reading, Henry VIII’s biographer concedes, is not really ‘in’ – after all they write for a living and must read professionally. Reading for pleasure is not really something they do; furthermore, the Australian children’s book writer adds, reading means realizing that everybody else is better. They all laugh heartily, the audience claps, then the scene is interrupted – Cut! – by a mobile telephone ringing. It is not in the audience – we were all asked to turn off our mobiles in order to prevent this very type of interference – it is David Starky who forgot to turn off his mobile. How embarrassing. The floor manager points out to Mariella that the scene has to be filmed again. That won’t work, she exclaims, we won’t ever get it so perfect again! No, you should film from the middle, we will say, ‘wasn’t that a horrible sound?’ and get on with it. The floor manager doesn’t like the solution proposed, but accepts it, since the audience is not very happy about the break either. Some are already glancing nervously around, the next performances are about to start and in the meantime it is getting hot in the Sky tent. The show continues, we share another couple of laughs, then finally it is over and we flock outside …

This is an entirely different literature festival – and show – and I experience perhaps for the first time the real meaning of Habermas’ concept of ‘fragmented public spheres’. Hay-on-Wye thrives on diversity and this also means giving space to literature, authors – and even TV- shows – which are light and more entertainment than intellectual discourse or an exchange of ideas. Instinctively – and professionally – I feel like criticizing what I see, but I hesitate and tell myself that popularization is an inevitable component of democratization in the arts. If the literature festival is to represent public culture, then it can only assume a wide, or inclusive, definition of public and not an elitist one.
That this is the festival’s self-understanding is also demonstrated by next day’s Raymond Williams’ memorial lecture – given by Lisa Jardine of the University of London. Raymond Williams, she states, would have wanted us to embrace the new forms of communication, like the internet or even twitter, and to adopt an inclusive approach to the consumption of the arts and, more specifically, literature. Only this way can the masses be educated. Here, Jardine rejects the use of the term ‘mass’, as Raymond Williams also did, because of its negative connotations. The process of communication is a process of community-building – an idea by Williams taken from his book The Long Revolution. Therefore, if we want to live and create an inclusive and tolerant community aiming at equality, then we must accept different forms of communication.

The terms high vs. low brow or literary vs. commercial fiction are not dualities with which the Hay Festival wants to operate, and there is something noble about this approach, no doubt, but at the same time I am not so sure Raymond Williams would have viewed the type of literary discourse promoted by Hay on Sky as conducive to radical and political thought. This is not to say that entertainment or popular literature is a ‘bad’ thing. But when ‘popular’ spirals downwards into flimsiness and emotion into flat sentimentality and gets stuck there, there is the risk that the exchange of ideas becomes suspended or that it is substituted by sight-seeing, as in tourism. But perhaps the strategy of the Hay Literature Festival with regard to Sky Arts is the equivalent of ‘if you cannot beat them, join them’ in reverse, that is, let them (and their parallel universe) join and we will then beat them by transforming them. A brilliant strategy, if successful, but what if the others win instead?