Spend it like Beckham

It has been two days since the announcement that the UK Film Council would be abolished as part of cuts implemented by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, and many have been quick to slam the decision, not least the council’s chairman Tim Bevan, who almost instantly slammed it as ‘a bad decision’. The quango, formed in 2000 by New Labour, aimed to make it easier for British filmmakers to obtain funding for their films, with the idea of providing one central body to pitch to rather than relying on funds from several smaller sources. A most excellent idea, as Bill and Ted would have it, and a quick look at some of the results of funding from the UK Film Council would suggest success: Kevin McDonald’s Last King of Scotland earned an Academy Award for lead actor Forrest Whittaker, and Streetdance 3D was a huge financial success earlier this year.

However, not everyone has spoken out in support of the organisation. Many have criticised the level of bureaucracy involved in it’s structure, and with 75 staff on the books and upper management salaries north of £100,000 it was always going to attract attention in these more lenient times. Similar organisations that offer support to new film, including BBC Films and Film4, have been providing their services far more efficiently.

As Chris Atkins writes in today’s The Times, there have been several baffling decisions made over the past ten years on money granted. The Rolling Stones documentary Shine a Light was granted over £154,000 for marketing, despite the band being worth over £100 million. Lest we forget, the council also provided funding for Sex Lives of the Potato Men, a movie so deeply repellent as to work well as an anti-perspirant should a can of Lynx not prove handy.

A drive to increase the number of digital screens in UK cinemas also proved a costly failure, as many cinema chains used the subsidiaries gained to put digital projectors in their biggest screens and promptly fail to show any independent cinema on them. Next time you complain about the proliferance of 3D cinema, just remember that your tax money has gone some way to fuelling the fire.

Still, as large, unwieldy and expensive as the UK Film Council was, it is not yet sure what, if anything, will replace it. Everyone seems to agree that the idea behind the council was sound, but the execution was flawed. There is talk of the British Film Council taking on some responsibility, but it would require expansion and a move away from their core priority of preserving British cinema for future generations. It seems that in their hurry to announce another high-profile cut the government have forgotten the consequences of their actions: a sudden lack of funds going to the UK film industry, a move by production companies to other countries and a loss of employment for the hard-working people who, as Gavin (off of him and Stacey) keeps reminding me every time I go to the cinema, are the people most directly affected by cinema profits. It’s a similar situation to the recent u-turn on tax incentives for the video games industry, a key pre-election manifesto item that was rescinded by Ed Vaizey last week.

Britain is currently responsible for some of the finest cinema in the world (just this evening I have fallen a bit in love with Carey Mulligan in An Education) with our actors and filmmakers involved in successes as diverse as Kick Ass, Inception and The Killer Inside Me this year alone. It would be a travesty to fail a generation of talent currently growing up with the desire to make tomorrow’s cinema because of a lack of funding available to them.