Chris Bryant and James Blunt

I am appalled, therefore, at the elitist fantasy you have encouraged especially with your own background. The measure of our arts is their capacity to inform and entertain. It is not about the origin of the participants or indeed about dictating content. Content is created in a free market in response to what the public wants. So, where are the next Albert Finney and Glenda Jackson to come from? Perhaps, rather than playing the class-card and bemoaning the success of James Blunt, you should reflect on your own party’s chaotic education policy and consider the fact that both actors went to grammar schools which may have something to do with their success and with an age that was “more meritocratic”. Indeed, you should have known this fact as you wrote a very reasonable biography about Glenda Jackson- for which thanks and congratulations!

Rather than bang on about educational privilege – something which, incidentally, you have benefitted from- you should look around at the way great teachers have inspired and directly helped students to be the best. In the Arts, you could have cited Richard Burton, a man who acknowledged the help he received, turned again to his guardian and teacher to get him through “Camelot” and who endowed the Oxford Playhouse, the ETC and a studio theatre in the city that gave him an all too brief experience of an excellent University education (Check out the excellent biography by Tom Rubython). I should add that, looking at the dates, we probably shared seminars in Mansfield college.

There are so many issues from your past that should caution you against these statements, sir, whatever things Mr Blunt may write.

I welcome the opportunity to talk further with you about this and the options available to the Arts. I would be very happy to debate this issue on youtube or elsewhere and, to this effect, challenge you directly to a recorded session, even on skype, at your convenience.

I am aware you are not my local MP but you represent my broader business and arts’ interests and I am deeply concerned that, should you take the helm with these views, our theatre, film, TV and cultural lives are threatened.

 

(an irrelevant page of caricatures that I did a few days’ ago. Pickles is in the news today so I may add something later!)

Here is the Blunt letter. It is a bit of a rant, but I like the story about the Russian accent!

Here is the letter sent by Blunt to Bryant:

Dear Chris Bryant MP,

You classist gimp. I happened to go to a boarding school. No one helped me at boarding school to get into the music business. I bought my first guitar with money I saved from holiday jobs (sandwich packing!). I was taught the only four chords I know by a friend. No one at school had ANY knowledge or contacts in the music business, and I was expected to become a soldier or a lawyer or perhaps a stockbroker. So alien was it, that people laughed at the idea of me going into the music business, and certainly no one was of any use.

In the army, again, people thought it was a mad idea. None of them knew anyone in the business either.

And when I left the army, going against everyone’s advice, EVERYONE I met in the British music industry told me there was no way it would work for me because I was too posh. One record company even asked if I could speak in a different accent. (I told them I could try Russian).

Every step of the way, my background has been AGAINST me succeeding in the music business. And when I have managed to break through, I was STILL scoffed at for being too posh for the industry.

And then you come along, looking for votes, telling working class people that posh people like me don’t deserve it, and that we must redress the balance. But it is your populist, envy-based, vote-hunting ideas which make our country crap, far more than me and my shit songs, and my plummy accent.

I got signed in America, where they don’t give a stuff about, or even understand what you mean by me and “my ilk”, you prejudiced wazzock, and I worked my arse off. What you teach is the politics of jealousy. Rather than celebrating success and figuring out how we can all exploit it further as the Americans do, you instead talk about how we can hobble that success and “level the playing field”. Perhaps what you’ve failed to realise is that the only head-start my school gave me in the music business, where the VAST majority of people are NOT from boarding school, is to tell me that I should aim high. Perhaps it protected me from your kind of narrow-minded, self-defeating, lead-us-to-a-dead-end, remove-the-‘G’-from-‘GB’ thinking, which is to look at others’ success and say, “it’s not fair.”

Up yours,

James Cucking Funt

This is Chris Bryant’s reply:

Dear James

Stop being so blooming precious. I’m not knocking your success. I even contributed to it by buying one of your albums. I’m not knocking Eddie Redmayne, either. He was the best Richard II I have ever seen.

If you’d read the whole of my interview, you’d have seen that I make the point that the people who subsidise the arts the most are artists themselves. Of course that includes you. But it is a statement of the blindingly obvious that that is far tougher if you come from a poor family where you have to hand over your holiday earnings to help pay the family bills.

I’m delighted you’ve done well for yourself. But it is really tough forging a career in the arts if you can’t afford the enormous fees for drama school, if you don’t know anybody who can give you a leg up, if your parents can’t subsidise you for a few years whilst you make your name and if you can’t afford to take on an unpaid internship.

You see the thing is I want everyone to take part in the arts. I don’t want any no-go areas for young people from less privileged backgrounds. And I’m convinced that we won’t be Great Britain if we waste great British talent in the arts. You seem to think talent will always out. My fear is that someone like Stanley Baxter, the son of a disabled miner in the Rhondda, who rose to be one of Britain’s greatest film actors (Zulu), would have found it even harder to make it today.

That’s why we need more diversity at every level in the arts – in education, in training, on-screen, on stage and backstage – and we need to break down all the barriers to taking part so that every talent gets a chance.

Yours bluntly

Chris

Stanley Baxter’s career was in part due to his teacher Glynne Morse, though his success was more to the friendship with Emlyn Williams, a friendship also shared by Richard Burton. In the end, the role of good teachers is paramount: it is not the contacts these teachers provide, but the inspiration, encouragement and the basic skills they impart.

The Telegraph kindly printed a letter I sent to them: 21st Jan 2015:

SIR – Mr Bryant asks where the next Albert Finney and Glenda Jackson are to come from.

Perhaps rather than playing the class card and bemoaning the success of a public school-educated pop singer, he should reflect on his own party’s chaotic education policy and consider the fact that both of the actors he refers to came from a more meritocratic age, and both attended grammar schools.

Tim Wilson
Daventry, Northamptonshire