Scotsman Bulletin Tuesday 28 January
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00:00Hello, welcome to the Scotsman's daily video bulletin for this Tuesday. My name is Dale
00:11Miller. I'm deputy editor of the Scotsman and I'm joined by our arts and culture correspondent,
00:16Brian Ferguson. Brian, we're going to get to talking about a couple of stories that you've
00:21got today up at Scotsman.com. But just firstly, front page of today's Scotsman. And we led on
00:29the SNP being accused of hypocrisy as their wage bill increases by £42 million. So this is
00:36effectively Scottish government workers' confirmation that the wage bill rose £42
00:43million over a period from 2022 to 2024. So a significant rise and approaching 1400 workers
00:56in the top pay bracket. Now, Shona Robison was saying that they have effectively reduced
01:04contract work and they've reduced the overall number of staff employed by the Scottish
01:10government. But this figure does not take into account wage inflation as well. So naturally,
01:16there has been criticism at a time where savings have been found in the budget and councils have
01:22been warned not to raise council tax by too much, that the wage bill that the government does
01:27continue to rise. Note that this is up until the latter half of 2024, which is just a couple of
01:33months away, a couple of months ago, sorry. Brian, there's a couple of good stories from yourself as
01:40well there at Scotsman.com to read. The first is a fringe venue that's joining the list, shall we
01:50say, for August. Can you tell us a bit about it? Yeah, believe it or not, this is a very busy year
01:55and behind the scenes in the fringe world, a lot of the big venue operators are nailing down the
02:01venues and also you can now register, you know, registrations are very much open for shows at the
02:09fringe, which isn't really that far away in the great scheme of things. But I think the first
02:14shows will be going on sale within the next few weeks. So a lot of the venue operators are keen
02:19to get the word out of what they're up to this year. Guilded Balloon have had a bit of a difficult
02:24period. They were without their biggest venue at Teviot Row House last year. There was a big
02:30refurbishment underway just after the festival the previous year. It was meant to be finished
02:35for the summer, but they heard quite late in the autumn that that wasn't going to be available
02:41again. The work was running a bit late. You know, it's a very, very old building, I think,
02:47from the 19th century. So, you know, there's a big multi-million pound redevelopment happening
02:52of that building. So it's not going to be available this year, but they have just managed
02:56to pin down a deal with the university, I think, has played a big part in to use Appleton Tower,
03:04which a lot of people will know. It was a very controversial building when it was built in the
03:091960s as part of the kind of large scale redevelopment of the kind of George Square area,
03:14a lot of really old Georgian buildings were knocked down in that period. So it has been,
03:22certainly, even in modern times, you know, a lot of people see it as one of the kind of
03:26ISO buildings of Edinburgh. But as ever, in August, people are looking for spaces to try
03:33and transform into venues. So it's definitely going to be one of the biggest venues in town.
03:39Guilded Balloon are going to be running seven different spaces in there. And I've been in a
03:44fair bit. The Fringe Society used it as a kind of temporary home for quite a number of years
03:50and had some of their events there, especially a really big event, Meet the Media at the start of
03:56the Fringe. So they've used it a fair bit. It's got quite a number of
04:00lecture theatres, obviously, that are fairly easy, I think, to adapt into theatre spaces. So
04:07they really had to scale back Guilded Balloon in the summer just past. So
04:12they are very ambitious these days. They're trying to do more and more things. Like a lot
04:17of operators, they're keen to have a year-round presence in the city, but they also, you know,
04:22it's very competitive during August. So, you know, they really do need a certain number of
04:27venue spaces to kind of maintain that level of competition with the other kind of really
04:33three or four big venues. So I think it's good news that they're coming back to a reasonable
04:39and big scale this summer. And we obviously had the news recently about the return of Summer Hall
04:47this summer, again, after a very difficult period for that particular venue. So yeah,
04:52and there'll be a lot more Fringe news to come in the coming weeks and months.
04:58And Brian, I'm just circling around to another story from you,
05:01some fresh donations made to, was it Glasgow School of Art?
05:06Yeah, absolutely. This is a really interesting story. I have to hold my hands up. I've never
05:10heard of the guy who's made a donation. He's actually a novelist, author and art historian
05:15from Devon, who had been up to Glasgow School of Art quite a number of times, going right back to
05:21when he was studying art history at Cambridge University. He obviously studied Charles Rennie
05:28McIntosh, came up to see that his building, his art school building, which obviously was,
05:32you know, within the last decade, obviously has had a couple of really big fires, but he was up
05:39there quite a lot. He really followed the careers of a lot of the young artists that emerged from
05:43there. And that really came out of a period where he moved to the white interior of London
05:49in the mid 80s. And he was really in that area when a lot of artists like Gilbert George and
05:57Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst were emerging in that area, in and around that area and in London
06:02in general, in the kind of late 80s, early 90s. They were actually known as the young
06:07British artists or the YBAs. And he was very much part of that scene. He was living there and he
06:14wrote about a lot of them. And he became very close friends with a lot of these artists. So
06:19what he has donated, there's a mix of things that he obviously has been a big collector of books,
06:24so he's donated a lot of books, but he also has acquired, you know, through a lot of these
06:29personal relationships and friendships, you know, a huge number of, you know, the Glasgow School of
06:36Art is calling it ephemera. It's really a lot of personal material. There's a lot of really limited
06:42edition invitations to events. A lot of the exhibition launches, there could be parties,
06:49there could be private dinners. There's a lot of, you know, a lot of these are signed by the
06:53individual artists, so they're very, very rare. One of the things Glasgow School of Art was saying
06:58was that that kind of stuff has not really been collected by many people over the years.
07:04People obviously collect works of art and people obviously do collect art books, but these kind of
07:10very personal, you know, objects, you know, they don't really, there's not that many of them.
07:17And obviously a lot of them relate to some very well-known artists. There's a couple of
07:23Scottish artists in there that I can see at the moment, Ian Hamilton Finlay and Anja Galacio,
07:29two very well-known Scottish artists that are in there. And again, I think the crucial thing
07:34really is that a lot of the material that's been donated was from a period where these
07:41artists were relatively unknown, and almost certainly no one has really seen any of this
07:47material in a kind of public before. So, you know, there's something like 2,000 different
07:54objects or pieces of material that Jeremy Cooper has donated to Glasgow School of Art, so it'll be
08:00really interesting to see what comes out of that. You know, like all these big donations, it
08:07takes a long time to catalogue them and, you know, I think Glasgow School of Art will be hoping
08:12that there'll be kind of real discoveries in there that they don't know about yet. And, you know,
08:18it's the kind of thing you can imagine that in future years they'll be able to do some exhibitions
08:25to really kind of bring that collection to life. But yeah, it was a really interesting story and
08:29it just makes you wonder what else is out there in private collections around the country.
08:35Yeah, it'd be amazing if we knew even half of what was out there and whether it could be
08:40re-put on display for the public, Brian. You can read both those stories that Brian's
08:46been talking about at scotsman.com, and please follow us for all the very latest
08:51arts and culture news as well as reviews from our full team. You'll be able to find that in
08:58the relevant sections of the site. Thanks to you, Brian, and thanks everyone else for joining us.