So, thank you, Greg Hilty, for joining us. The date today is 22nd January 2024. We’re here at Hammersmith, Riverside Studios in Hammersmith, London. We’re just going to run through a few questions looking back on your recollections of working at Riverside Studios. So, if that’s ok with you we’ll make a start on that, and hear what you have to say, that would be great.
Absolutely fine.
So, I think as for the first question I would like to know more about is if you could give an introduction to yourself, and some sort of indication of how you first became involved with Riverside Studios?
Well, I knew about it, because I went to school across the river at St. Paul’s School, and I had friends who in the earlier days of Riverside sort of came and volunteered in the theatre: Simon Curtis, actually, someone who was very close to Peter Gill in the early days when Peter was getting things going, and yeah, he was a volunteer.
I went to university, studied History and then History of Art and was looking for work in the art world. I studied 19th Century French painting as my specialism but decided, rashly, that I should work in the contemporary art field, just really with no knowledge. I just thought that was, you know, more interesting. Wrote a couple of hundred letters to people and one of the only replies even that I got, let alone an interview, was from Milena Kalinovska, who was working here.
She was, she’d left Czechoslovakia then, where she was an art historian and a film historian, because she worked as a consultant on an exhibition of Mayakovsky at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford. And that exhibition had come to Riverside, and she had come with it and then she’d been asked, in a kind of informal way, to stay and manage the gallery programme. There was a small space on the, what used to be the front of Riverside, on Crisp Road, that was the gallery. And it had been built a year or so before from old workshop space. There was another workshop space, a big workshop space, behind it but that had been knocked out. There’s kind of documentary photographs of Bruce McLean with a sledgehammer kind of knocking walls down and so it had been made into a very rough and ready but interesting small exhibition space.
And she was looking for help, and I came and we spoke and she asked me to volunteer, which was all that Riverside could do at that time. I got lunch vouchers and, I know, £5 a week or something like that and so I did, and really it was just the two of us. And she was a very charismatic figure, very outspoken; she had sort of nothing, no investment in the British art world, and nothing to lose and everything to gain by just being, you know, herself. And she was, it was also a great opportunity for her to meet people, so she was very much outward looking, and meeting artists, curators and museum people. I was, she was kind of charismatic and outward looking and I could write English, basically, she wasn’t so good at that, well she was, but I could, you know, do press releases and basically between us we did everything in terms of, you know, loan requests, getting the work, supervising the installation of exhibitions, invigilating. So, I did a lot of, you know, invigilating - all day Saturdays and things like that. There was a small team of local volunteers. Lizzie Grant – I don’t know if that name has come up at all – but she was, she lived very close to Riverside, I think she's passed away now, but she lived there and she was basically the kind of invigilator for the space. And so she was there and you know, we were a very small and sort of quirky team. A few weeks really, I think the first show that I was involved in was an exhibition of the Judson Dance Theater. And so, at that time, the gallery didn’t really have a programme, it was just a space that was programmed mainly for things relating to the performance space. So, there were, you know, photographic exhibitions related to theatre or dance, so the Judson Dance Theater was an exhibition that was on. And Milena’s aim was to make it a visual arts space and to bring things that were, kind of had their own credibility. And she reported to David Gothard who was the Artistic Director at the time – Peter Gill had left by that point – and, you know, he was encouraging of that, but there was always a little bit of a to-and-fro between things that were for the, sort of seen as the core performing arts audience and then this more specific visual arts audience. Anyway, that’s, I guess, how I came to be here, yes.
Thank you, I was wondering whether you could perhaps talk about your memories of actually walking to Riverside Studios. What was the atmosphere like? What was the, just think back to how the place almost smelled, what the sort of sounds were that you encountered as you walked to and around Riverside Studios during that period?
That’s a good question because it did have a very definite atmosphere, you know, you walked through Hammersmith which was a very varied community, socially and, I guess it felt like, it’s odd being on the river, it’s sort of on the edge of Hammersmith but it was also very definitely a meeting place for people from Kings Road, from Shepherd’s Bush, from Fulham, from the Richmond area which was where I lived at that time and then from the rest of London. Hammersmith is pretty fortunate as being easy to get to and people, even though it’s out of the centre of where most of the art and performing world was, people came because of what was on offer. And the foyer was a very buzzy place, I mean it was really active, there was a restaurant, you know, it was pretty basic, like baked potatoes, there was a bar.
There was a foyer exhibition space that was part of our remit, so we programmed that and then the exhibition space. But, you know, it was a place that young people would come in, young performing people so, pretty soon, I think maybe at the same time or very soon after I started volunteering, Michael Clark was here as a maybe 20 year old choreographer, he just was in or had just left the Royal Ballet, and was just setting up his own company, very much sort of mentored by David Gothard, and so there was him and his group around. Hanif Kureishi was here quite often. Peter Gill kept coming in and it was sort of funny because he and David hated each other by that point so, I am sure Peter would agree, and so he would sit there having lunch and David would sort of, you know, scuttle by and they wouldn’t speak to each other, but they were both really important to the character of Riverside. There was Willie, the dustman, who I mention because he was an absolutely key figure. He was from Glasgow and was, he worked for Hammersmith & Fulham as a dustman and, you know, you would see him wandering around, but he would come in. He was very friendly with Peter as well, and he had discovered Riverside and – this is him saying – he had sort of said that he was a ‘savage’, I think that was kind of the word he used. He came from a very kind of poor and uncultured environment, and he came into Riverside. And, at a time when there was a lot going on, he sort of, you know, saw everything, he was absolutely passionate about everything and then he would go to other theatre and he would read and, he would, he was very, he would hold forth, you know he was very much, a sort of presence there.
And you know, it was a place, that you might come in and Samuel Beckett would be having lunch and talking about his production, lots of people from Eastern Europe, Europe more generally and that was quite unusual at that time. I mean, I think we look now, and London is a very kind of global, international, cultural city and it wasn’t then. It was very much not, it was very parochial. You know, places like the Royal Court were innovative and dynamic and had some, some international but it was mainly focused on home-grown new writing. Where, and so Riverside would invite, this was, I think, David’s ..., whereas Peter Gill established Riverside as a place for his theatre, his own productions, David’s background was in, was more international and so he would bring, Trisha Brown – a choreographer from America - or (Andrei) Tarkovsky came to give talks here. Kantor, Tadeusz Kantor performed the Dead Class a few times, Dario Fo came, and so yeah, all of that was happening, it was, so it was a very mixed environment.
And I guess the sort of epitome of it was, a few, not that long after I started as an intern, Riverside went into liquidation, so everybody became a volunteer. And then the generator broke, so there was no money, no light, no heating and everybody came to work. It was kind of extraordinary, they still came, there was a sort of, big Save Riverside campaign. ‘Art is not a Luxury’ was the great sort of stamp that went out and so there was this whole kind of tussle between the Arts Council, Hammersmith & Fulham Council, the GLC, as it was at that time, the Greater London Authority which was a bit different, and people trying to find funding.
And in the meantime, that happened early on in a run of the Cirque Imaginaire with Victoria Chaplin and, what’s his name..., Jean-Baptiste Thiérée and their family, and it was this quirky sort of avant garde circus. And they had parakeets and, you know, I don’t know, goats and, so it was strange, and they would, they would be in the foyer, sort of chatting or rehearsing. The other thing that was there was Margaret Harrison, Percy Harrison, she was half of a theatre design company called Motley which was the same generation as John Gielgud. And so they, through the 40s I think, and then onwards, you know, were very key parts of British theatre and she had a theatre design course and there were maybe six students who worked in the upstairs space in the offices and that was really interesting, so they were always there and they would kind of gather and so there was a sense of very varied creativity. Yes, so that gives you an indication. And it smelled like burnt generator, if you’re asking what it smelled like. It smelled literally like there had been a fire and baked potatoes, I think that’s what it smelled like.
So we’re in the new Riverside Studios, which is a new set of spaces. In your view how does the current layout and the set of spaces we’re working within, how does that compare to your memories of the old Riverside Studios?
Well, it’s sort of, you know, neater and bigger and more generous, and more, you know, higher quality materials. It was all very rough, the floor was beer-soaked, and the carpet tiles sort of, needed replacing and nobody had time for that. I don’t fully, I haven’t been around and seen things, but I don’t kind of, get the geography of the place. I guess because I worked here for 6 years, it’s not surprising that I did then, but I think there was, well there was always a strangeness that you would, it was, the entrance was off Crisp Road. So, you’d go down this, you’d go down Crisp Road and then you’d turn down an alleyway. And one of the debates was always shouldn’t it be, shouldn’t the opening be onto Crisp Road which would have been, meant knocking down the gallery or opening through the gallery and so there was a bit of a tussle about that, and one of the arguments was, well that sort of makes sense but Crisp Road itself isn’t a massive thoroughfare so, really if anybody’s coming here, they’re going to find the entrance, basically. But, once you were in, there was that foyer, there was Studio 1, Studio 2, the gallery. And then, after about four years, when John Baraldi came, he built the cinema and it was very clear really, that, that was, that was it. You couldn’t get to the river which was a great shame and always a great kind of sense of loss and you could get, there were dressing rooms there, and staff would kind of go with a beer or something but there was no public access and there was no, you know, walkway connecting the two sides, either side of the bridge. So, that was, it’s much clearer and more accessible now I guess, and maybe a little ..., no, I mean it’s unfair to say, just it, it had its own character at that time but now, the cinema seems very important and the documentation, like at that time there was no, there weren’t any posters up of previous productions, it was very much like a raw more experimental space. And so, just different.
[15.02] What would you say Riverside has offered you, that you might not have been offered elsewhere?
Well, it was my first job, and I wasn't offered anything. So, it offered me everything in the sense of a, you know, initial entry into working in the arts world. It was a good introduction. I guess it's been interesting that it's my career, whether it's, whether I kind of gravitated here, because of that, or whether my time here influenced me. But everywhere I've worked, I've had multidisciplinary context so and I, you know, it was just fascinating to be here as a young - I was 23 when I started - and, you know, was working on the visual arts, which is what I was interested in. But I wasn't still a specialist in it, so I was kind of learning that but alongside these theatrical or dance performances that were always connected in some way. So, Kantor was theatre, but he was very much part of a sort of visual arts community in Poland. So, I guess I always had a wider angle on the visual arts and culture, which stayed with me. I then moved to the Hayward Gallery, but I was, so I was working on exhibitions, but instinctively, or you know, my kind of aim was to work with, we brought dance performers into the gallery. I initiated exhibitions of sound art and fashion, as a fashion show. So, I’ve always had - and film - so I've always had a wider context. It also did introduce me in a very kind of quick way to the visual arts.
We, Milena and I, were working with, she had very good, she met very early in her time here, a few key people. Michael Craig Martin, who was then teaching at Goldsmiths and he was, that was before, but during that time, he taught the sort of Damien Hirst generation, so he was very much a kind of key figure. Michael Compton, who was a contemporary curator at the Tate, Milena got very close to and so through those two people particularly, and others, some very good people showed at Riverside. Sort of unusually, Anthony Gormley had his, one of his first exhibitions here. Richard Deacon, Richard Wentworth, Julian Opie, had just finished being a student of Michael's and showed in a group exhibition and I guess because of Milena’s charisma, and because Riverside allowed things to happen that other people didn't, people were very generous, you know, like curators would do shows without a fee, artists would lend work. There was no, I mean, there wasn't much, kind of organisation around making exhibitions in those days anyway, but it was a, it felt like a place of energy.
And so I think it was the second year, I can't remember which date it was, 1984 I think [It was 1985], either the first or the second year that the Turner Prize happened. Rivers... Millenia was nominated for it, which is kind of extraordinary. And, it was, you know, for her programme at Riverside, alongside, I think Howard Hodgkin, was the artist who won at that time, but that was pretty remarkable. The next year, Declan McGonagal from Derry was nominated. And then after that, they stopped having anybody but artists, it was just artists, but so in the very, so you know, it came to, public attention and prominence very quickly and it just attracted good people.
I came soon after Erica Bolton and Jane Quinn left: they were quite young press officers. They were in the press team, and they left to set up Bolton & Quinn, which is one of the best PR agencies in the world now and I worked, you know, closely with Erica on a lot of art projects, so it was definitely a, you know, interesting meeting place, so yeah, offered me quite a lot.
[19.30] I think you may have partly answered the question I was going to ask next, which is just thinking longer term, and just reflecting on the sort of impact Riverside has had on your life and career in the period since. I’d interested to hear your reflections on that.
Yeah. So, I guess I might extend that because the places that I've worked then since Riverside, the Hayward Gallery as part of the South Bank, and then at the Arts Council, and then working independently and even coming to Lisson Gallery, which is, I worked with Nicholas Logsdail, and Lisson artists from my time at Riverside but I kept in touch and it seemed a very, for me to go from the public sector into the commercial, this was a very natural transition in 2008 when that happened.
But over that time, London grew, you know, in culturally, you know, built on, I guess, being part of Europe, the financial growth, huge increase in wealth, people moving here from all over the world. And culturally, it grew, the, I guess, the key time that I was aware of that was when I was at the Arts Council, which was in the early 2000’s. And it was kind of, you know, heady days of quite a lot of government funding. Lottery funding. I was involved with the rebuilding of Sadler's Wells, which moved from its old site to the new building that's there now. We funded LIFT, London International Festival of Theatre, Dance Umbrella which was actually, sorry, I forgot that that was based here as well. Val Bourne had an office here at Riverside. But those years, really, from the time when I was here to say the mid 2000’s were a time of incredible, cultural expansion and international work came to London in a much more significant way. And now, you know, there are limits in terms of budget, but every major theatre has an international programme. The Barbican, it's very active. Sadler’s Wells is kind of remarkable and I guess I see those things, not caused by Riverside, but I think there was some causative connection, it showed what could be done by bringing artists of great renown from places like Poland or Russia or, you know, Italy, but innovative, experimental practitioners in a way that London hadn't really so much seen before. So yeah, I think that's certainly coloured my engagement in that expansion of culture over those years.
[22.22] So during the course of Riverside Studios’ history, there would have been a range of people involved, there has been a range of people involved behind the scenes. Lots of interesting people coming and going over that period, you mentioned your colleague, Milena, for example. I was just wondering whether you could perhaps talk about some of your most memorable colleagues at Riverside Studios.
So, I've spoken about Milena - now there's more I can say about her, but she moved to America after three years, so in 1986, and kind of kept involved, but more-or-less handed over to me. And then I was working with Kate McFarlane, who had joined as an education officer and then she became kind of Deputy Director, you know, big titles for small teams but so, and she has remained very active, she's now co-director of the Drawing Room, which is an important, independent space that focuses on drawing in London.
Zoe Sherman came. I mean, people, you know, joined as volunteers and just sort of proved themselves or didn't. We had a training scheme: I can't remember what it's called, M-Soc or something like that, it was, sorry, it was a long time ago, but it was basically, you know, people out of work who did work and got paid and so they did voluntary work and there were some really fascinating people, there are artists and curators and writers who came to us through that. That means there were many artists, sort of too many. I don't think that's necessarily your question, but...
David Gothard was the sort of presiding figure and he was complicated. He was the great asset, and really, the reason for Riverside's appeal and interest and character. He was quite difficult to work with, he was, you know, a bit erratic, he wasn't great at budgeting. He, you know, he, yeah, he was hard to work with, and he would probably accept that as well. But a lot of people's energy was put into sort of making a platform in which David could thrive, and the good qualities of Riverside could happen. David Leveaux, Theatre Director, was a friend of his and he came in as a sort of deputy creative director under David and did a number of his own productions, and was a kind of more measured creative figure, and I think tried. But then he, you know, eventually moved on to other things.
There was, I mean, there was always this, funding and organisation was just always an issue. So, all of these things were happening with things that went hugely over budget, had to be rescued, there wasn't as much corporate funding or sponsorship then as people are used to now, so places like Sadler’s Wells, and the Barbican, the Royal Academy, you know, they depend on sponsorship. Riverside really struggled to get that.
So, there were endless sort of emergency board meetings. The board itself was a kind of a remarkable collection of people. Richard Wollheim, a distinguished philosopher, was a board member, alongside, because he lived locally and then there were, particularly the Hammersmith council changed, from being a Tory council to Labour around that time, 1983-84 I think and, the Labour councillors were very supportive of Riverside, but they wanted it to be a popular art centre, they wanted it to change. And so there was sort of factions, you know, there was the, I guess you call it the sort of... Oh, Alan Yentob was a board member, from the BBC. So there was a kind of division between the sort of populist side and the, you know, for the sake of argument, art for art's sake side and they weren't, it was interesting now, looking back, because some of that, it's just called a good populism because populism isn't bad, obviously, but there's, there's populism that's not very interesting and there's populism that's interesting. And really, there was probably more in common between those people than against them, but they, you know, became sort of factionalized and the things that were some of the best were the ones that, met both criteria. Dario Fo, I guess was, a great example of this sort of revolutionary Italian agitator and activist who was also, you know, one of the best theatre directors of his age.
We were involved with the GLC, which is, Ken Livingstone was Head at that time and the Head of Culture was somebody called Peter Pitt, who we went to visit, and he very clearly said. So, I, I became, I was 24 or something, and became a staff board member, so I was involved in all of this quite directly. And we went to see Peter Pitt, who said so, nice to see you, here's what he called the Stalinist plan for Riverside. He basically, it was, they were going to control it, you know, they were going to say what Riverside did, and, there's very little, we sort of had to say yes because they were funding. But there were always efforts to meet with what the GLC wanted because their sort of attempt to get, you know, lots of people in was right, but then there were times when they wanted it to be a political vehicle for political art and, you know, like I said, there's really good political art and really bad political art and that was, you know, so that was a sort of ongoing, tension or battle, sometimes a creative battle and sometimes a very frustrating one.
Charlie Hanson came in. David left at a certain point, and Charlie came in. He was a board member, he was a television producer and particularly focused on Black theatre companies and bringing black performing artists into the television world and so that was a strand of the programme. Talawa was one of the theatre companies that had a platform here. Woza Albert! - so not British Black, but there was a connection between the South African company that did that, and some of the Black British theatre companies, so there was that. So, Charlie came in as artistic director, and, you know, he was a more kind of measured, you know, he wanted to work with the board, he wanted budgets to balance, let's say more reasonable and he was here for a number of years.
And then John Baraldi came, who had been, he was American, but he had been in Britain for a long time, was the founding director of Waterman's Art Centre. And he was really brought in, by the Labour side of the board as a very populist, they liked what he had done in terms of engaging with the local community and so he sort of exemplified a different aspect of that, you know, programming imperative. And I think on balance, you know, he was understanding of the need to keep the quality and the innovation and the kind of range of the programme, as well as doing things that appealed to an audience that might not know of who Kantor was or whatever. And, I think, you know, there were people who felt that Riverside sort of lost its particular energy around that time. I was here and I, I don't... I think there was a balance, I mean, there were, you know, there were community events around, say, the Irish community in Hammersmith and so there would be, you know, singing events in the foyer and that was great. It was really interesting to see a community that hadn't been addressed before. There was a band and a kind of community music workshop called Zion Music Workshop, who were given one of the old workshop spaces. And that was tricky. They were Rastafarian and, just wanted to do their own thing, which is completely understandable. But I guess where, previously, there was a kind of, sort of, dynamic, meeting of different cultures, you know, in the foyer and around, I think they felt, sort of unwelcomed. And they probably were, frankly, by the rest of the establishment, which they were sort of forced on the establishment here, and it never you know, it never became a creative connection, partly maybe to do with some of the people involved as well. But it was a shame, because those things, I think there was a, it was a time of um, sort of transition in British culture and opening up and diversifying and some things worked and some things didn't.
We had exhibitions, Veronica Ryan was quite a young artist who was in a double show with an artist called Jackie Ponsele. Veronica Ryan, recently, just very recently as a more senior artist won the Turner prize. There was a Nigerian photographer, Rotimi Fani-Kayode who sent slides in, I saw his slides and visited him in Brixton and we showed his work in the foyer and he didn't live very long. He died in the late 1980s, but he was a founding chair of autograph, which is a Black photography collective. So, you know, there are examples. Denzil Forrester was a student at the Royal College of Art who Milena saw and she asked to show his work in the foyer. He's now a kind of leading painter, had many years, moved out of London, had many years when he was, sort of ignored but, he's now come into his own reputation. So, you know, there was, ability and desire to show a very diverse aspect of London and global culture. But, like I say, some things sort of took and some things didn't.
So, I think, alongside your role as Exhibitions Director, during the period you've mentioned, I expect you also would have consumed, so to speak, some of the shows that were being put on at Riverside Studios and enjoyed seeing those.
I was wondering whether you could perhaps talk about some of the performances or exhibitions that you personally saw and some of the ones that you perhaps remember as being your favourite.
So, the exhibitions programme, I'll just say briefly there was a lot. It was very varied and I guess some of the, for me, the highlights, it was really broad, doing the individual shows of Gormley and Deacon and Wentworth was very satisfying. And good. We did a film, we did an exhibition of Bill Viola, American video artist, which was, I think, his first show in this country. We showed Tim Rollins in KOS. Tim was a teacher who worked with kids in the Bronx, in a sort of evolving workshop, and they made work collectively. So, we showed that and that was very well received.
Too many things to name, but I guess what I might then talk about is, the theatre performances that stood out, The Dead Class, I think, by Kantor was one. There was a production of Crime and Punishment by Andrzej Wajda, the Polish film director. That was really extraordinary, really just, yeah, sort of intense. It was in Polish and, you know, you couldn't understand everything but you could feel everything, the acting was so dramatic.
The Wooster Group came here early on, relatively early on. They've since I mean, now, they're sort of too expensive even to show in places like Sadlers Well or the National Theatre because they're, not that they're paid a lot, but their productions are complicated, technically. So, the Riverside showed them and that was, kind of, extremely memorable for me.
The dance performances, I think were some of the some of the best, Carol Armitage, Steven Perino and then Michael Clarke's early performances, the kind of launch of his company were sort of legendary in British culture. Those are the ones that come to mind.
You mentioned Hammersmith a couple of times as the setting for Riverside Studios. Could you possibly comment on how you feel that Hammersmith has changed in the period since you were based here?
You can't sit anywhere without paying. I would say maybe here. But I mean, generally, that's, like in the Broadway, you know, there's a library, right? Is there even a library now? I don't, I mean, it just feels like it's all got corporatized and privatised and that's really sad because it did feel like a community with a, sort of, around the Broadway, around the library with key places, the Lyric Theatre, was, I didn't know the Lyric that well. I knew it much better when I was working at the Arts Council but, sorry that that's where I come every day, I kind of go from across the bridge to Edgware Road where I work. So, I come through Hammersmith and there's nothing apart from Riverside. There's nothing much to stay for, you know, there's no sort of sense of community. I guess if you lived here, through schools and other things you might find it. But what felt like something that had more of an identity, now feels corporatized.
Just staying on the topic of the local community, how were audiences within the local community and local youth involved in Riverside studios? And what's been the effect on the local area, would you say?
Well, that's a hard question, I don't really have, because nobody at that time did much data gathering. It would be small I think, because the audiences were small for that kind of work anywhere but there were, Kate I mentioned, was the education officer, she worked really hard with local schools. We did, another thing we did, with the urging really, of the Labour Councillors, we were involved with the, it's called the Riverside Artists Group and it was a group of West London artists based around mainly Hammersmith and Fulham. And there was an annual open exhibition that happened, which I think was really good. I mean, I think it, you know, it was, it opened the doors to a wider constituency, brought some of the artistic community in and involved them in the wider culture of Riverside.
But Kate worked a lot with schools, we had workshops. When I was at the Hayward, I did a film exhibition called Spellbound. And I invited Steve McQueen, the filmmaker, to be in that exhibition and we were having a coffee talking about it and he said, you know, thanks for inviting me to this. You know, we met quite a while ago and I said, yeah, I remember because I went to his degree show. He said no no, way before that, he was a student. He came when he was 15 to a workshop here and he remembered that. And then I remembered seeing his name in the kind of guest book, Steve McQueen, which seemed like a joke, you know, because the only Steve McQueen that anybody knew about was the American actor. But he said he was a student, a schoolboy in Ealing and he came to a workshop, and it was sort of part of his transition into becoming an artist. So that's an impact, you know, that's a good result.
I think you mentioned earlier about how Riverside studios provided a sort of exposure to the arts to groups that perhaps wouldn't normally have access to, that wouldn't normally be given an opportunity to see some of the shows that were put on here, the type of shows that were put on here. But do you feel that Riverside Studios has provided young people in particular with an introduction to the arts?
Other than what I've said, like I said, without looking back, I know it was something that we worked hard at and with the educational groups that Kate led, with some awareness of programming, I mean, the idea of doing Tim Rollins and KOS, who were, you know, Bronx based, you know, children's collective workshop, that one of the aims was that we were addressing that need as well as presenting somebody who was, at that time, very kind of active and well known in the art world.
But there was, it was hard... We took data, I don't know, I don't know if in the archive you have that data, but I think we tried, but I'm not sure if we could measure the impact fully just because measurement wasn't really sort of done, but anecdotally, it was something that the whole team thought about and worked at and tried to integrate with programming. But I can't answer more specifically.
What elements of the old Riverside Studios do you feel are missing today?
I have to say, I don't come as often as I'd like, mainly because I'm travelling. Though I'd walk by twice a day, I just, if I'm going home, I'm going home. So, I really, to my regret, don't know the programme as well as I should or would like to. I mean, I've admired the very successful theatre productions that have happened here, seem to be great.
The position of the cinema, it was a quite bold move when John Baraldi brought the cinema into Riverside and it didn't work that well commercially. It should have done; it could have done. And it was definitely one of, you know, it was an arthouse, and it was programmed by somebody called Ed Lewis, who also programmed the Arnolfini in Bristol, I think. And it was, you know, very sort of unusual, avant garde programmes. So that was surprising, and I think a lot of that's become, let's say, more mainstream now, so it's not as surprising now as it used to be but it's still there.
And similarly, you know, the international theatre, the range of art, it's not that it, well there isn't the art gallery so that was a change, I think when soon after William Burdett Coutts came, a few years after I left [1994], you know, he was very much a sort of theatre and television person and, you know, kind of understandably in one regard, didn't see that the gallery added value, so he stopped that and I think did then change the entrance so that it came through what used to be the gallery, so that was a change and it's regrettable. But, you know, on the other hand, things change, so I never felt, never sort of took that personally, I think some people maybe did. But I think mainly some of the things that made Riverside interesting have just spread across London, so it makes it harder for Riverside to keep that sense of energy and innovation and specialness, harder to compete for audiences, harder to compete for money. You know, I know in terms of when I was at the arts council, Riverside had funding, but it didn't have a great case for funding based on the exceptional nature of its programme. It did quite interesting things but they it wasn't a kind of leader in the field which it had been. So, I guess that changed but I think some of that was things changing around and maybe Riverside didn't have the, it had challenges with the building itself, I mean it's an expensive and complicated and unwieldy building, or it was, so I think that was a bit of a burden for different administrations to have to sort of deal with that at the same time as presenting cutting edge programming.
So sorry, that's a bit of a jumbled answer to reasons why it does feel that it hasn't kept, you know, the sort of sense of innovation and dynamism that maybe it had back in the time that I was fortunate to work here.
What difference, if any, do you think Riverside has made and what differences did you see within the time that you were involved, personally?
Well, when I joined, it was an exceptional and sort of ridiculous thing to be there because it was, it did hugely ambitious projects, extremely expensive, went bust several times, was paid off by different local authorities and the Arts Council and it was unsustainable. So, it was a kind of glorious failure really and, if you look at it from, not administratively, but creatively and artistically was certainly glorious. And that wasn't sustainable, you know, that wasn't, you can't do that for long. So it had maybe 10 years of being able to do that and then needed to, sort of, come into line in some way and, at the same time, sorry I'm repeating myself, but at the same time, other places were taking on some of the mantle or taking up some of the programming interest and certainly the visual arts had many more places to go than Riverside. I mean, the Tate, did, frankly, very little contemporary art when I started working. It had a show called the New Art, which is one of the first contemporary art exhibitions, international contemporary art exhibitions that it had done for many, many years, that Michael Compton organised, and you know now, then the process happened that led to Tate Modern being created, so that landscape is completely transformed and there are the places that were there at that time, the Whitechapel, the ICA, Camden but there are others and places like the Royal Academy, the Barbican and Tate are just doing much more and places like, on the more experimental kind of, you know, newer, innovative side, there are places that have a much clearer identity, Chisenhill, for example, in the East End. It's quite small, it's very focused but it's doing one thing very precisely. It struggles for funding, but it works sort of within its means and it knows what it's doing. And Riverside was never really, you know, stable either in funding terms or programmatically to be able to do that.
What would you say is distinctive or unique about Riverside Studios?
Well, I always found and I think it's still true, that combination that television history was quite an interesting one because it gave a sort of creative industries edge to what it was, and I've always been a bit sad that it hasn't, I mean, I think the television industries are a bit ruthless, really. And so, you know, they're hard to, they don't, you know, they do their own thing, but they don't naturally necessarily support more cutting-edge stuff. And if that but I think that, as a context, it was really interesting and certainly when I was there, well actually, in the early days that I was there, the Riverside music programme was still being broadcast from Riverside Studios and there was a sort of connection with. That's one of the reasons that Alan Yentob too was there from the BBC because there was a television connection and there were often the figures, you know, like Dario Fo were significant enough that they would be subject sometimes to documentaries within that kind of high end of culture programming.
So, I think that combination of television, film, history, theatre and then opening that up to the broader cultural sphere it was really sort of exceptional. It just didn't quite take, you know, it just didn't fully become, maybe fully realise its potential
I had an opportunity to look through some of the archives, reflecting the period that you were exhibitions director here. What struck me was, the range and the scope, but also how brave some of the programming was. There were shows by, and this is just a small sample here of the names that I saw is you've got Hanif Qureshi, Benjamin Zephaniah, Brian Eno, Lenny Henry. There was a cultural exchange with the USSR at that time as well that I saw and various other similar things happening over that period. You also mentioned, for example, Julian Opie and Michael Clarke as well. All these people had an interaction with Riverside Studios during that period. In that sense, how does the programming today compare with how things were when you were Director?
Well, a lot of those were actually not exhibitions, Benjamin Zephaniah did something. I think Brian Eno was quite interesting because he, some people hired the studios for shows and he was one of them. He did a show of his, kind of, ambient paintings, which were basically video paintings behind a screen. So, videos behind frosted glass that looked like moving paintings. I’ve kept up with him and he's, you know, he was part of the Riverside story, but he was a hire. Anselm Kiefer, Kiefer similarly did an incredible show in Studio 2 that was paid for by his gallery at that time, Anthony d’Offay and I think that's good, you know, economically it was good and it's a mixed economy, it's always a mixed economy. So, it's interesting that, people could sort of have access without necessarily being part of the core programme.
So, sorry, I've lost track in terms of answering your question.
Just in terms of how you feel that, looking back to how dynamic some of the programming was during your time here as Director, how that compares with how things are today? Are things as brave as they were, so to speak?
I am not personally aware of that quality here now but that may be my... I think you’d find some of that in the South Bank, you know, the combination of literature, theatre, dance, visual art. You find it at the Barbican, yeah. I'm not personally as aware of that and I'm quite engaged, you know, with the cultural world here. So, it may just be that I'm missing it, but I'm not as aware. I know that it does good programming and, you know, good theatre particularly and good film. I'm not so aware of the I guess the sort of, let's say, urgency of it.
That's been hugely insightful, enjoyable, so thank you very much.
Good questions. Thank you.
