In two weeks Dame Liz Forgan will take Sir Christopher Frayling’s chair at the head of Arts Council England in no doubt that she’s in for a tough time. The good three year settlement ACE got in the last CSR was weighted towards the final year, which now looks almost certain to be renegotiated substantially downward by the DCMS and she will have to manoeuvre a strategy to deal with that.
But she knows how to. Last year she stood down after seven years as chair of the Heritage Lottery Fund, during which she had to deal not only with a shrinking of income as the numbers of lottery players declined, but the raid on the lottery income by the Treasury to help raise the £9.3 billion the 2012 Olympics will cost. The HLF lost £161.2m.
With chief executive Carole Souter she finessed the HLF operation to ensure it maintained momentum. She instigated the Restoration programme on BBC TV which changed the public attitude to the built heritage and developed HLF as, she said, “as a significant player in the regeneration world”.
Forgan is the first female chair of the Arts Council, as she was of HLF, but she had made her mark long before, first as a journalist and then as a broadcasting executive. She is 64, left Oxford for journalism on the Hampstead & Highgate Gazette, the Evening Standard and the Guardian; became director of programmes for Channel 4, then managing director of BBC Radio before going into private production. She became chair of the HLF in 2001 and was made a dame in 2006.
While the task that confronts her at Great Peter Street is different what Christopher Frayling has to deal with when he arrived five years ago. Her chief executive is only a year in post, is committed to changing ACE to fit with the McMaster plan and his own instincts for public collaboration, and a year after the Arts Council’s worst publicity since it tried to close two London symphony orchestras.
Frayling is said to be well-connected but he would die for her contacts book. She has devoted her life to jobs that require her to be wired into the cultural establishment. She is in a position now where the cultural establishment needs to be wired into her.
Forgan is of course succeeded in her £45,000-a-year HLF post by another star of the media firmament. Jenny Abramsky, appointed a dame in the New Years Honours list, was until her retirement, the most senior woman employee in the BBC and had been tipped as a possible director-general when the Gilligan affair toppled Greg Dyke.
But Abramsky is best known for her leadership of the BBC’s radio stations through a turbulent period when radio had practically been written off by senior media executives as a fading technology.
Abramsky, who had joined the BBC as a radio programmes operations assistant in 1969 begged to differ. She launched BBC’s news and sports rolling station, Five Live and was responsible for persuading the Corporation to back DAB digital radio. When audiences on radio stations leapt, she was promoted to the BBC’s executive board and in 2006 became director of audio and music, including online output.
She is described as frank, energetic, a tremendous organiser and tough and uncompromising when it comes to radio. She was not afraid to incur the wrath of many a senior BBC executive for her doughty defence of radio against the more favoured medium of television. Dyke described that passion as “infuriating”. She was also an opponent of the BBC’s move to Manchester.
She is chair of the Hampstead Theatre, a trustee of the Central School of Ballet and an Honorary Member of the Royal Academy of Music.
