The cultured European
“Don’t go on about his Czechness,” one of John Tusa’s colleagues warned me before we met. “He’s not that keen on talking about it.” In fact, he didn’t seem to mind at all, and when you study his face – with its Georg Solti-like sharpness – you can’t help but be reminded of his middle European antecedents. He has an un-English directness, too, that helped him to move from journalism into management, and to build a second career in arts administration when he left the BBC in his late 50s.
The other point that strikes you about Tusa – again Solti-esque – is his energy. He has just turned 70 and is about to enter his final year as managing director of London’s Barbican Centre, but he exudes the fitness and squat muscularity of the keen squash player as he bounds up the staircase at his modernist, minimalist Islington home. He says he has no intention of retiring when he steps down after 10 years at the Barbican in August 2007, and intends to look for a part-time chairmanship in the arts. “I’m certainly not going to sit at home going through my cuttings,” he says. “It would drive me mad, and it would certainly drive my wife mad.”
Having spent his life interviewing others – he has just published a book of his Radio 3 interviews with leading figures in the arts – he is not a natural interviewee. It’s not reticence exactly, nor an unwillingness to sell himself short, but the good journalist’s refusal to see himself as the story. His background, with echoes of Tom Stoppard’s flight from Czechoslovakia to the bosom of the British establishment, is highly unusual, but he explains it very matter-of-factly.
His father, like Stoppard’s, worked for the Bata shoe company, and just before the war broke out – the timing was a coincidence – was sent to manage a factory in Essex. Tusa was three and a half at the time – just old enough to have recollections of life in Czechoslovakia. He quickly embraced English, so much so that he insisted his parents stop embarrassing him by speaking Czech in front of other children, and at six was sent to boarding school. His parents had been told by their new English friends that a public school education was de rigueur in the manufacture of good British boys. He then went to Gresham’s School in Norfolk and Trinity, Cambridge, though his two years of national service between school and university sound the most instructive period of all.
His Cambridge friend John Drummond, the former controller of Radio 3, makes great play of Tusa’s outsider status and says that leads him to “continually question values”, but Tusa is more circumspect. “I am way past the stage of guessing whether my Czechness makes me different,” he says. “I really don’t know. But I’m British, not English, and I’m European. I feel perfectly at ease on the continent. Also, having been brought up in a house full of people who spoke broken English does something. It means you’re not frightened of foreigners, and was fantastically helpful at Bush House [the headquarters of the BBC World Service].”
Tusa has only had a job in the arts for the past 10 years – the previous 35 were spent with the BBC, either on the staff or working for them as a freelance – but they have been a passion since he was a teenager. His family were not especially artistic, but he says they were open to the arts and loved to travel down from Essex to the West End. Surprisingly for a man often seen as a champion of the high arts, his first loves were American musicals such as Annie Get Your Gun and Bob Hope’s regular bill-topping appearances at the Palladium. Variety was the spice of the teenage Tusa’s life. “I still love jugglers and people spinning plates on poles,” he says. “If someone could create a modern version of those shows, that would be my idea of heaven.”
He was introduced to classical music and the theatre while at Gresham’s, and makes his spell of national service sound more like a crash course in opera than a period of professional soldiering. “I was stationed just north of Hanover,” he recalls, in a pretty little town called Celle, and I used to go to the opera house in Hanover. It was a good middle-ranking German opera house and I saw everything from Rheingold to The Force of Destiny, all for the first time. I was in an anti-aircraft battalion, though I can’t imagine that we would ever have shot anything down. We used to go up on to the Baltic coast for exercises, and on one occasion I rather surprised my battalion commander by asking for permission to go across to Kiel, where there was another opera house, to see Die Meistersinger. They thought this was pretty odd, but they didn’t stop me, and that was where I saw my first Meistersinger. It was fantastic, one of the great events in my life.” He also saw Don Carlos in Stockholm – several years before it became an established part of the repertoire at Covent Garden.
After his two years of international opera-going, he went to Cambridge, where he met his wife-to-be Ann and formed part of a tight little circle that included Drummond and John Tydeman, who became head of drama at BBC Radio. Tusa acted – it was the late 1950s when Osborne, Pinter and Wesker were turning theatre on its head – and tried, not very successfully, to get involved in student politics. He shamefacedly admits to having become a life member of the university Conservative association in a failed bid to win favour at the Cambridge Union.
One happier memory of Cambridge are the weekly lectures by the architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner, who introduced him to what remains one of his favourite buildings – the church of Aya Sofya in Istanbul. “Pevsner used to come up to give a general lecture on European architecture,” Tusa recalls. “I don’t think I’d heard of Aya Sofya then, and suddenly there were these black and white slides of this wonderful, fantastic, extraordinary building, and I thought we have to go there some time. When we finally did go there it was staggering. I fell in love with it. Actually, no that’s wrong – you can’t love Aya Sofya. I was in awe of it.”
In 1960, armed with a first in history, Tusa – along with Drummond and Tydeman – joined the BBC as a trainee. He became a producer, but after seven years quit to go freelance as a writer and presenter. “I realised being on the staff of the BBC was going to be a very long haul,” he says. “In six or seven years’ time, I thought maybe I’ll be a deputy head of something, and then in another five years’ time I may be head of something. I didn’t fancy that. It was a brave thing to do. People at the BBC said, ‘Have you sorted out your pension?’, But thank God at that stage you say ‘Bugger the pension’. I knew I couldn’t stay. With the appropriate impatience and arrogance of comparative youth, I thought they’re promoting too many people who I don’t think are very good. In any case, I didn’t leap totally into the dark. I was pretty sure that there was enough work out there.”
He spent the 70s working for Radio 4 and the World Service, and in 1980 became one of the founder presenters of Newsnight, where he is proud to say he managed to smuggle in the odd arts story, including a lengthy report on English National Opera’s first Tristan and Isolde. All through his journalistic career, he says, the arts helped keep him sane. “One of my boasts was that in all my time as a journalist, the number of times that I didn’t go to an event for which we’d bought tickets I could count on the fingers of one hand. Now you could say this showed I wasn’t a really serious journalist, or you could say I had my priorities right. I wasn’t doing it because I thought that one day I would need to show some credentials for being interested in the arts. I did it because it was the thing that gave balance to life.”
One experience he never forgot was nipping out of the BBC in the mid-1960s to see a matinee of Peter Brook’s production of King Lear at the Aldwych with Paul Schofield as Lear. “It just seemed to make more sense of the play than anyone else,” he says. Another of his cultural rites of passage also dates from that period: reading Leo Rosten’s The Education of Hyman Kaplan, a comic novel about a group of foreigners in the US who are trying to learn to be American. “I read it soon after Cambridge, and it would have tied in with the question of my own foreignness” – a question which evidently bothered him then, even if it has long since receded as a central issue in his life.
In 1986 Tusa was plucked from his presenting role to become managing director of the BBC External Services, which two years later he renamed the World Service. Imagine John Humphrys suddenly being made head of Radio 4 and you realise how peculiar such a move is – presenters, on the whole, don’t get management jobs at the BBC. Friends had encouraged him to apply, he thought he had little chance of getting the job, senior managers dismissed his application as an “irrelevance”, yet thanks to the support of the then chairman Stuart Young he beat off the professional hierarchs.
Five years later, he was in the running for the director-generalship, and was annoyed when John Birt got the post without any formal interviewing process. Where Birt was thought to represent the bureaucratisation of the corporation, Tusa stood for the reassertion of its traditional values. Bureaucracy won and Tusa, who later fought a high-profile campaign to preserve the independence of the World Service, realised it was time to escape. “I felt badly treated at the time, and think they should at least have interviewed me – I told [the then chairman] Duke Hussey that they would certainly have heard a different vision if they had – but I stopped feeling that years ago. If I’d become director-general I would not have done what I’ve been doing for the past 10 years. I’ve had an infinitely richer and more varied life because I didn’t get the job.”
When he left the World Service in 1992, he spent three years presenting the One O’Clock News on BBC1, but then successfully applied for the job of managing director at the Barbican, which was close to meltdown after the controversial tenure of of Detta O’Cathain. “The place had nearly imploded,” says Tusa, “and I had a lot of pacification to do.”
During his 10 years in charge, the Barbican has ceased to be simply a venue and established an in-house artistic team that shapes what takes place there. In effect, the Barbican now promotes most of its own shows – financially more risky but artistically far more satisfying. “By and large audiences don’t find the venues which are just hall hires terribly interesting,” he says. “They like to have the sense there is an artistic idea behind it, and that is what they increasingly buy into. That has been much the most important thing we’ve done.” That and “pretty well rebuilding the place without ever closing” – a dig at the South Bank perhaps.
Tusa is irritated by the BBC’s occasional failure of confidence in its treatment of the arts. “I sense there is still a cultural unease about what you do, how much you do and which audience you are doing it for,” he says. “It’s part of the prevailing BBC guilt about being elitist and highbrow.” He is also critical of celebrity culture and the media’s belief that even a serious programme must be leavened by some recognisable (and preferably youthful) face. But in general he feels the arts in Britain are buoyant and audiences more open to innovation than even before – indeed perhaps more open than the media which is supposed to serve it.
“There’s a huge flourishing of art,” he insists. “You can hardly turn round without someone building a new concert hall or museum, or setting up a new orchestra or theatre company. Our audiences at the Barbican have become much more diverse because of the more adventurous programming. When the RSC left [acrimoniously in 2002] their audience went with them, decamped, vamoosed, were just not interested. But an entirely new audience has come in which is more interested in contemporary theatre. Audiences will find you.”
The Janus Aspect, John Tusa’s book of interviews with leading figures in the arts, is published by Methuen.
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