Government Stuff
According to new DCMS stats, almost 40% of businesses reported cybersecurity breaches or attacks in the past year.
DCMS Committee has published its report into the future of public service broadcasting, with recommendations around diversity and the BBC licence fee.
DCMS is investing £1m in the Edinburgh Festivals this year to help boost their digital offer.
DCMS has launched a call for evidence around improving broadband for very hard to reach premises.
UK Music chief exec Jamie Njoku-Goodwin has welcomed the Prime Minister’s commitment to help fix the work permits crisis for touring musicians.
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Culture Stuff
Arts & Culture
The number of creative freelancers fell by 38,000 in 2020, with young people and women disproportionately affected by the pandemic, according to new Centre for Cultural Value research.
National Theatre Wales is among the organisations leading 10 creative teams for the £120m government-backed Festival UK* 2022.
Battersea Arts Centre has confirmed a new pay-what-you-can model across all events when it launches its new season.
The Journey of Humanity, the world’s largest painting (the size of four basketball courts), has sold for $62m. Thanks. Hanging it in my downstairs loo.
The sale of a Banksy depicting a young lad playing with a superhero nurse has raised £14.4m for NHS charities.
The World Health Organisation is backing a $15m initiative to mobilise the art world to tackle the mental health crisis.
Vault Creative Arts has launched a programme of development opportunities for creative from under-represented backgrounds.
WHAT A WHOPPER. The longest art piece in Europe, a 2km long wall mural by Venice Biennale artist Sonia Boyce, is coming to London’s East End.
Design
The design of the new £50 note featuring the computer pioneer and codebreaker Alan Turing has been revealed and will enter circulation in June.
A ‘digital home’ has sold for $500,000 in the latest NFT sale. Not biting at these any more. Just smiling, nodding and mouthing ‘ok’.
Theatre & Dance
Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre is to operate at half pre-pandemic turnover when it reopens in May.
The Theatre Artists Fund has received a further £500,000 donation from the Mackintosh Foundation.
A new report has called for the formation of a federation of performing arts freelancers to ensure their needs are served in the future.
Classical Music & Opera
Trinity Laban has become the first London conservatoire to partner with Black Lives in Music to improve the experience of Black young people in jazz and classical.
Tourism & Heritage
Marc Quinn’s Black Lives Matter protestor statue could be reinstalled on the Bristol plinth previously occupied by an Edward Colsten sculpture before it went for a dip in the harbour.
The National Archives has announced the 25 successful applicants who have each received £50,000 of funding from the COVID-19 Archives Fund.
Museums
The National Gallery has agreed one of its largest ever loans to a regional gallery, with nine pieces including a Monet off for a lil’ trip to Southampton.
Great interview in The Observer with Gus Casely-Hyford, director of the forthcoming V&A East, on his mission to drag museums into the 21st century.
The V&A has backtracked on its plans to cut its National Art Library staff following public backlash.
Books, Press & Libraries
Richard Osman’s debut novel, The Thursday Murder Club, has joined the million sales club.
Debut authors dominate the shortlist for this year’s Dylan Thomas Prize for bold, inventive British writers under the age of 39.
Exhibitions and Events
Some reopening plans and shows for your diary from The Southbank Centre in May and The National Theatre in June.
11 new productions, 5 world premieres and 20 revivals are included in the Royal Opera House’s 2021/22 seasons.
The Young Vic’s hotly-anticipated production of Hamlet starring Cush Jumbo is to start previewing in September.
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Well this is rather exciting… Brad Peyton (director of Dwayne Johnson blockbusters San Andreas and Rampage) is to direct Sniper Elite, a movie based on the Rebellion bestselling game.
Evil Genius 2 is out NEXT TUESDAY, ARGH! Here’s Looper with how it will differ from the original and all the new locations, too.
A lil’ glimpse from Rebellion at the virtual production and motion capture tech behind Evil Genius 2 in action.
2000 AD is returning to Free Comic Book Day in 2021 with an all-star Judge Dredd special issue.
Comic Book News with just the five stars for Tammy & Jinty Remixed, calling it ‘a proper comic annual with a powerful heart’.
TIGA and the ICO are teaming up for a webinar on the Age Appropriate Design Code on 13th April.
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Creative Industries & Tech Stuff
Enders Analysis outlines how the UK’s creative industries engage more enterprises and employees than any other part of the economy (except financial services).
Creative Industries Fed has launched its Future of Freelance Champions to shape its work supporting freelance creatives.
I LIKE NETWORKING’s mentoring scheme is back, with over 50 mentors available for women and non-binary people in the creative industries.
Film & TV
The Beeb has lost 200,000 licence fee payers, resulting in an income drop of £30m.
Sunday's return of Line of Duty attracted the biggest audience in the Beeb police drama's history, with 9.6m viewers. Now we’re sucking diesel.
Cineworld is to reopen across the US and UK after signing a ‘cinema-first movie deal’ (is that not how cinemas have worked for years?) with Warner Bros.
Brits Emerald Fennell and Sacha Baron Cohen were among the winners at the Writers Guild Awards.
Fashion
UK high streets lost 11,000 shops in 2020 and a further eight John Lewis stores won’t be reopening after lockdown.
UK fashion house Burberry is partnering with Chinese tech giant Tencent to design outfits for video game characters.
The Beeb looks at how plastic bags can be recycled into fabric to fight pollution. Wow, is that Prada? No, it’s Tesco Bag for Life.
Music & Radio
The global recorded music industry made $21.6bn last year – the highest figure since 2002, according to IFPI stats.
And here in Blighty, music revenues rose by 3.8% in 2020 to £1.12bn, with vinyl spending overtaking CDs for the first time since the 80s, so says BPI stats.
Griff has been announced as the winner of this year’s Rising Star award at the BRITS – and Jack Whitehall is returning to host for a fourth time.
Warner Music has joined forces with Chinese tech giant Tencent to form a new record label in a bid to crack the Chinese market.
One you might have missed but pretty landmark… California has introduced legislation to limit record label contracts to seven years.
Dave is headlining Manchester’s Parklife Festival in September - and we may well see a gig on the Glastonbury site then too.
Wireless Festival is moving across town from Finsbury Park to Crystal Palace Park in September. The beauty of running a festival without wires I guess.
Gaming
The UK video games market hit a record £7bn in 2020, a rise of £1.6bn compared to 2019. Huge.
Hades was the big winner at last night’s BAFTA Games Awards, and Siobhan Reddy, studio director at Media Molecule, received the prestigious Fellowship.
Tech & Telecoms
The number of young people in the UK taking IT GCSEs is down by 40% since 2015 and could spark a digital skills shortage, according to the Learning & Work Institute.
Tech bosses Marky Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai and Jack Dorsey have faced another grilling from US politicians over disinformation.
A new Ofcom report has found that one in three of us have spotted hate speech in online videos in the past three months.
Similarly, Asian Americans and Black Americans experienced major rises in online hate in the past year, according to an Anti-Defamation League report.
Santander is to close 111 branches across the country due to the shift to mobile and online banking.
You can now buy a Tesla with Bitcoin.
The Women in FinTech Powerlist 2020 has been revealed, shining the spotlight on the women leading innovation in financial services around the world.
YouTube is to detect items shown in videos and automatically generate a list of related items to buy.
Wired on the Pentagon project testing fighter jets controlled by AI. Seems fine.
NASA is to fly the first helicopter on Mars in April. I’d probably use a rocket, guys. It’s actually further away than you think.
Intel chief Pat Gelsinger: ‘Too many chips made in Asia’
Newsletter writer Alex Pleasants: ‘Too many chips eaten in SE London, can’t move’
Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s first ever tweet has been sold to a Malaysian businessman for $2.9m as… you guessed it… an NFT. Had enough.
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Appointments & Movers
BBC arts editor Will Gompertz is leaving to join the Barbican Centre as director of arts and learning; BBC journalist Clive Myrie is to be the new host of Mastermind; Simon McCoy is leaving BBC News after 17 years to join GB News; Association of Independent Museums has appointed Lisa Ollerhead from DCMS as chief exec; Kenneth Tharp has joined Eclipse Theatre as interim chief exec; Vicky Richardson has been appointed as head of architecture at the Royal Academy; Dermot O’Leary, Edith Bowman and Clara Amfo are replacing Graham Norton as hosts of the BAFTAS; Kadiatu and Stuart Kanneh-Mason have joined the board of Music Masters; tech newcomer Prince Harry has been named chief impact officer at Silicon Valley startup, BetterUp - and as a commissioner against misinformation at the Aspen Institute
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Ed Stuff
Wrote about how the creative industries can lead our COVID recovery in the Evening Standard; also wrote about the future of public service media for kids for the Children’s Media Foundation; talked about the healing powers of the arts at a Culturunners event
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...And Finally
Meat Loaf is legitimately producing a dating show called I Would Do Anything For Love… But I Won’t Do That. Or as I like to call it: I Would Do Anything For Cash… Yes, Even That.
This is fun. Pick-up lines generated by AI. Here’s one a robot probably made up earlier: is that a skyscraper-sized ship blocking one of the world’s major shipping routes, or are you just pleased the newsletter’s over? Needs work.
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