Colin Welland famously exclaimed "the British are coming!" while accepting an Oscar for Chariots of Fire in 1982. Three decades on, Mr Welland could feel a tinge of satisfaction when looking through the Academy Awards nominations. Heading the list of UK contenders is Londoner Steve McQueen's film 12 Years a Slave, which will be vying for best picture and best director with Gravity, the spacewalk thriller whose visual effects were created at Shepperton Studios. Brit actors Judi Dench, Steve Coogan and Jeff Pope have nominations for the comedy Philomena, as do Christian Bale and Sally Hawkins for their roles in American Hustle and Blue Jasmine.
These British hopefuls – and there are many more – may come to little on the night, but even if they do, anyone who shares a Welland-like interest in our creative arts will be able to find solace in another significant achievement, revealed by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport last week. In the midst of recession, the UK's creative industries have been quietly outperforming the rest of British industry, growing by 15.6% since 2008 against a baseline increase of 5.4% for the UK economy as a whole. The creative sector is now worth £71.4bn and accounts for 5.6% of all employment in the country. In short, Britain's artistic side has been booming.
Drilling into the DCMS data, we find broad growth across the industry. "Film, TV, video, radio and photography" is up £1bn over five years, boosted by such transatlantic hits as Skyfall, while "music, performing and visual arts" has grown by £0.9bn. In 2012, UK artists created five of the 10 top-selling albums in the world, and there is still room for growth. There is a continuing rich motherlode of UK theatrical successes overseas, with the Young Vic's A Doll's House about to follow Angus Jackson's Chichester Festival King Lear to New York, where it will join the RSC's Matilda.
As anyone with school-age children will know, the entertainment success story of our time is gaming, which makes up a key part of the £5bn growth in the "IT, software and computer services" category. Game design is something Britain has excelled at since the late 1970s, when programmers at Essex University designed one of the first virtual worlds, MUD1. Now Britain boasts of companies such as Core Design in Derby, which created Lara Croft, and Rockstar North in Edinburgh, which designed Grand Theft Auto 5. GTA 5 smashed records in September by taking a staggering $1bn in its first three days.
Some will argue these successes are too commercial to reveal much of meaning about the health of the arts in Britain, but as Harriet Harman has pointed out, there is a false dichotomy between the public and commercial faces of culture. Arts Council England estimates that for every pound the government invests in the arts, the UK economy grows £4, a statistic borne out by the recent history of British film, which was an endangered species before lottery funding arrived in the 1990s and is now in rude health. Rewards for public funding at the grassroots level are harder to quantify but equally tangible: Mr McQueen found his calling at Goldsmiths and has been supported by the publicly funded Tate galleries. Adele is a graduate of the state-backed Brit school of performing arts. Ms Dench and Mr Coogan have worked extensively for the BBC, while the games industry is supported by likes of the University of Abertay in Dundee.
Even now, the arts are too often dismissed as a disposable add-on to British life, an optional extra to the real drivers of the growth, the City and manufacturing, as the current government's cuts to the DCMS and the Arts Council have demonstrated. The Department for Education meanwhile has a tendency to talk down the "soft" subjects of drama and media. But, as the economist Gerard Lyons has noted, the countries that will thrive in the future will be "those with cash, commodities or creativity". With diminishing cash and few commodities, nurturing the delicate ecology of our creative industries has rarely been more important.
