The House of Commons digital, culture, media and sport (DCMS) committee has decided that it doesn’t like Unboxed – originally seen as a festival of Brexit – which kicked off without much attention this month. Its report on the government’s handling of major cultural and sporting events concludes that the aims of the year-long, countrywide celebration of British creativity have been “vague and ripe for misinterpretation” from the first; thus, the £120m investment was, it said, “an irresponsible use of public money”.
Unboxed is a series of 10 art, science and technology projects with ambitious (if at times amorphous) aims such as sending music to the moon and back, transporting a North Sea oil rig to the beach at Weston-super-Mare and turning it into a multimedia centre, and asking people in Wales to imagine what life might be like in 2052. These are all no doubt admirable, inclusive and challenging, but it is fair to say that they are somewhat removed from the Festival of Britain-type idea that Theresa May announced at the Conservative party conference in 2018 and which Brexit backers imagined would involve flag-waving, bangers and mash, and replays of speeches by Churchill. You would have to have a heart of stone not to laugh at the way their assumptions have been upended.
The original notion was that the festival, the Queen’s platinum jubilee and this summer’s Commonwealth Games in Birmingham would come together in a glorious reforging of a newly confident nation. Some hope – with war in Ukraine, Covid still rampant, inflation rising and Brexit divisions far from healed. Julian Knight, the Conservative chair of the DCMS committee, complains that the three-pronged opportunity has been missed: “There is no golden thread linking them all together.” But a country’s elite cannot impose a national narrative. Politicians like to latch on to the sort of unifying “national traditions” that Eric Hobsbawm and others have exposed as bogus, and invest in grand projects such as the Millennium Dome. Such top-down impositions are doomed. TS Eliot hinted at that with his own banal list of what signifies a culture: “a cup final, the dog races, the pin table, the dart board, wensleydale cheese, boiled cabbage cut into sections, beetroot in vinegar, 19th-century Gothic churches, the music of Elgar”.
The Festival of Britain in 1951 worked because it was a day out, an antidote to austerity. It captured a moment, but it didn’t encapsulate a culture. Danny Boyle had a good go at telling our “national story” in his widely admired Olympic opening ceremony in 2012 (symbol of a happier age), but even his pastoral-radical retelling was partial. What about the English civil war, the relationship with Ireland, empire, slavery, and postwar decline? Identity is a contested mess that doesn’t lend itself to being contained; it has to be suggestive, tangled, unresolved.
Unboxed contends with enduring suspicion about its origins on one side, and scepticism about its results on the other. Its programme suggests it will be admirably true to itself – and almost universally disliked or ignored by those who long for simple stories, linear narratives, easy resolutions. It will stand or fall on whether it can engage and enthuse the wider public.
