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Scotsman Bulletin Tuesday 28 January
The Scotsman
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28/01/2025
Scotsman Bulletin Tuesday 28 January
Category
🗞
News
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00:00
Hello, welcome to the Scotsman's daily video bulletin for this Tuesday. My name is Dale
00:11
Miller. I'm deputy editor of the Scotsman and I'm joined by our arts and culture correspondent,
00:16
Brian Ferguson. Brian, we're going to get to talking about a couple of stories that you've
00:21
got today up at Scotsman.com. But just firstly, front page of today's Scotsman. And we led on
00:29
the SNP being accused of hypocrisy as their wage bill increases by £42 million. So this is
00:36
effectively Scottish government workers' confirmation that the wage bill rose £42
00:43
million over a period from 2022 to 2024. So a significant rise and approaching 1400 workers
00:56
in the top pay bracket. Now, Shona Robison was saying that they have effectively reduced
01:04
contract work and they've reduced the overall number of staff employed by the Scottish
01:10
government. But this figure does not take into account wage inflation as well. So naturally,
01:16
there has been criticism at a time where savings have been found in the budget and councils have
01:22
been warned not to raise council tax by too much, that the wage bill that the government does
01:27
continue to rise. Note that this is up until the latter half of 2024, which is just a couple of
01:33
months away, a couple of months ago, sorry. Brian, there's a couple of good stories from yourself as
01:40
well there at Scotsman.com to read. The first is a fringe venue that's joining the list, shall we
01:50
say, for August. Can you tell us a bit about it? Yeah, believe it or not, this is a very busy year
01:55
and behind the scenes in the fringe world, a lot of the big venue operators are nailing down the
02:01
venues and also you can now register, you know, registrations are very much open for shows at the
02:09
fringe, which isn't really that far away in the great scheme of things. But I think the first
02:14
shows will be going on sale within the next few weeks. So a lot of the venue operators are keen
02:19
to get the word out of what they're up to this year. Guilded Balloon have had a bit of a difficult
02:24
period. They were without their biggest venue at Teviot Row House last year. There was a big
02:30
refurbishment underway just after the festival the previous year. It was meant to be finished
02:35
for the summer, but they heard quite late in the autumn that that wasn't going to be available
02:41
again. The work was running a bit late. You know, it's a very, very old building, I think,
02:47
from the 19th century. So, you know, there's a big multi-million pound redevelopment happening
02:52
of that building. So it's not going to be available this year, but they have just managed
02:56
to pin down a deal with the university, I think, has played a big part in to use Appleton Tower,
03:04
which a lot of people will know. It was a very controversial building when it was built in the
03:09
1960s as part of the kind of large scale redevelopment of the kind of George Square area,
03:14
a lot of really old Georgian buildings were knocked down in that period. So it has been,
03:22
certainly, even in modern times, you know, a lot of people see it as one of the kind of
03:26
ISO buildings of Edinburgh. But as ever, in August, people are looking for spaces to try
03:33
and transform into venues. So it's definitely going to be one of the biggest venues in town.
03:39
Guilded Balloon are going to be running seven different spaces in there. And I've been in a
03:44
fair bit. The Fringe Society used it as a kind of temporary home for quite a number of years
03:50
and had some of their events there, especially a really big event, Meet the Media at the start of
03:56
the Fringe. So they've used it a fair bit. It's got quite a number of
04:00
lecture theatres, obviously, that are fairly easy, I think, to adapt into theatre spaces. So
04:07
they really had to scale back Guilded Balloon in the summer just past. So
04:12
they are very ambitious these days. They're trying to do more and more things. Like a lot
04:17
of operators, they're keen to have a year-round presence in the city, but they also, you know,
04:22
it's very competitive during August. So, you know, they really do need a certain number of
04:27
venue spaces to kind of maintain that level of competition with the other kind of really
04:33
three or four big venues. So I think it's good news that they're coming back to a reasonable
04:39
and big scale this summer. And we obviously had the news recently about the return of Summer Hall
04:47
this summer, again, after a very difficult period for that particular venue. So yeah,
04:52
and there'll be a lot more Fringe news to come in the coming weeks and months.
04:58
And Brian, I'm just circling around to another story from you,
05:01
some fresh donations made to, was it Glasgow School of Art?
05:06
Yeah, absolutely. This is a really interesting story. I have to hold my hands up. I've never
05:10
heard of the guy who's made a donation. He's actually a novelist, author and art historian
05:15
from Devon, who had been up to Glasgow School of Art quite a number of times, going right back to
05:21
when he was studying art history at Cambridge University. He obviously studied Charles Rennie
05:28
McIntosh, came up to see that his building, his art school building, which obviously was,
05:32
you know, within the last decade, obviously has had a couple of really big fires, but he was up
05:39
there quite a lot. He really followed the careers of a lot of the young artists that emerged from
05:43
there. And that really came out of a period where he moved to the white interior of London
05:49
in the mid 80s. And he was really in that area when a lot of artists like Gilbert George and
05:57
Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst were emerging in that area, in and around that area and in London
06:02
in general, in the kind of late 80s, early 90s. They were actually known as the young
06:07
British artists or the YBAs. And he was very much part of that scene. He was living there and he
06:14
wrote about a lot of them. And he became very close friends with a lot of these artists. So
06:19
what he has donated, there's a mix of things that he obviously has been a big collector of books,
06:24
so he's donated a lot of books, but he also has acquired, you know, through a lot of these
06:29
personal relationships and friendships, you know, a huge number of, you know, the Glasgow School of
06:36
Art is calling it ephemera. It's really a lot of personal material. There's a lot of really limited
06:42
edition invitations to events. A lot of the exhibition launches, there could be parties,
06:49
there could be private dinners. There's a lot of, you know, a lot of these are signed by the
06:53
individual artists, so they're very, very rare. One of the things Glasgow School of Art was saying
06:58
was that that kind of stuff has not really been collected by many people over the years.
07:04
People obviously collect works of art and people obviously do collect art books, but these kind of
07:10
very personal, you know, objects, you know, they don't really, there's not that many of them.
07:17
And obviously a lot of them relate to some very well-known artists. There's a couple of
07:23
Scottish artists in there that I can see at the moment, Ian Hamilton Finlay and Anja Galacio,
07:29
two very well-known Scottish artists that are in there. And again, I think the crucial thing
07:34
really is that a lot of the material that's been donated was from a period where these
07:41
artists were relatively unknown, and almost certainly no one has really seen any of this
07:47
material in a kind of public before. So, you know, there's something like 2,000 different
07:54
objects or pieces of material that Jeremy Cooper has donated to Glasgow School of Art, so it'll be
08:00
really interesting to see what comes out of that. You know, like all these big donations, it
08:07
takes a long time to catalogue them and, you know, I think Glasgow School of Art will be hoping
08:12
that there'll be kind of real discoveries in there that they don't know about yet. And, you know,
08:18
it's the kind of thing you can imagine that in future years they'll be able to do some exhibitions
08:25
to really kind of bring that collection to life. But yeah, it was a really interesting story and
08:29
it just makes you wonder what else is out there in private collections around the country.
08:35
Yeah, it'd be amazing if we knew even half of what was out there and whether it could be
08:40
re-put on display for the public, Brian. You can read both those stories that Brian's
08:46
been talking about at scotsman.com, and please follow us for all the very latest
08:51
arts and culture news as well as reviews from our full team. You'll be able to find that in
08:58
the relevant sections of the site. Thanks to you, Brian, and thanks everyone else for joining us.
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