British Theatre Guide Blog

It sounds great, doesn’t it?  All children are to have five hours a week of culture a week.  That’s tremendous.  And the government is going to give £135m for this.  “Theatre, film, music, museums and other art forms can be life-changing for young people, broadening their horizons and raising self-confidence and aspirations,” says the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport.  Brilliant!

But just hang on a moment.  Let’s start off with that last sentence - “Theatre, film, music, museums and other art forms…”  When the top government minister responsible for the cultural life of the country describes museums as an art form, one has to wonder if he really does know what he’s talking about.

“Well,” you may say, “he gets the wording wrong, but his heart’s in the right place.  After all,  he’s giving £135m.”  Yes, he is, and I’ve just done a very rough calculation - £135m a year boils down to approximately 53p per child per school week, or just over 10p per hour for each child.  Generous funding indeed. 

And where is the time to come from?  While league tables exist, schools are going to concentrate on raising their students’ levels as much as they can and they are not going to take time away from that. 

I was going to write “they would not be happy taking time away from that” but in fact they would.  Teachers do recognise - certainly more than government minsters - the value of cultural activities to the development of children but they and their schools are being judged (and, indeed, valued) on the basis of examination and SATs results, a system which they know to be fatally flawed but to which the government sticks like super-glue, so they are not going to risk being condemned for not achieving the targets imnposed on them.

Which is almost certainly why the proposal mentions in and out of school hours. But there are major problems here.  Let’s take a simple thing like taking the kids to the theatre.

Apart from the costs - let’s face it, 53p a week doesn’t go very far towards buying even a £5 theatre ticket, let alone paying for a bus to get them there and back - there’s all of the work involved: getting written parental permission, filling in a risk assesment, as well as the usual problems associated with taking large numbers out of school.  Couple that with an average of two to three hours marking, preparation, assessment and form filling after school each evening, after coming home from an after-school meeting, and you can see why there is not the enthusiasm for out-of-school activities that there once was.  And there’s always the fear that, if something goes wrong, the teacher will be pilloried.

Or suppose a teacher wants to bring a theatre company into school to perform for a whole year group.  Say the performance last s an hour and there are 200 kids in the year group.  Using their full week’s allocation of cash will raise £106, which is - at best - a third of the cost of a small (and rather cheap) company.  How are the other four hours to be funded?

What will happen will be the educational version of creative accounting.  The kids have to have five hours of cultural activity a week?  Great!  One one-hour lesson a week of creative writing, one of art, one of music, one of drama - there’s only an hour a week to fill.  But wait a moment: one English lesson can be devoted to literature.  That’s five hours - every week!  Now we can save up all those 53 pences and have a couple of major(ish) events every term.  Sorted!

I know I may have overestimated the number of children of school age and my 53p is therefore just a rough approximation, but it is enough, surely, to show this latest initiative up for what it is - a token gesture, a PR exercise, a sound bite.  If I wanted to be rather crude, I would say that the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families is well named, but I wouldn’t do such a thing.  Not me, sir: no.

In an interview in the Telegraph (see a summary here) in which he tells how the row over the Arts Council’s finding decisions have affected him, Sir Christopher Fraying, chair of ACE, “likened the process of deciding to cut or stop funding for some organisations to weeding a garden.”

I consulted two dictionaries.  One said that a weed is “any useless, troublesome plant” and the other described it as “a wild plant growing where it is not wanted and in competition with cultivated plants”.

Is this how he thinks of companies like Compass, Quicksilver, Red Shift or London Bubble, or theatres like the Chester Gateway? One has to be kind and assume that he just picked a poor analogy, but even so it is so typical of the attitude of ACE throughout: dismissive of and arrogant towards anyone who objects to their plans.

And this was in an interview in which he laments that “people have treated me like a leper” and “people have said some horrible things.”

Oh poor you, Sir Christopher!  People should just accept that it is OK for you -  behind closed doors, without providing adequate time for reply and without prior warning - to destroy or at least put at risk the work to which they have dedicated their lives.

Talking about Nick Hytner’s “bollocks” comment, he admits to feeling “raw” and said, “The National Theatre is a beneficiary of this redistribution” and  “I can completely understand organisations that are dispossessed getting angry”  which rather tends to suggest he thinks that Hytner should shut up and be grateful - sort of You’re alright, Nick: forget about the rest.

He says, “I am the first chairman of the Arts Council since the 1950s to work in the arts world. It’s a plus and it’s a minus. The plus is, I hope, I understand a bit about the arts. The minus is I know a lot of these people.”

He may know them, but he certainly doesn’t understand them.  He doesn’t understand, as Sam West pointed out at that Equity meeting, that the big theatres and companies depend on the smaller ones because that’s where new actors, writers and everyone else in theatre learn their art.  It’s a pyramid: take away bits in the middle or at the bottom and the whole edifice comes tumbling down.

He told the Telegraph that Arts Council was “staffed by dedicated professionals and that actors did not have a monopoly on caring about the arts.” One must ask: professional in what?

Since Nicholas de Jongh said that it is time for Arts Council to go, others have taken up the cry.  I happen to believe that an arts council is the best way of delivering public funding to the arts (although not the Arts Council as presently constituted)  and Frayling’s mixture of whinging and bluster is not going to change my mind - nor anyone else’s, I suspect.

The scene: outside Northern Stage in Newcastle.  A group of 15/16 year old girls and their teacher surround two actors whio have just come off-stage after this evening’s performance.

What is this? A group of stage-struck youngsters? Drama students trying to get tips for their GCSE exam or wanting to know how to become an actor? Autograph hunters?  Theatre groupies?

None of these.  It is actually a group of GCSE Physics students who’ve come to the theatre to see Unlimited Theatre’s Tangle because it deals with Quantum Physics. and they wanted to talk about how this difficult (or, to me, impenetrable) subject was presented on stage.

I thought it was great! Here we had a piece of theatre dealing with a very non-theatrical subject exciting a group of non-theatregoers. Brilliant!

OK.  This is not an earth-shattering post, not a comment on a burning theatrical issue of the day, but what happened here is so important, for  this is what theatre is all about - getting people excited and wanting to discuss, even argue.  And as we get involved in the day-to-day problems of running theatres and theatre companies, as we immerse ourselves in the undoubtedly very important issues which face all of us who try to make theatre in Britain in 2008, let’s not forget that this is what it all comes down to - reaching out to our audiences and getting them excited.

Well done to Jon Spooner and Unlimited for dealing with subjects which bring in those audiences which other companies don’t reach, and well done to that Physics teacher who had the courage to step outside the lab and fire his students’ enthusiasm in a most unsual way!

That’s “call” in both senses of the word -  as in “to telephone” and “to say bad things about”.

I live more than 300 miles from London, so when I go to the theatre there, I go as an ordinary audience member, not as a critic.  I pay the same ticket prices as anyone else and book in the same way as anyone else.

Today I have been trying to book tickets for Speed-the- Plow at the Old Vic.  It was almost a day-long job.  I’ve started trying at 11.00 this morning and it’s now 3.10 and I have just got through.

 First I thought, “Book online.  As the editor of an internet theatre site, you should use online facilities.”  So I tried Ticketmaster - well, you have to support your advertisers, don’t you?.  Tickets not available for the performances I want.  Indeed, it looked like tickets weren’t available, full-stop.

So I phoned the 0870 box office number.  Engaged.  OK, use ring-back.  After half an hour, still no response, so I rang again.  Engaged.  For the next hour I tried every ten minutes.  Always engaged.

So I thought, “Use the Ticketmaster phone number.”  I got straight through - well, after listening to countless options for pop concerts.  A very helpful lady told me that they have only a very limited ticket allocation for the Old Vic and it has been sold, so I should try the box office.  I explained my predicament.  “Have you tried the 020 number?” she asks.  I didn’t know there was one, so she gave me it.

Wonderful!  Perhaps this might be better.

Unfortunately it rang once, then started indicating it was engaged, and then it hung up.

So, back to the 0870 number.  On about the tenth try, I got through!  Well, I got through to a recording which told me I was being placed in a queue.  After a while, a nice pre-recorded gentleman came on to apologise for my being kept waiting but I will be spoken to as quickly as possible.  After all, they are, as he said, committed to answering calls as quickly as possible.  Well, I waited for ten minutes but it was between 10am and 1pm, which, the voice said, is their busiest time, so I would call back later, as they advised.

I tried -  at 1.15, 1.30. 1.45, 2.00 - but no luck: it was engaged.  Tried the 020 number - ring once, engaged tone, hang up.  Did that at least half a dozen times.

Tried the 0870 at 2.30 - engaged.

Tried at 2.45 - engaged.

Tried at 2.55.  Got through!  Sat listening to how important my call is and how committed they are to answering my call as quickly as possible for just over ten minutes and finally - finally! - spoke to a real person.  Booked my tickets - at £90 for two, plus a transaction fee, plus something else that I’m not sure of because by then I was so tired that I wan’t listening properly and if I’d asked her to repeat, that would have delayed some other poor bugger who’d been trying for hours to get through.

I’ve booked by phone or on the Net for shows at many West End theatres, the National, the RSC and London fringe venues, and have always found it pretty painless, fast and efficient - except at the Old Vic.  Always - without fail - the Old Vic takes longer than anywhere else - hours instead of minutes - and I always say I’ll never go there again, but I never remember until I’m actually in the process of trying to make the booking.

I’m going to see The Sea at the Haymarket and booked via Ticketmaster.  It took less than five minutes and I downloaded my tickets there and then.  Why can’t the Old Vic be as efficient?  If they can’t afford the staff to service the number of calls they get, then they should turn over all their ticket sales to a specialist ticketing company.  You don’t do your theatre any good by alienating customers by making them wait hours and spend loadsamoney on phone calls.

Come on, Kevin Spacey: you’ve got a damned good programme - now sort out your box office!

So now we know.

 The highest profile cuts (the Bush, the Orange Tree, Bristol Old Vic, the National Student Drama Festival and Exeter Northcott) have been reversed.  One wonders how much  the very public support of major theatrical figures like Nick Hytner had to do with that. Perhaps rather more surprising - but most welcome for all that - Eastern Angles have also had their funding reinstated, as have Jacksons Lane, Harrogate Theatre and the Birmingham Opera Company.

But 165 organisations have still been dropped by Arts Council and a further 27 have had their funding cut.  This is core funding and it is what keeps the companies alive: without it, the majority will either have to cut their activities to the bone or close.  Indeed the Drill Hall has already closed and we can expect to hear of more closures over the coming weeks.

No one has a right to Arts Council funding but ACE must assume some responsibility for the companies it chooses to stop funding.  It must give them a reasonable space in which to prepare a case for appeal, enough time to the actual cessation of funding to find alternatives, and be absolutely clear and accurate in presenting its reasons for its decision.  It cannot be said that any of this has been the case this time so a bad taste has been left in everybody’s mouth and trust in the organisation has been severely damaged.

That is probably the worst legacy  of the whole sorry business.  How can the arts world trust ACE after this debacle?  Already one influential figure - Nicholas de Jongh of the Evening Standard - has called for the Council to be scrapped, but if that happened and funding decisions were left to the DCMS, then that would be an even bigger disaster.  The arms-length principle must be maintained.

What is needed is a root and branch look at all of ACE’s funding procedures - a major reconstruction job, in fact.  Incoming chief executive Alan Davey has the Herculean task of re-establishing the arts world’s trust in the organisation and if he doesn’t realise that, he shouldn’t be in the job.  Now that the funding brouhaha is finished (barring any legal challenges), his first job must be to make the Council more arts-led, more transparent and more hands-on.

If, as many of the affected companies have complained, the officer responsible for “looking after” them never leaves the office to see what they are doing, that must change now.  It should be part of their job description that they see the work of the companies for which they have responsibility a minimum number of times a year.

ACE claims that it is putting into action Brian McMaster’s recommendations about excellence.  Excellent!  Now let’s see them institute another of his recommendations - peer review.  Let the professionals assess the work that is being funded, not the desk-bound bean-counters, some of whom wouldn’t recognise excellence in an art form if it hit them in the face with a wet fish.

Since those letters were sent out in December the arts world has been in turmoil and the reputation of Arts Council England has sunk to an all-time low.  If changes are not made - and are seen to be made - then more and more people will start to wonder why we have an arts council at all, and that will take us into very dangerous territory indeed.

Last week I received a review of the National Youth Theatre’s White Boy at the Soho from our reviewer Rachel Sheridan.  In her accompanying email, she pointed out - horror of horrors! - that they actually call it the soho theatre.  No capitalisation!

Now I know this is the modern way - playwright debbie tucker green, for example, wants to be called just that, without any capitalisation - and I also know that, in most editions of his work, the poet E. E, Cummings  is known as e. e. cummings (although, according to Wikipedia, he did say that he he preferred the capitalized version), but I am a proud pedant and insist upon capitalisation (notice the “s” there, unlike the American “z” in the quote for Wikipedia).

Does that sound petty?  I suppose it does and, if I restricted myself to so minor a pedantry, it would be, but (notice the Oxford comma!) I really do think language and the way we write it matter.  We live in a visually very sophisticated society, which is a good thing because it means that we have become skilled at reading visual messages, but, at the same time, we seem to be in danger of becoming desensitised to language, and that is dangerous.

Why is it dangerous?  Because the less complex the language we can use, the less complex the concepts and thoughts we can process.

You don’t believe that?  Someone told me the other day that he is distinterested in… well, the subject doesn’t matter.  He actually meant that he is not interested in it, that he is uninterested.  It appears that now those two very distinct and useful words, uniterested and disinterested, have lost their very distinct meanings and have become synonyms.  Thus we have lost a very useful word.  How soon before the concept of disinterestedness is lost?  Come to think of it, there are some who will say it already has been, with people looking first and foremost at “what’s in it for me?”

Now I am not advocating the return to the florid language of times past, nor to the obfuscations of legalese (or any other jargon, for that matter), but sloppy language leads to slopping thinking and slopping thinking leads to errors and confusion.

I probably go too far in the opposite direction - even when texting I will use capitals and proper punctuation: God forbis that I should ever write “c u 2nite”! - and I often delay (sometimes for hours) getting one of my own reviews online because I am searching for exactly the right word.

And it is so easy to lose the appreciation for beautiful language.  When Shakespeare sounds like a foreign language and the reaction to passages from the King James Bible is “eh?”, then we are in deep linguistic trouble.  Of course language must change and develop, and its natural direction is towards greater simplicity - the loss of inflection being a prime example - but far too many changes in modern English are the result of ignorance.  Witness the “grocer’s apostrophe”, where an apostrophe is added to every plural - potato’s , apple’s and so on - as inflection is so far in the past that people do not recognise that ’s is a replacement for the old genitive.

But I am wandering too far!  I simply insist that a little pedantry is a good thing!

13,630,810 attendances, £469,729,135 in box office takings and a VAT contribution of £70m: that’s a pretty good record for one year’s work. That is what the members of the Society of London Theatre did in 2007.  Now add in all the takings from other London venues (unknown, alas) and the additional spend that goes with theatregoing - travel, meals and so on - and you can see why theatre is a major contributor to the capital’s economy.

Now add in the box office receipts and additional spend associated with theatregoing throughout the UK (again, the figures are unknown - to me, at any rate), and, in spite of the howls of protest from the philistines who scream whenever public subsidy is mentioned,  it is perfectly obvious that theatre is a major net contributor to Britain’s economy.

(Proof?  in the financial year in question, ACE paid out £46,981,038 in grants to Regularly Funded Organisations and in Grants for the Arts, which are Lottery funded,  for one-off projects.  That leaves £23,018,962 out of the VAT that SOLT members paid.  OK, we have to take into account local authority support for theatre throughout the country, but if we do that we have to factor in the VAT paid by these theatres - and, of course, the rates, income tax on theatre workers’ salaries and other associated taxation.  No matter how you look at it, the taxpayers get a good deal from theatre subsidy.)

We should celebrate that more than we do.

What does not surprise me is the fact that just under three million (21.6%) of those attending went to see plays as distinct from musicals.  As an aside, a significant proportion of the 2.95m playgoers (722,000 - just a smidgeon under a quarter) were at the National Theatre alone. 

But back to musicals. One only has to look at what is playing in the West End at any one time to see how huge a part of what is on offer musicals are. It would be interesting to compare similar figures from across the country, but I am sure that musicals would still hold the top spot.  And I suspect it will always be so.  Part of the reason, of course, is that musicals are the “feel good” shows par excellence, but there is also the fact that (the big) musicals are spectacle and people love spectacle.  They also appeal to a wider range of people, if only because of the fact that they include so much: songs, dance, acting, comedy, often spectacular sets and costumes. 

Just as a matter of interest, I decided to compare attendances at premier league football games for the same period. Trying to compare (as far as it is possible) like with like, I took into account just the London clubs, and their attendance was 41,88,835 (less than a third of those who attend theatre).  The figures aren’t really comparable, of course, as there are far too many variables and it’s also pretty irrelevant, but it’s interesting to look at the figures all the same.

Yes, I know - I’m rambling.  But it’s so nice to have the chance to do so on a happy subject after a few weeks of the doom and gloom engendered by the ACE funding cuts!

Today is the last day for those organisations affected by the ACE cuts to submit their appeals.  From now on, it’s up to Arts Council.

Or is it?  We’ve reached a situation where both sides are so entrenched that it seems unlikely that anyone will budge.  OK, ACE may make a few concessions - the Bush, for example - but for it to do anything else than to inker with its plans would be to admit it is wrong and there is nothing bureaucrats hate more than admitting to error. 

Some organisations have already accepted the situation - they’re the ones we haven’t heard from - but most are firm in the opposition and some will go ahead with plans for a legal challenge. But if that happens ACE has already said that, when it wins as it is sure it will, it will claim costs, thus making the organisation which it has already deprived of funds pay out more.  Whilst that is undoubtedly legally correct, it would be another PR own goal.

The relationship between ACE and its clients, especially in the theatre world, has never been worse, and even though there are undoubtedly some of its decisions which are perfectly justified, nothing short of stopping the cuts and going through a much more transparent process will restore confidence.  But that would be to admit it was wrong, and that seems highly unlikely, to say the least.

Time for adjudication!  Time, in fact, for culture secretary James Purnell to step in and sort out the mess.  For him not to do so would be a gross dereliction of duty.  He is responsible for the health of the cultural sector and the paymaster of ACE.  He has a duty to both sides in the dispute and it is also incumbent upon him, as a minister of the crown, to ensure that the workings of government and of government-funded quangos are transparent and fair. If he fails to intervene, he will lose all credibility in the eyes of the arts world, and with an Arts Council and a minister lacking the respect and trust of the sector, the arts in England will be in a very parlous state indeed.

Over to you, minister!

What a breath of fresh air Brian McMaster’s Review is! (See our summary)  The title says it all really: Supporting excellence in the arts - from measurement to judgement. 

For far too long the arts have been weighed down under tons of  priorities and targets which must be met to get funding. The quality of the work - McMaster’s excellence - has been forgotten in the indecent haste to follow slavishly every government “initiative” (access, diversity, inclusion, etc. etc. etc.)  and to set “measurable” targets (”How many people will take part?” or  ”How many target groups will be reached?” rather than “Is it good?”). 

Now McMaster, with the support - God bless him! - of Culture Secretary James Purnell, had redressed the balance and is proposing putting the pursuit of artistic excellence at the centre - a place from which it should never, ever have been moved.  It says much about the organisation’s utter lack of understanding of what the arts are about that ACE has allowed itself to be led down the social engineering/target setting road with nary a squeak of protest.

“It is,” Purnell said in his introduction to the Review, “time to trust our artists and our organisations to do what they do best - to create the most excellent work they can - and to strive for what is new and exciting, rather than what is safe and comfortable. To do this we must free artists and cultural organisations from outdated structures and burdensome targets, which can act as millstones around the neck of creativity.”

If I had an order paper, I would wave it in the air and shout, “Hear, hear!”

One is tempted to wonder if the bureaucrats in Great Peter Street knew what McMaster was going to say - and how could they not?  He is, after all, a member of the Council of ACE) - and decided to rush their “reforms” through before his Review was published.  If so, they miscalculated badly. 

They cannot (surely? If they did, why go ahead?) have foreseen the furore their proposals would cause. Protests not just from the affected organisations but from theatregoers, Equity, the Theatres Trust, theatre journalists, Old Uncle Tom Cobbley and all have now been added to by the Conservative Party. Tory culture minister Ed Vaizey said today, making a very pertinent point,  “It is astonishing that the Arts Council was allowed to proceed with cuts before the publication of the McMaster Report.”

He went on to say, “It is completely unacceptable to carry out the biggest cull of arts organisations in history in just six weeks. With the current chief executive leaving in a month, the head of the London arts council already gone, and the new chief executive on holiday in Mexico, arts organisations are entitled to ask who is making these decisions.”

And, we might add, deciding on the timing. 

ACE must cancel the cuts, reinstate the status quo for the time being, give those companies which are genuinely not achieving the chance to put things right, and revisit its whole method of deciding upon who gets what on the basis laid down by McMaster.  If that means we have to wait another year for any changes, so be it. 

And for goodness sake, let’s have some genuine artists at the core of the funding decision making rather than bean-counting, target-setting, social-engineering bureaucrats.

In September 2000, Jo Weston, then chief executive of Arts Council Wales, resigned, following uproar in the Welsh arts world over a string of proposals which showed that the organisation was totally out of touch with the sector it was supposed to serve.  In a feature article at that time, the BTG said, “The organisation has so badly misjudged the mood of the arts community in Wales and has acted with such arrogance that its position and that of Weston have become almost untenable. Hence … Weston’s resignation.”

Some six years later the Welsh Assembly Government - and, in particular, the then Culture Minister Alun Pugh - made the same mistake, in the process sacking the very popular Geraint Talfan Davies as chair of the Arts Council of Wales.  The proposals were defeated in the Assembly and, after a “decent” interval, Alun Pugh lost his job.

If we don’t learn from history, then we are condemned to repeat the mistakes of the past, as Arts Council England is in the process of finding out at the moment.  Chief exec Peter Hewitt won’t be forced to resign because he’s going anyway after ten years at the helm, but the organisation is bound to suffer.

Enough press releases to destroy a small forest, protesting websites springing up all over the place, a petition of no confidence on the government’s e-petitions website, a threat of legal action because of the allegation that ACE is not following its own procedures, a hastily-arranged public meeting between Hewitt and members of Equity, and that’s probably the tip of the iceberg, as I suspect there’s an awful lot more going on behind the scenes.

ACE officers I have spoken to (not for publication) are very much on the defensive, stressing that these are just proposals and they may not be implemented.  “They have the right to put their case and be listened to,” one told me.  Tell that to the staff of the Drill Hall who have already lost their jobs!

Now I am willing to admit that probably a few of the organisations which are to be cut are not really delivering as they should, but have they been told this and given the help they need to put things right, which is what ACE’s own guidelines say should happen?

What is obvious, however, is that this is a PR disaster of major proportions which suggests that ACE, like ACW in 2000 and WAG two years ago, is totally out of touch with its constituency and the major fall-out will be, as the e-petition suggests, a loss of confidence in ACE.

In that Power to the People! article mentioned above, we wrote, “In 1997, this site carried five feature articles which were intensely critical of ACE. There were three in 1998, one last year and none so far in 2000. Why? Have I stopped writing critical pieces because I have become softer? No. It’s because ACE has changed radically, become more responsive and in touch with the reality of the arts world, and that change was forced upon it by pressure from the English arts community.”

It’s drifted away again, though, and one of the reasons is that the influence of practitioners has declined and that of administrators has increased.  ACE has adopted the management ethos and quality has been replaced by quantity (of the number of “priority” boxes ticked) as the major yardstick in making funding decisions.

Since this was written a few hours ago, we have received news of the meeting between Equity members and Peter Hewitt at the Young Vic at which the 500 or so members present passed a vote of no confidence in ACE.  Peter Hewitt responded by saying, “”We do not feel they (those present) are representative of the theatre community as a whole and most certainly not the wider arts community.”  He went on to say that it must be remembered that 75% of RFOs are getting an inflation or above increase.

Oh dear!  Another gigantic PR error!  Does he really think that everyone else will adopt an “I’m all right, Jack” attitude?  Surely he can’t be that dumb?  Almost 200 organisations have been cut without warning, without adequate explanation and given only a few weeks to respond: the rest are more likely to think “It could be us next time” than to dismiss the cuts as irrelevant to them.  And this has happened at a time when ACE has actually got more money than expected from central government!

This kind of comment only illustrates how divorced from the reality of the arts world ACE has become.  It’s as well that Hewitt is going, for if he were staying the chances of ACE recovering the trust of the theatre world, at any rate, would be nil.

One hopes that the furore which has erupted over what has been called the most bloody cull in Arts Council history will teach ACE a much needed lesson and that new chief exec Alan Davey will be able to get the arts world behind him and his organisation again so they can work together for the good of the arts in England rather than being at each others’ throats.