The British Council's head has €600 million a year to spend on promoting UK culture. Watch and learn, writes Arminta Wallace
My first encounter at the British Council's headquarters, a discreet building in a quiet street off Trafalgar Square, is revealing. Three bright young receptionists float in a space-age foyer, complete with trendy purple light wall to starboard; the result, I'm told, of a recent refurbishment. As a visitor I feel obliged to murmur something polite and vaguely admiring. One of the receptionists raises an incredulous eyebrow. "You should try sitting next to that thing all day," she says, calmly but firmly, giving the light wall a very dark glance indeed.
Clearly, forthrightness counts for as much at the British Council these days as the stiff upper lips of old. But then, as it is at pains to stress, people are the mainstay of this sprawling cultural organisation, which has offices in 110 countries. And people are always surprising. Up in the penthouse office of the council's director-general, David Green, coffee has already been poured into enormous white Jasper Conran cups when I enter.
This time I can't help but make admiring noises. The view from the window that runs the length of the room is like one of those panoramic postcards of London they sell in the square below. From this lofty eyrie Green looks down on the London Eye, the London Aquarium and, as he points out with a wry smile, the foreign office and 10 Downing Street.
Whitehall, of course, is where the official power lies. But the area of cultural relations has a strange and often unpredictable power of its own. As the council's outgoing chairwoman, Helena Kennedy QC, puts it in her introductory note to the most recent annual report, "sometimes poetry finds consensus where politics cannot". Green smiles again. There aren't many positive stories coming out of the Middle East these days, but he has one. "When the Iraq war began we had to close operations in the nine countries affected by the war," he says. "That meant closing a number of our language-teaching centres. When we reopened them we gave all our students the opportunity to come back and continue their courses, begin a new programme or get their money back.
"I can't remember the exact figure of those who chose to return, but it was well over 90 per cent. So while the war may have cast Britain in a bad light in some quarters, and while they may have disliked the role the UK played in the war, people were still very keen to continue studying English and maintain their personal links with the UK."
The council reopened its offices in Iraq in August, and the courage of the staff who have undertaken to deliver its educational and research partnership programmes in Baghdad and Basra is undeniable. In fact, says Green, security is fast becoming his biggest headache, and not just in Iraq. "It's what keeps me awake at night," he says. "By the very nature of our work - providing library resources, language classes and so on - we need to be accessible to the public in the countries where we work. Yet we also need to make sure, as far as we reasonably can, that our staff can work in safety."
His other concern, he says, is how the council can do more. I look for a trace of a smile, but this time there is none. More? In the course of a brief conversation Green has mentioned a jaw-dropping array of activities: a human-rights project in China that is looking at the process of trial by jury and at the potential for legal reform, a scheme that places teachers from England in schools abroad (including a number in Ireland) to examine issues such as bullying or the teaching of reading, and a technical programme that saw 10,000 people from developing countries in Africa take part in training projects in the UK. One highly successful scheme connects the science departments of a university in Uganda with one in the UK, another will host a day of lectures and informal discussions on climate change, called Café Scientifique, at this week's European Union Contest for Young Scientists, in Dublin.
For those who have encountered the British Council mainly in an arts context, through its sponsorship of plays, exhibitions and concerts - it is, for example, supporting Declan Donnellan's Russian-language production of Twelfth Night and his Cheek by Jowl Othello, both at Dublin Theatre Festival - this may come as a surprise. But it stems quite naturally from the council's wide-ranging definition of culture. "Essentially," says Green, "we take the view that culture is everything one does while one is living. Our range of activities covers the arts, governance, human rights, development, language teaching, science. In our view that's what makes up a cultural identity and what makes people engage with each other. Our work is very much about conversation and exchange."
Set up in 1934 to counter fascist propaganda - Green's first visit here as director-general, this week, is to mark the council's 70th anniversary - the British Council began life as the British Committee for Relations with Other Countries.
"From the beginning," says Green, "there was a recognition that to set up a simple propaganda organisation in response wasn't a very bright way to do things." So the organisation was given independence from the government; "the technical term, is a non-departmental public body, but we're also a charity."
The council was put in an awkward position last month when it emerged that one of its press officers had written a series of pseudonymous articles for the Sunday Telegraph, in which he compared Muslims to Nazis, claimed that "all Muslims, like all dogs, share certain characteristics" and remarked: "It is the black heart of Islam, not its black face, to which millions object." The council quickly sacked him.
It was an embarrassing controversy for a cultural-relations organisation with a turnover of more than €600 million a year.
A third of that money comes from the foreign office, another third comes from teaching English and administering exams, and most of the rest comes from contracts undertaken on behalf of such bodies as the European Union or the UK's department for international development. Policy decisions are made by the board, whose members include the singer-songwriter Billy Bragg and the French ambassador to Greece, Bruno Delaye.
"That arm's-length relationship with government is important," says Green, "because it allows us to make decisions - for example, about which artists to exhibit, which musicians to tour - and also to work in the human-rights field, which wouldn't be possible for government organisations. There's always a certain tension in that the foreign office wants to portray the UK in the best possible light, as we do, but we want to be honest. We want to talk about the UK warts and all. We've put on some very controversial plays which paint a bleak picture of life in the UK, for example, but we feel that's important, because we want to show the creativity which is also there."
Born in the British Virgin Islands, where his father, a conscientious objector during the second World War, had gone to set up a secondary-school system at the behest of the Methodist Missionary Society, Green had ambitions to be an architect but at 18 went to teach in Pakistan with Voluntary Service Overseas, eventually ending up as its director- general. He has worked with a children's charity and taught in schools in Yorkshire. A keen painter, he held an exhibition of his work in 1978; he is also very interested in theatre and music and directed 70 children in a production of Peter Maxwell Davies's Cinderella in 1990.
With Ireland mulling over the possibility of setting up a cultural-relations body and asking what the purpose and structure of such an institution should be, does he have any advice for those who may be involved in creating it? He does - and for those who may be wondering what chance we could possibly have to mimic the British Council, with its huge income, it has nothing to do with budgets. "I think you have to be clear about what you're trying to achieve," he says. "Unless you're got that really clear, obviously you can't be effective.
"Our purpose statement is 'to build mutually beneficial relationships between people from the UK and overseas and to develop an appreciation of the UK's creative ideas and achievements'." He laughs. "We quibbled over that for 10 months, battled over every word. But when I was doing some work for the 70th anniversary recently I came across a purpose statement from 1939 which was almost identical, in that it spoke of exchange and long-term relationships. Despite all the changes in the interim - the rise of new media, the expansion into many different countries and so on - our purpose has remained the same."
Which is a consoling thought for the man whose first contact with the British Council landed him in prison. When he was teaching in Pakistan as a teenager he went to his council mentor for permission to travel out of the country. "In those days," he says, "VSO didn't have the volunteer network it does now: it relied on the British Council to look after volunteers. The rule was, if you wanted to leave the country you had to get permission. So I went and asked if I could go to Afghanistan on holiday. And the guy from the council said yes, that's fine - and then he added, as an afterthought, 'My car is stuck in Kabul. Would you like to drive it back?' " Great idea, thought Green: save a few hours on overcrowded trains. "Everything was fine until I got back to the border with Pakistan, where, quite reasonably, the immigration officer asked for proof that I was the owner of the vehicle. And of course I had no means at all of proving anything. So I was put in jail for a night - in a really horrible, dirty, mosquito-infested cell - and told that if the British Council man didn't arrive the next day to get me I'd be brought back to Kabul and charged with illegal possession of a vehicle. Luckily, he came in time, and I was all right." He looks out of the window and chuckles. "And, luckily, it didn't put me off the British Council. Too much."
