With Of All The People In All The World doing so tremendously well around the world and opening so many doors for us it is frustrating to have a bid to stage a World Version back at home in Birmingham shot down before it even really got going. The Urban Fusion programme is administered by the City Council and they got their money from Advantage West Midlands. The catch when money comes from these regeneration sources is that criteria shift even more radically from Art to Enterprise. The application needed to set out how many jobs would be generated or safe-guarded, how many training places would be available and so on. Clearly we fell woefully short in these directions as our proposal didn’t even reach the ‘short’ list of 20ish projects.

Still, we can only pitch what we want to do, not what we think will stack up the most points in the regeneration stakes. I just hope the projects that are eventually commissioned produce great art as well as great numbers.

James