LONDON: The financial power of the creative industries in the UK — comparable, we’re told, to the financial-services sector, and growing at twice the speed of the general economy — was the subject of a report from the Work Foundation published the day before the change of premiers. This was partly because of the risk that the foreword by culture secretary Tessa Jowell might have a sell-by date, but also because the celebration of entertainment — or “knowledge economy” in the report’s coinage — feels instinctively more Blairite than Brownite.

The government-commissioned survey praises our various fun factories (theatres, museums, radio, TV, computers) for being unusually innovative and responsive to the demands of the consumer. A large photograph of David Tennant as Doctor Who holds up the restored timelord, whose adventures are filmed in Wales, as an exemplar of job creation, regional investment and pleasure-giving. Besides the BBC, the British Library, V&A and National Theatre are singled out as, you might say, the Microsofts of the knowledge economy.

What’s fascinating about that list, after a decade in which economic rhetoric has hymned the power of the market or the public-private partnership, is that these cultural powerhouses have received huge and sustained state aid, either through grants or the licence fee. Anticipating this objection, the Work Foundation’s Will Hutton encourages us to view these handouts as “investment” rather than “subsidy”. Yet it’s still startling to read arguments applied to the arts that few politicians or lobbyists would now dare invoke in relation to railways, telecommunications or post.

The traditional defence of national handouts and quasi-nationalised structures in theatre, museums and broadcasting is that the arts are different from business: an uncontrolled market will encourage cheap, weak work. I’ve always accepted that argument, but the Work Foundation seems, like a modish movie, to be running parallel and contradictory narratives, in which culture is favourably compared with other industries, while the basis for the comparison is often false.For example, the area in which the fun businesses are most vulnerable is productivity. The report questions whether the manufacturers of entertainment always do enough to maximise the impact of their successes. A conventional business that discovers it has stumbled on an innovative product to which the public responds will usually rush out as many copies as possible.

But culture, though a huge industry, often has more in common with tiny, specialised businesses — such as the makers of premium sports cars and fashion, or jewellery of personalised design — in that the limited supply may be integral to the effect. The most extreme case is theatre, where the optimum product may be available to only 200 people a night for the fortnight before the cast become bored.

The same applies in television. The demand for Doctor Who is so strong, conventional economic logic suggests that “roll-out” should be “maximised” beyond the paltry dozen or so episodes a year. But, as the creation of an EastEnders factory proved — its pistons straining to pump out yards of shoddy mockney dialogue — maximising the roll-out of shows can rapidly remove the qualities to which the public respond.

The most vivid example of this fault-line underlying the production line is cinema. As the seemingly unbreakable chain of sequels filling our multiplexes demonstrates, film studios are efficient at giving the audience more and more of what they seem to like. But, while a consumer might reasonably consume the same favoured beer or chocolate bar throughout a lifetime, taste works differently in films. While the hundredth Bud or Snickers might exactly replicate the first, there is something about the process of getting to the third Spider-Man that corrupts or poisons the recipe. Skewing the rules of supply and demand, cultural creativity is often inimical to repetition: success can rapidly turn bespoke into off-the-peg.

So the Work Foundation’s commendable attempt to give culture the status of other businesses stumbles because it isn’t — and shouldn’t be — just another industry.

—Dawn/The Guardian News Service