On the face of it, there has never been a better time to break into the arts, television, music or journalism. Look at the universities, and you can think that all the bragging about London being the creative capital of Europe, and British cultural dominance replacing British imperial dominance, is a simple statement of fact.
Our institutes of higher education offer training for every type of creative career. You can learn how to act, paint and play classical music, as you always could. But universities now train students for careers that no one imagined needed an academic qualification until recently. Every variety of print and television journalism is on offer up to and including sports journalism. (The pedagogues at the University of East Anglia have stepped forward to intellectualise this rough trade.) Every variety of film-making is covered too. Then we have courses on game design, game development, creative writing (both poetry and prose), animation, popular music (this at London’s Goldsmiths University), arts administration, children’s literature, creative and cultural entrepreneurship (“to commercialise on your creative and cultural practices and/or knowledge” — Goldsmiths again), musical theatre (Guildford University offers both the singing and the dancing), and arts festival management (a niche occupation filled by sharp-eyed dons at Leicester’s De Montfort university).