Making a Noise: Getting It Right, Getting It Wrong in Life, Arts and Broadcasting Book

MAKING A NOISE tells the finely observed story of how this child of Mitteleuropa underwent an education that led him to Cambridge and then to a career at the BBC, and to a second career as an influential arts administrator. John Tusa's story began in Zlin in Czechoslovakia, a newly established Bata (shoe) company town. His father was a company man through and through, and it was Bata which offered him employment in its factory in East Tilbury and also provided visas for Tusa's family. With his mother and older brother, three-year-old Jan Tusa took a tense train journey to England in 1939 just in advance of the invasion of Czechoslovakia. Despite the dislocation, the family had a comfortable existence within a Czech community that resided in a Bata Estate which was almost uniformly similar to the estate in Zlin. In September 1942 young Tusa was sent to a boarding school that had been evacuated to a hotel in Devon, where Tusa felt foreign. The gap that 'first opened between us on that platform at Paddington Station in 1942 never fully closed'. He went to school at Gresham's, Holt, which gave him an experience of Norfolk and its bracing weather. At this point in his life Tusa was now 'indistinguishable from someone British. The necessary protective colouring was in place and I hardly noticed it. The British public school system had done its work.' After National Service and student life at Cambridge, Tusa secured a BBC general traineeship which took him to London and the beginning of a career in broadcasting. He would wear many hats at the BBC. He was chosen to present Newsweek - which would become Newsnight - until 1986, when he became the Director General for the World Service. His move into management is an insightful and well-written political history of the BBC, culminating with the arrival of the notorious John Birt and his administration of the corporation. Tusa elected to leave and endured a brief (and entertainingly unhappy) period as the President of Wolfson College, Cambridge. He was commissioned in 1994 to create a series of millennium-oriented programmes called A View of the Century; then was asked to lead the failing enterprise of the Barbican as their Managing Director. The story of the challenges that Tusa and his administrators faced to make the Barbican an attractive venue and a cohesive arts centre is compelling, its main companies being the Royal Shakespeare Company and the London Symphony Orchestra. Tusa left the Barbican in good shape in 2007, and now devotes his undivided energies to the University of the Arts and to selection as a fellow in the Clore Leadership Programme. This is the wholly absorbing account of a life in the arts, and one written with a generosity of spirit (there is not much mean score-settling). John Tusa's elegant, controlled style gives some of his revelations the quality of stark truth.Read More