Melanie Lewis proposes a hopeful, innovative and prosperous future for the Cultural sector
Melanie Lewis is the new Chair of Trustees for the Association for Cultural Enterprises. She has a brilliant track record within the sector, being named as one of The Stage 100’s Most Influential People of 2024.
With Melanie as CEO, Shakespeare North Playhouse has flourished as a hub for creativity, innovation, and community engagement. Her strategic vision has not only elevated the artistic excellence of the theatre but has also fostered a vibrant and inclusive cultural space that resonates with audiences far and wide. Plus the venue's success and its community focus has brought commercial benefits to Prescot's High Street.
In this interview - recorded at ICC Wales where the Association for Cultural Enterprises hosted their 2024 annual conference - Mel and host Tom Dawson map out a future for the cultural sector. What will be the biggest challenges? How can the sector react, adapt and thrive?
Mel is a positive and purposeful voice and this episode is full of useful insights and strategic vision that can help people and organisations at all levels within the cultural sector build towards a vibrant and prosperous future.
This episode is sponsored by King & McGaw, the market leader in print on demand framed and unframed prints. King & McGaw, proudly supplying the cultural sector for over forty years.
Tom Dawson: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Arts and Culture podcast from the Association for Cultural Enterprises. I'm Tom Dawson. In the 1590s, a remarkable theatre stood in the town of Prescott near Liverpool. The playhouse hosted performances made possible by the Earl of Derby, resident at the nearby Knowsley Hall. It is thought that it was the only purpose built indoor playhouse outside of London.
Tom Dawson: The players brought with them new shows from a popular playwright of the day, a certain William Shakespeare, who were grateful for the Earl's support. This is the inspiration for Shakespeare North Playhouse, today in Prescott, part of an important regeneration project designed to reawaken and reinvigorate the town, bringing opportunity and excitement as part of the wider Liverpool City region.
Tom Dawson: My guest today is Melanie Lewis, the CEO of Shakespeare North Playhouse, member of the Liverpool City Region Business and Enterprise Board, and most importantly, the new Chair of the Association [00:01:00] for Cultural Enterprises. Before I speak to Mel, I'm genuinely thrilled to introduce our sponsor, King & McGaw.
Tom Dawson: King & McGaw have supplied bespoke printed art products to the world's greatest institutions, including the National Gallery, Tate, V& A and MoMA, for over 40 years. Their in house designers create and produce best selling products, from prints and postcard packs to signed limited editions for blockbuster exhibitions and innovative museum shops.
Tom Dawson: An early adopter of print on demand and dropship technology, they are the market leader in print on demand framed and unframed prints. King & McGaw proudly supplying the cultural sector for over 40 years. You can find them at kingandmcgaw. com or at many cultural online shops. And as both a client and a customer, I can honestly say their quality and professionalism is outstanding.
Tom Dawson: Thank you to King & McGaw. Now, Mel was already on my wish list of guests before I knew she would be chair of our board of trustees. So [00:02:00] this was the perfect excuse to sit down with Mel at our recent annual conference at the ICC Wales.
Tom Dawson: Hi, Mel. Thanks for joining us on the podcast. We are sat in the foyer of the ICC Wales. It's the first day of our annual conference, and there's a nice hubbub in the background. The energy is rising. So before we get on to talking about you as our new chair, you're all at Shakespeare North Playhouse. Give us a sense of the real Melanie, two truths and a lie, and I'm gonna try and guess your lie.
Melanie Lewis: Okay, I sang karaoke at the Chinese embassy, and I sang Dolly Parton's Jolene. I was in a bit of a difficult situation when we first opened Shakespeare North Playhouse. We had a show, Midsummer Night's Dream. On the last show, one of our actors was unwell. And up until about 15 minutes before, I was in costume, going on [00:03:00] as Helena.
Melanie Lewis: Which I was terrified! And My dad is the real Father Christmas.
Tom Dawson: Oh, come on Mel. You've made that easy for me. Unless this is breaking news here. It is breaking news. Father Christmas is real, obviously, for any young people listening to cultural podcasts. So, the first two are true, which are pretty good anecdotes.
Tom Dawson: I don't want to spend the entire podcast talking about either of them, but, um, how did you enjoy filling in as a standby for Midsummer Night's Dream?
Melanie Lewis: I didn't. That's my lie.
Tom Dawson: That's the lie? It is. What?
Melanie Lewis: My dad is really Father Christmas. And we're going to need to get photographic evidence for the podcast and for the website.
Tom Dawson: You've thrown me.
Melanie Lewis: My dad is really Father Christmas.
Tom Dawson: This is breaking news. It is.
Melanie Lewis: When you see the pictures, I promise you, you'll be like, Oh no, Mel's dad is really Father Christmas.
Tom Dawson: All this time, and he was just [00:04:00] living on the Mersey.
Melanie Lewis: Who knew?
Melanie Lewis: Yeah, living his best life.
Tom Dawson: Okay so I'm actually kind of relieved you didn't have to, um, stand by the stage.
Melanie Lewis: I didn't, I could never have done that.
Tom Dawson: So, I've heard Rufus Norris, Artistic Director of the National Theatre, did do that on the Dorfman stage once. I think he genuinely did, just grab the script and go on stage as a, as a good sport.
Tom Dawson: But, you know. So, I do have to ask, how does one get into the Chinese Embassy?
Melanie Lewis: When I was working at National Museums Liverpool. We hosted the Terracotta Warriors and as part of that there was an embassy dinner and at the end of the embassy dinner there was karaoke and the Chinese ambassador pointed at me and said, right Mel, it's your turn.
Melanie Lewis: And I went to the book and I thought, well, classically, you know, I'm a Scouser, I'll find the Beatles and the Beatles were not in the book. And I panicked, searching through the pages. And thought, I can do Dolly Parton. Yeah, that's fine. And the rest is history.
Tom Dawson: Do you like karaoke? No. No?
Melanie Lewis: Okay. I was absolutely petrified [00:05:00] the whole time.
Melanie Lewis: And I think that that's why it lives long in the memory.
Tom Dawson: So at the end of conference, you're not getting up with Gordon and doing
Melanie Lewis: no islands in the stream.
Tom Dawson: Yeah, we'll look forward to that. Um, okay. Let's let's talk a bit about dissociation and we're very lucky to have you as our brand new chair. Caroline Brown from the British Library is sadly leaving us, but we'll, we'll always still be in touch. You're stepping into her shoes. So my first question is why, why, you know, you're, you're a busy person. You've got a, you know, a busy job. Why choose to take on a, you know, a voluntary role and chair of the association for cultural enterprises?
Melanie Lewis: I think for me, the association got a special place in my career and I forged personally, an awful lot of friendships through the association.
Melanie Lewis: I think watching Caroline's leadership and the way that the association's developed over the last decade has been inspirational. I [00:06:00] wouldn't have done any other voluntary role in this way. You're right, being a chief exec of a cultural organization. organization is really, really busy, really time consuming and I wouldn't have put myself forward for anything else.
Melanie Lewis: It was when the association came up I really thought that's a place where I want to be. They're people I want to be working with. That was essentially it and the more that I've got to know about the role and the more I've got to speak to Caroline and Gordon and the rest of the team, the more I know that I can contribute, I can support and Yeah, I can hopefully take the association with you guys and the rest of the team to the next place over the, over the next kind of couple of years.
Melanie Lewis: We're in a very challenging set of circumstances and it's going to take an awful lot for us as a sector to be able to remain. in a position where we're thriving. And I want to be part of that conversation and [00:07:00] that debate and help people find the solutions and make sure that we are, we keep pushing our bottom line, but we're also making a contribution to wider society.
Tom Dawson: So great. I mean, we've talked in the past about the strain on funding and budgets. And you used a kind of really interesting phrase, you talked about how resilience actually makes us more entrepreneurial, more creative and more collaborative, which I think is something certainly we've seen as an association.
Tom Dawson: I mean, is that very much how you see your role and our role in the sector?
Melanie Lewis: I do. Yeah, I think we have to tell our story. We need to articulate our value, not the pounds, shillings and pence of it. We need to do that as well. But I think we need to talk about the value of what we as a sector, as a cultural enterprise, what we bring to the wider sector, but also beyond that, what we're bringing to society, what we're doing for skills, what we're doing for business.
Melanie Lewis: and ethical trading and [00:08:00] trying to work towards net zero. There are some really groundbreaking things that are happening within cultural enterprises that the rest of the business sector should be looking up, taking notice and replicating. And I do think that we have demonstrated Time and time again in arts and culture that we know how to innovate and we know when times are tough, we will find resilience together and we will, we will bring those new brilliant ideas to the fore.
Melanie Lewis: So we've done it before and we'll do it again. And it, yeah, it feels tough right now. It does. But what gets me through is my peers and my network, which the association has given me. And I think that the association moving forward can
Tom Dawson: Right. And you've referenced our relatively new Chief Exec, Gordon Morrison.
Tom Dawson: So we've got relatively new Chief Exec, relatively new Chair. Yeah. I mean, what would you like to see happen over the next few [00:09:00] years? What can we do to support our members and the wider sector? Where can we be most effective, do you think?
Melanie Lewis: I think largely, we've got to take inspiration from the work that Jill and Caroline have done so far.
Melanie Lewis: The transformation of the association over the last several years. decades has been wonderful, really, really wonderful. And it's how do you use that then as your platform to move forward? There's a piece about advocacy, as I mentioned before, and that is to the people that we serve, how do our visitors to our cultural institutions, how do they see.
Melanie Lewis: The retail spaces or the food and beverage spaces or the commercial income streams that we're driving. How do they see the value in that? And then I do think it's about policy. How are we making sure that structurally in this country we are funded appropriately? And from a commercial perspective and a cultural enterprise perspective.
Melanie Lewis: How are we making sure that there is [00:10:00] investment for us to thrive? And so I see that as a really big opportunity moving forward. We're at a time when we know we've got a general election this year, and in that general election comes change, and change gives us opportunity. So we need to be part of that conversation about What are our politicians?
Melanie Lewis: What are the policy makers? How are they seeing us? How are they investing in us? How are we part of their manifestos? That is where we'll see change. I think we are unique in our institutions, particularly the commercial leaders, where we are demonstrating. Economic impact where we're demonstrating return on investments.
Melanie Lewis: So that's the investment we should be going after. We're in our bricks and mortar. Should we be building? What should we do about our online presence and our digital presence? And how do we use that technology? And perhaps even AI, how are we using it to make [00:11:00] sure that, you know, the experiences that we are delivering are groundbreaking and potentially we sell that to the rest of the world.
Tom Dawson: I think particularly if you go to other leading institutions and you look at their retail events, catering offer, I think you realize how far we've come. You talked earlier about how other businesses could actually learn from the cultural sector. But I'm interested in your career journey.
Tom Dawson: So you sort of, you've gone the other way around in some ways compared to people in this sector. So you started off, some of your earlier roles were for football clubs, weren't they? With Blackburn Rovers and Everton. You're an Everton supporter, right?
Melanie Lewis: I am. I better get that one right. Season ticket holder.
Tom Dawson: Okay, good. Where did you kind of, at what point did you go, right, I'm going to move from that kind of type of business into a cultural organisation? National Museums Liverpool, how did that come about? Was it by chance or design?
Melanie Lewis: There's an interesting story. I think largely, I've done just over a decade working in football, [00:12:00] And it is incredibly commercial.
Melanie Lewis: And so it gave me a lot of the skills and a lot of the tools to be able to transfer into arts and culture at a time when I think institutions were not particularly commercial. So that gave me personally an advantage. And I think the reason why I wanted to. Transition was my personal feelings about needing to be, work for an organization that's more purpose driven, that has social impact.
Melanie Lewis: And football clubs do do that. Not to be disparaging about football clubs, but I needed a space that had more of that, say. And interestingly, I've been playing around with this for a while, back around 2009, 2010. And interestingly enough, I actually got married at the Maritime Museum in Liverpool and in that experience of being the client of a commercial entity at an arts and [00:13:00] cultural venue, every single human that I met along the way, I thought, they're brilliant people, they're fantastic people.
Melanie Lewis: And then I started to think, I need to work in this sector. This is a sector that is just full of brilliant, brilliant people. And I am very much about the team dynamic and who you work with and people that you choose to spend so much time with. So for me, being purpose driven and about social impact and, you know, how do we cultivate and use art really as a vehicle to do that.
Melanie Lewis: I started to think, I want to go and work at National Museums Liverpool. How am I going to do that? So then I, I kind of called them up and I said, Are there any jobs going? And they said, Um, well actually, there is a job going. And it wasn't quite the job that was suited to me, and you know, there was a bit of, I took a bit of a step down to be able to go into National Museums Liverpool, but I knew it was the right thing for me to do.
Melanie Lewis: And the rest, they say, is history, because obviously he then [00:14:00] was commercial director, which turns into the exec director of the museum. Commercial and business developments at National Museums Liverpool and was there for a decade. But a weird quirk of I got married in the Maritime Museum.
Tom Dawson: Amazing, that's lovely.
Tom Dawson: If you could say to someone working in the cultural sector, was there one thing you brought over from Working in sport and football in terms of commercial thinking or practice that maybe was, was new to the cultural sector. Is there something that you would?
Melanie Lewis: Yeah, the business modeling side of things and needing to be able to prove that something commercially was going to work.
Melanie Lewis: A lot of institutions do this now and it's, you know, nobody thinks about doing it. We've got templates to do it. There's the business plan in there. But I think when I first started at National Museums Liverpool, it was about the proof of concept. So how do we say if you're going to spend 100, 000 on refurbing your shop, well what is that going to do?
Melanie Lewis: At what point is it going to [00:15:00] pay back? What does it do to the people that we serve? And almost one of the KPIs that sit behind that, and the financial and the data rigour, that wasn't necessarily there back in 2010. But I think that that's now commonplace. And actually, I would say, having the ambition around commercial.
Melanie Lewis: So when I, again, first started at National Museums Liverpool, I think that we couldn't really use that language of commercial. And that wasn't just National Museums Liverpool, I think that that was an industry. situation, you couldn't really use commercial. So we softened the edges and said we were income generation.
Melanie Lewis: But still, I think that that got us, it got us to a position where we could have a seat around the table about our value and our worth within our institutions. And funnily enough, I was talking about that with Caroline this morning, about how things have changed over this last decade. We're not, We're not necessarily asking for a seat around that table anymore.
Melanie Lewis: We're at the table, we're having the debates and people are listening to the impact that we [00:16:00] have as commercial professionals and what we can do for the wider organization. It's one of the best things about spending all this time in arts and culture.
Tom Dawson: Well, what's really interesting hearing you talk is talking about being unapologetically commercial, but also you obviously clearly feel strongly about having that social purpose and the role of.
Tom Dawson: culture and arts in the community. There's a balance there, isn't there? And I guess that's what I've, I've got from Shakespeare North Playhouse. It's an incredible award winning building, already, it's a relatively new venue. But it's in an unusual location for an arts organisation, particularly performing arts, isn't it?
Tom Dawson: Compared with traditional venues. We're in a kind of, would you call it like a working class town outside Liverpool? So, what was the decision to base it there?
Melanie Lewis: Some of it historic, and some of it about regeneration. So it's in a town called Prescott, which is halfway between Liverpool and Manchester, and this was an industrial town.
Melanie Lewis: Needs a fair [00:17:00] bit of investment, it needs regeneration, there's a lot of deprivation there. And so what the council did, and this is a borough in Liverpool City region called Knowsley, the council were incredibly brave and they said we're gonna give this town purpose and we're gonna do it through arts and culture.
Melanie Lewis: At a time when no one was doing that. No one was. And they, they infested significant amount of money in a capital build for a new theatre in the North. Not only that, they were going to base it around Shakespeare. And you think to yourself, why? I remember doing 4, when I'd not long started, and they, and they said, why?
Melanie Lewis: And you could almost hear in their voice that they couldn't quite get it. Um, I was rather sarcastic and said, why not? Left the tumbleweeds, you will know Tom, silence on radio is, they hate it. But it was almost about, we were [00:18:00] saying to the residents of Prescott and Liverpool City region, it is your right to demand culture.
Melanie Lewis: You should demand art and culture and to give them the opportunity to do that, the freedom to be able to do that. That's why Shakespeare in Old Playhouse was born there. There is also huge historical context. So 400 years ago, in Prescott, was the first play. purpose built theater outside of London in the whole of the country.
Melanie Lewis: And that was largely to do with how Prescott was situated. So it was, it was almost like the traveling town when you were going north to west, east to south, you know, it was where you stopped. Essentially there were more pubs and hotels and hostilities than there were like residents in Prescott. And so there was a playhouse.
Melanie Lewis: So it was a hospitality town. It was a fun play town. And also a quarter of a mile away from where the Playhouse is now, you've got Knowsley Hall, which is where Lord Derby currently resides, [00:19:00] and his ancestors have resided there for, well, over 500 years. We now have the 19th there. The 5th a patron of the arts had a troupe, uh, sponsored a troupe of traveling actors called Lord Strange that then in time became Lord Chamberlain's men. There's no hard evidence, there's no smoking gun that says Shakespeare was at Knowsley Hall, but we know that he was part of that group that travels and so it's likely that Shakespeare was around Prescott.
Melanie Lewis: He was Possibly staying at Lord Derby's estate, so we have that link. It's also about saying we can all own Shakespeare, we can all own our heritage and our culture. And that's why it's been so much of a success, is that you have residents of Prescott saying this is my Shakespeare, this is my culture, this is my theatre, this is my playhouse.
Melanie Lewis: And then you have an international audience saying, but we want to learn more about this heritage. About, where was Shakespeare? Was he there? [00:20:00] It's, it's exciting. And, you know, we're using Shakespeare as a vehicle to retell stories and allow people to explore their creativity. So, it's a, it's a magic book.
Melanie Lewis: It is a, it's a stunning project. You can tell I'm incredibly passionate about it. And it would take something incredibly passionate for me to leave National Museums Liverpool because I loved it there as well. And I've been really lucky throughout my whole career that I've loved every single job I've had.
Melanie Lewis: I've been really, really lucky, so. Yeah, it's a, it's a special project, Shakespeare North.
Tom Dawson: It sounds it. And how have the, the people of Prescott taken to it? What's the engagement like with the local community?
Melanie Lewis: Yeah, it's brilliant. So we try to be more than a playhouse. So we open quite early in the morning.
Melanie Lewis: We stay open late at night, even if we don't have a show. And there's a wraparound of the traditional theatre business. that's around community engagement. So we have a lot of education. So a lot of school groups come in. We [00:21:00] have a lot of community groups. So we'll do things like we have a games club where multi generational people are coming to do jigsaws or playing chess.
Melanie Lewis: So we have quite a lot of our older audience will come in and teach younger people chess. It's animated all of the time. We have a program called Baby Bards, where the toddlers come in with their carers or their grandparents or their parents, and they're learning the first skills of oracy or literacy.
Melanie Lewis: And it's just wonderful to see that you're using Shakespeare in a way that is not traditional play, it's not traditional text, and it doesn't need to be. So the community have owned it in that sense. We talk about it being our Shakespeare North Playhouse, it's not mine. It doesn't belong to the council, it belongs to the people.
Melanie Lewis: It's lovely to see.
Tom Dawson: I'm just thinking, you know, what are the, as the Chief Executive of a performing arts organisation now, what are the [00:22:00] biggest challenges on your horizon that are kind of in your inbox at the moment I suppose?
Melanie Lewis: It's money. But money is the issue. But the money is the issue for every business and money is the issue for every household and every human Currently, I think for theatre in particular It's challenging because we've got costs increasing in terms of raw materials about how do we produce shows?
Melanie Lewis: We have got and I think this replicates quite a lot across all arts and cultural sectors With the cost of living crisis, people obviously don't have the disposable income that they previously had. So they're making choices about where are they spending their time. They would have come to three shows a year and now they're only choosing one.
Melanie Lewis: So we are considering how we program differently to be able to allow people to use the space or how are we thinking about our ticket and pricing. And the conference has quite a few sections and a few talks today about ticketing pricing. [00:23:00] And I'm really keen to see what other institutions are doing around that.
Melanie Lewis: But I guess it's, it's trying to find the balance to the point of breakeven. So that we can continue to do the great work. And I wish that that wasn't necessarily the case. I think, as a Chief Exec, when I speak to All of my peers and all of my other chief execs, we wish that the proportion of time that we were talking about funding and what the profit and loss looks like and what the balance sheet looks like and what the cash flow looks like, we wish we weren't talking about it as much as we were.
Melanie Lewis: But I think that we are, all of us, determined to make this work, to find a way to keep world class theatre on our stages, to keep world class exhibitions on our walls and to make sure that people are engaging with arts and culture because we go back to that social purpose it's without arts and culture i'm not entirely sure that we have a soul so it's really critically important that [00:24:00] particularly for cultural enterprises we know that as commercial leaders That's what we're enabling, that's what we're making happen within our institutions.
Tom Dawson: Our last episode of the podcast was talking about local government funding cuts and that's obviously a really big problem for a lot of council funded organisations. So it's really interesting to hear about Knowsley and their decision to invest in culture. You would obviously say that's worked wonders for the community and brought in a lot of investment and employment.
Tom Dawson: How do we convince local authorities and funders and central government? To value investment in the arts when, when it is often seen as a luxury.
Melanie Lewis: And I think that that's going back to the piece earlier about articulating our value. So what more do we give to society? What more can we do? And, and, you know, happy to use Shakespeare North's Playhouse as a
Melanie Lewis: case study for that. You've got a council who not only invested in the [00:25:00] infrastructure, the bricks and mortar, but are continuing to invest in making sure that world class theatre and world class art is available to their residents. And what is that doing for the regeneration of the place? So when we look at the high streets, which is we're at the bottom of the high street and the high street was in the town that we're at.
Melanie Lewis: We are booking the trend in terms of how that's performing. So we're having a impact beyond arts and culture. We're having an impact beyond the department in central government that is responsible for arts and culture. We're having an impact on the economy. So where you have the national average is about 11 percent on retail voids on high streets at the minute.
Melanie Lewis: Prescott is 7. 5%, so bucking the trend. Prescott is building, and Knowsley, is building more houses than any other borough. I think it's in the top 5 of [00:26:00] house building, because we're creating a place. that people want to live and want to work, so we're only ever going to move to a place in the world where, for our jobs or for our family, where we know that we can have a good lifestyle and that we, and art and culture, feed into that.
Melanie Lewis: So we know that people aren't moving into Knowsley because it has Good infrastructure links, it has good culture, it has a good night time economy, and all of these things interlink. So it's about, when I said about talking about broader articulation to other sectors about exactly what do we bring, talk about that heart and soul of a place, you know, that is what we are delivering.
Melanie Lewis: When we think about all the great cities around the country, Cardiff, Glasgow, Birmingham, um, Nottingham, we're thinking of the cultural things that we want to do when we're there. We don't [00:27:00] necessarily think about how great their train stations are, although we, we need great train stations. But you know, we're not thinking about that.
Melanie Lewis: We're thinking about, well, what plays am I going to see and what museums am I going to go to? And that is the story that we need to be telling to central governments. Because that brings inbound investments. So probably one of the other volunteer roles that I have is for the Liverpool Combined Authority.
Melanie Lewis: So we have a Metro Mayor. My only other kind of voluntary thing that I do. I'm part of the Business and Enterprise Board. And one of the things that I am constantly championing is how arts and culture make the place. They give us our identity. They give us our reason for being somewhere. It's our humanity.
Melanie Lewis: So if we start telling that story If, for instance, Liverpool are going to a tech giant, or a pharmaceutical giant, and they're choosing between Liverpool and Madrid, why would they move to Liverpool over Madrid? Why would they move [00:28:00] to Berlin over Liverpool? It's going to be about the cultural infrastructure.
Melanie Lewis: So these are the links that we need to start making and we need to be advocating to Well, anyone that will listen, but we need to be advocating to beyond DCMS into Treasury into Department for Education, Department for Health. If we can start to do that and do that really well, then we will start to see a step change.
Melanie Lewis: And I think for our local authorities. They are under the most immense pressure and I don't doubt for a second those local authorities in Birmingham and Nottingham and other parts of the South West in particular, who are saying that they can't fund culture anymore. They're not taking it lightly. They wish that they were not having to make those choices, of course.
Melanie Lewis: But we need to help them understand that by putting the pressure on our cultural infrastructure, we're not creating a legacy or we're not [00:29:00] building an infrastructure for next generation. We're leaving a problem behind for the next decades and the decades after that.
Tom Dawson: So, what are you looking forward to in the future?
Tom Dawson: There's a lot of food for thought there, but let's end on a hopeful note.
Melanie Lewis: Yeah, I am hopeful. It goes back to through resilience and collaboration, you find the answer. If we open up that dialogue and start talking about how brilliant we are, and we are brilliant, you know, our arts and culture is phenomenal.
Melanie Lewis: And I think that we will find the solutions. We will work together in partnership. And I'm, as I said before, I'm excited to see how technology drives that. I'm excited to see how we originate. We come up with brand new projects and things that, that perhaps have never happened within arts and culture before.
Melanie Lewis: That's what gets me excited. You know, I, I think that how we make our arts and culture relevant, [00:30:00] that is critically important. And I think once we get to that point where we've got products and services that we know are relevant. We as the commercial leaders know that we can monetize that. Let's be crude about it, we know that we can monetize that too.
Melanie Lewis: People are still going to go out, people are still going to do things, people are still going to interact with us. It's just about finding the way forward that is sustainable. Meaningful to them that builds up that loyalty. There's a tiny part of me that thinks that, that we might just all decide, yeah, it, it's difficult, but let's have fun.
Melanie Lewis: Anyway, let's go and have fun. Anyway, let's go to the play. Let's go to the gallery. Let's go and interact. Yeah, so I am hopeful for the future. I am, and I think that we've got some. Brilliant, brilliant people within our sector. Thought leaders, innovators. We will find a way.
Tom Dawson: Brilliant. Thank you, Mel. Great to speak to you.
Tom Dawson: And I'll see you in the karaoke bar, right?
Melanie Lewis: I will not be singing.
Tom Dawson: Just the bar? Yeah, just the bar. Okay. What's your [00:31:00] karaoke song?
Tom Dawson: Oh, no. You don't want to hear me sing.
Melanie Lewis: I don't think the Chinese embassy would be too happy. There'd be a diplomatic incident. Let’s glossed over that.
Tom Dawson: Thank you, Mel.
Melanie Lewis: No worries.
Tom Dawson: Thanks for listening to the Arts and Culture podcast from the Association for Cultural Enterprises, representing over 1600 venues across the UK and beyond. And thanks again to our sponsor, King & McGaw. Please subscribe wherever you listen to your podcasts, and I'll see you next time.