DCMS committee report calls Unboxed festival ‘irresponsible’

A Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committeereport out today said that the aims of the government’s massive nationwide creative festival Unboxed have been “vague and ripe for misinterpretation” since its inception in 2018.

The committee of 11 MPs released the scathing report just two weeks after the launch of what was billed as a “UK wide groundbreaking celebration of creativity”.

Unboxed was first proposed in 2018 when Theresa May was Prime Minister and has since been endorsed by Boris Johnson’s government and the devolved governments around the UK.

Costing £120 million, Unboxed is an entirely free programme of events taking place across the country from March to October 2022. The idea was to educate and inspire, with 643 different parts and 10 major projects at the centre of the expansive commission. It aimed to involve thousands of school children, create jobs, and bring together science, history and art.

However, there seems to have been a major miscommunication, as many Britons don’t know about the existence of the festival and even fewer understand it.

“We questioned whether people understand the vision for Unboxed, or even know that it is happening,” said the DCMS report today.

Carrie Cooke, DCMS’s deputy director for Unboxed and City of Culture, told the committee that the festival, “could not be named before… because the Government ‘did not know what it was’.”

The festival name has gone through several iterations, including Festival UK* 2022 which was later dropped because of its confusing asterisk. It has also been dubbed the Festival of Brexit though the event programmers have firmly rejected this title.

The 11 MPS also criticised the £120 million budget of the festival, which is almost a third of the £407 million yearly national portfolio of Arts Council England.

“The desire for it to seemingly cater to everyone, everywhere, is a recipe for failure and investing £120 million in something when the Government, by their own admission, ‘did not know what it was’ is an irresponsible use of public money,” the committee said.

Martin Green, CBE, Unboxed’s chief creative officer, who was head of Ceremonies for the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, however, said that the festival would provide “once-in-a-lifetime” events.

The festival was launched in Paisley on March 1 with About Us, a combination of multimedia installations and live performances, exploring 13.8 billion years of history.

Other projects will include Dandelion, a large-scale grow-your-own-food initiative taking place across Scotland, Dreamachine an ‘immersive journey into light, sound, colour and imagination’ and Green Space Dark Skies where 20,000 people will assemble to make outdoor artworks.