As a former broadcast news journalist with a background in theatre, Andrew Macdonald knows all about telling a story. Now deputy director of The Art Fund, he’s using that skill to communicate the charity’s work to a wider audience. Heather McGregor reports:

Andrew Macdonald is, he tells me, “intellectually restless”. The brother of two younger sisters, his intellect won him a Local Authority-sponsored place at Dulwich College in the days when such things existed. It also led him to sit his O-levels early and his Cambridge entrance exams (after his A-levels) before he was 18. He spent most of the rest of his gap year working for ICI in what we would now recognise as their strategy department, but which in those days was termed ‘business environment’. “That I know how to read a balance sheet at all is thanks to that job,” he says now, 30 years later.

Once at Cambridge, he spent three years as an undergraduate at Gonville & Cauis, reading history. Did he like Cambridge? “I loved history. University was a bit of a shock, as I am sure it still is for people from a stable supportive home where everything is done for you.” He readily pays tribute to Neil McKendrick, then the Director of Studies for the history department who subsequently served as Master of the college and remains there as a Life Fellow. McKendrick had nurtured the best history scholars for years and placed them in colleges all over the university, getting them to tutor his Caius protégées. Thus Macdonald was taught by the likes of Christopher Andrew, Quentin Skinner and Norman Stone, three of the most outstanding historians at the university, and all in other colleges.

He rewarded their tutelage by taking a double first and was accepted by Trinity College to study for a PhD in Russian history. Given his academic success, did Macdonald do anything at Cambridge other than have his head in a book? “Theatre. I worked as the technical director on a number of productions, some of which we took to the Edinburgh Festival and a couple of which went on to have runs in London afterwards.”

But a career in academia, rather than the theatre, beckoned and Macdonald started his PhD. He spent a year learning Russian (“not very well”) and decided to abandon his degree. “I discovered that the library was a lonely place. I am not someone who likes a solo life – I like working in groups, where there is the opportunity to have argument and debate”. Not knowing what to do next, he did turn to the theatre for a living, working in various places including the Citizens’ Theatre in Glasgow. He pursued – persistently – a job at the BBC. “It’s not enough to put in an application form. You have to badger people for long enough so that they know you are serious.” When he did get a job, it was like buses – two came along almost at once. So it was the Macdonald spent a brief time in the BBC World Service before joining Panorama, a job he had applied for separately, as a researcher and assistant producer.

Macdonald graciously acknowledges those who, like McKendrick, played a key role in mentoring and developing him. Richard Tait, then editor of Newsnight, who went on to head up Channel 4 News and now sits on the BBC Trust. When Macdonald left the BBC it was to join the production team developing and making The Other Europe, which went to air in the autumn of 1987. It looked at the post-war history of the regimes operating behind the Iron Curtain and suggested that they would not be able to reform successfully. “It was quite prescient, as it turned out.” He moved on to work on The Sharp End as a producer/director before joining Channel 4 News, made by ITN, under Richard Tait, in 1989, just in time to cover Tiananmen Square, the Velvet Revolution and eventually – using the not-very-good Russian he had learned at Trinity – to establish a C4 news office in Moscow. He was there until 1991. Did the Russian get any better? “Not significantly, I am afraid to say”.

Macdonald had met the woman he went on to marry at C4 News, and he returned to the UK in 1991 to cement what had been a long distance relationship (they now have two teenage children) and to a long and successful career with the channel. It culminated in his promotion to Senior Foreign Editor, a post he held for ten years. Was that not a long time? “Yes, but it didn’t feel like that. The job reinvented itself constantly, not least when we pitched for and retained the franchise to produce C4 News. Jim Gray led the franchise bid and he substantially changed the way the programme looked and felt. It became much more about ‘who is the audience’ and ‘why are we telling them about this’ and ‘why should they be interested’, rather than one special interest group speaking to another one.”

So why leave? “In 2003 we covered the invasion of Iraq, and it had a profound impression on me both personally and professionally.” In the first week of the war, ITN’s Terry Lloyd was killed by a stray bullet from a never-identified US Marine, and a week later Gaby Rado, one of Macdonald’s foreign correspondents, fell to his death from a hotel roof in northern Iraq. The sadness of losing those colleagues contrasted with the ever-increasing number of awards that Channel 4 News were winning for its coverage, culminating in an international Emmy in the spring of 2004. “I thought, I’ve done this for long enough and it seems a fitting moment to stop. There wasn’t anything to move on to in ITN that would have been progression. So I decided to take a break.”

 "I discovered that the library was a lonely place. I am not someone who likes a solo life - I like working in groups, where there is the opportunity to have argument and debate"

Macdonald’s idea of a break might be a little different to other people’s – he set about the task of learning to play the piano. “My mother was a musician and played but I had given up at the age of eleven.” He is a classical music fan and often attends concerts. Who is his favourite composer? “That’s difficult. Probably Bach, or late Beethoven.” Do his children play? “Yes, one plays the flute and the other the cello and the piano”. No giving up at eleven for them, then.

He embarked on some freelance production work while looking for his next permanent position, including an episode of Panorama with Vivian White, which examined the government’s proposed anti-terror legislation in the aftermath of the 7/7 bombings. He also made a documentary, with Andrew Gilligan, “about the parlous state of Britain’s railways. We had some heated debates at the time, but I must say that now I travel by train a lot more than I used to – he was spot on”.

Macdonald reckoned that, with 20 years of working life left, he wanted to get on and try something new. The arts were a passion, and communications seemed, as for many journalists, a natural step, in the poacher-turned-gamekeeper mould. He applied for a few jobs, including one not in the arts but as the Head of News for a government department. “I didn’t get it, but I must have made an impression on the panel because when one of them was sourced by a head hunter for The Art Fund job, they recommended me.” To my delight, he cites this as an example of the power of executive search. “I had seen the advertisement, but I had thought I didn’t know enough about the visual arts to be a viable candidate.” The head hunter thought differently; The Art Fund was looking to combine its communications function and its grant-giving function in one role as Deputy Director. “The Art Fund had taken the strategic decision to link up the function that reached out to its members and raised the money with the function that spent it on their behalf.”

David Barrie is director of The Art Fund and was immediately struck by Macdonald’s no-nonsense personality. “I first met Andrew when he came for interview,” he says. “And I was attracted by his tough-minded realism – especially in relation to political lobbying – and also his insider’s grasp of what excites a journalist. He hasn’t disappointed me.”

The Art Fund had just renamed itself and rebranded as Macdonald joined. Founded in 1903 by four like-minded people who were looking to save important pictures from being sold abroad by hard-up aristocrats and landed gentry, it now has over 90,000 members who contribute £42 or more a year to the acquisition of works of art form Britain’s galleries. Communication is key. “The Art Fund owes its very existence to people being aware of who we are and what we do, as we are a charity and entirely dependent on voluntary membership and donations. We have a lot of different audiences that we need to talk to, and while the basic messages are constant, different audiences need nurturing in slightly different ways.”

Under David Barrie, it has broadened its range of activity and was seeking, through Macdonald’s appointment, to become much more publicly visible. “Since his arrival, Andrew has created a fully integrated communications team, ensuring that the Press and Public Affairs teams work hand in hand to raise the profile of The Art Fund,” says Barrie. “As a charity completely independent of government funding, we’re uniquely placed to speak out on behalf of museums and galleries and their visitors, and Andrew has made sure our opinions are known.”

Even when people do know about The Art Fund, they often associate it with ‘Old Masters in gilt frames’. Originally a proactive organisation which sought out paintings such as Velazquez’s Rokeby Venus and bought them for the nation, the Fund moved to becoming more a joint venture partner with the UK’s galleries. But it has always been interested in contemporary art, something that it underscored recently with its centenary commission, a ‘Skyspace’ by the artist James Turrell, now a permanent installation at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. It was created within the Park’s 18th-century Grade II Listed building – the deer shelter. Described as ‘a place of contemplation and revelation, harnessing the changing light of the Yorkshire sky’, it consists of a large square chamber with an aperture cut into the roof, and was The Art Fund’s most significant gift to the nation since The Burghers of Calais by Rodin in 1911.

More recently, in 2007, Macdonald devised a campaign to buy Turner’s Blue Rigi, raising over £550,000 in just five weeks. Based on an idea that had emerged from a research group, Macdonald and his team encouraged people to feel more engaged with the picture by ‘buying a brushstroke’ on a specially designed website.

“We had a mountain to climb in fundraising terms and a ridiculously short space of time in which to achieve it,” recalls Barrie. “But impossible deadlines don’t phase Andrew at all – in fact I think he relishes them. He has endless drive and thinks really creatively. I have really appreciated his frankness, intelligence and determination.”

Other innovations have followed, including sponsoring The Art Fund Prize, which gives £100,000 each year to the most innovative museum project in the UK; the rescuing of Dumfries House and its collection of Chippendale furniture from piecemeal sale; and this year the sponsoring of the national tour of the Artist Rooms collection of modern and contemporary art which opens this spring and summer at galleries all over the UK.

He has a team of eight on the communications side, and another four responsible for grant making. From Turner to Turrell, Macdonald has had to become much more knowledgeable about art than he ever was about Russian, or even the piano. Does he mind? “Learning is rejuvenating, and its keeps your brain alive. I am, as I said, intellectually restless.”

Curriculum Vitae: Andrew Macdonald

April 2006-date deputy director, The Art Fund

2004-2006 freelance filmmaker and media consultant

1994-2004 senior foreign editor, Channel 4 News

1992-1994 acting programme editor/chief sub-editor, Channel 4 News

1991-1992 duty foreign editor, Channel 4 News

1989-1991 Moscow producer, Channel 4 News

1988-1989 producer/director, Viewpoint Productions

1986-1988 assistant producer, Panoptic Productions

1985-1986 researcher/assistant producer, BBC TV, Current affairs dept

Education: 1st class BA (Hons), History, Gonville and Caius College,

Cambridge. 4 A-levels, Dulwich College, London

Interests: Trustee of Release, the UK drugs, law and human rights

charity, consultant for the Rory Peck Trust, a UK charity supporting

freelance newsgatherers

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