Man at the Beeb... Proms controller Nicholas Kenyon has been named as the new Barbican managing director. Photograph: Martin Argles
Making predictions about top appointments is a mug's game. We journalists often get them wrong, often spectacularly, as Private Eye gleefully makes a point of reporting. But when we get one right, we have to blow our own trumpets, because it's a cruel world, right?
A month ago on this site, I said Nicholas Kenyon was the logical choice to succeed John Tusa as managing director of the Barbican Centre. It wasn't exactly a wild punt. Kenyon has done a decade in charge of the Proms and was controller of Radio 3 before that. With his BBC background and ethos (not to mention his years on the Observer and the New Yorker), he was a nicely rounded peg for the hole that Tusa will leave behind later this year. And another bald man from the BBC is hardly a shock.
Kenyon comes with a proven record of success in organising the largest music festival in Europe. His Proms seasons have always been a mix of innovation and respect for tradition. He has regularly tweaked and shuffled the Proms formula to reach out to new audiences while recognising the importance of nurturing the core supporters. He has been a pioneer in early music and new music, and he knows everyone in the business. He has been a success.
But the Barbican is not the BBC. Tusa's legacy to Kenyon is a centre functioning better and more interestingly than at any time in Silk Street's 25-year history. Yet Kenyon still faces financial, audience and cultural challenges of a kind he won't have had to confront at the BBC. There's a major fight looming to maintain core City of London funding to the centre - and this at a time when government spending on the arts looks set to be massacred in the upcoming comprehensive spending review. The Barbican boom of the last two years is about to come to an end too, as the all-singing all-dancing South Bank Centre reopens and captures the limelight and part of the audience. And that renewed competition will put pressure on what has always been the Barbican's great existential struggle - to prove that it can work as a multi-disciplinary cultural centre in a part of London that is far deader in the evenings than the riverside setting of its main rival.
These will not be easy times for the Barbican. Kenyon's affability will also be put to an early managerial test as he inherits a staff headed by an artistic director, Graham Sheffield, who many at the Barbican expected, and wanted, as Tusa's successor. It is hard to see how someone with Kenyon's strong views and long experience of programming will be able to keep his hands off the Barbican's artistic policy. So here's another prediction to end with. Sheffield will not stay. Indeed, as of yesterday, he must surely now be one of the front-runners to succeed Kenyon at the Proms.
