As awards season gets under way and the inevitable controversies unfold, Oliver Laughland talks to actor Diana Quick and Judith Palmer, director of the Poetry Society, about whether prizes matter, and if they do, how much.
Diana Quick: When I was nominated for a Bafta, a friend of mine asked, how are you going to feel if you don't win? I said I'm going to feel terrible … She said shoot the person who wins, and left a waterpistol on the desk. Dame Judi won. But I couldn't be angry since, like everyone, I worship at her shrine. That's how it feels – you want people to win because you admire them, but you hate them for winning because it means you're not.
Judith Palmer: The National Poetry competition is different. It's an open contest. Up to 11,000 people write a poem and nobody knows if you've entered. Losing face is something that's hard for people, and even though our competition is judged anonymously we still get poets entering under a pseudonym. So you'll have someone who's written a poem for the first time and also people who have won other big prizes. It makes the judges nervous because something you're dismissing could be by your biggest hero. Last year, the winner was a 26-year-old from Leeds who was working in Waterstones and entered the first poem he'd ever made public.
DQ: That must have transformed his life?
JP: It's too early to tell. But Philip Gross, who won the TS Eliot prize last year, won the National Poetry competition 27 years earlier. He's said that he won it too early and it put the frighteners on him for years.
DQ: I've heard that said about this year's Booker, that sometimes winning a major prize too early on ruins you because the expectations are so high. It's interesting.
JP: It's the same with the Edinburgh Comedy awards – if you win that, you're transformed from being on the fringe to touring a range of venues.
DQ: But what seems invidious about prizes is that choosing a winner excludes others. I was in Edinburgh this year and I saw several shows that I thought were wonderful but didn't get a look in. Who are the arbiters? Why do I get chosen to be on book panels? I mean, I like reading books, but I'm not an expert, and the first time I agreed to be on a panel was an eye-opener. One assumes that one is plugged into a sort of gold standard of what's good, but then you discover other people have diametrically opposed views. So then you come to this problem of how to reach consensus. It's the person who argues hardest and is most tenacious who sweeps everybody away because they get exhausted. Or sometimes a default candidate comes through who is not extraordinary or adventurous but that everyone can agree is pretty good.
JP: Different prizes look for different things. Some say, "we're looking for the best", others say "we're looking for the most exciting contribution made this year", or with the comedy awards, they say they're looking for genius! You can set parameters of the prize to say you are looking for something that is surprising, exciting or rule-breaking.
DQ: I was at the Forward Poetry prize and was terribly pleased to see the prize for best single poem went to Roger Langley, who died this year. I was there with his widow, and we wondered if he'd have been granted that accolade had he not died, as he's not to everybody's taste. Those sorts of factors come into it.
JP: And, if you've read, say, 12 books by the same author, you can't help but bring that knowledge to the table.
DQ: I was once asked to be on the Booker panel. It was an enormous number of books to read, more than I could read in a year. I said I didn't think I physically could do it, with my day job. The chair of judges said: "Oh, don't worry, you don't have to read everything all the way through – if you don't like it read 50 pages and if it's no good put it on your discard pile." I think that's very dangerous. I know how much effort goes into writing a book, it seems disrespectful because it's completing the work that's the difficult thing.
JP: When I judged the Commonwealth Writers' prize, it was 120 books in three months, and it nearly killed me. My eyes could not focus. The last thing I wanted to read was a novel for about three or four years after. When you're judging a prize, reading books under that kind of pressure, different things come into play. I would be so resentful of a book that was 500 pages long that had a rubbish ending because I had been rooting for it, and on page 475 it falls apart.
Oliver Laughland: Do you worry that with the proliferation of prizes, criticism in general takes a back seat?
JP: I think the fact that prizes have a role in the marketplace is the thing that people don't necessarily acknowledge. Within the arts, the measurability, the ability to make excellence quantifiable and defined has become much more important. So you're trying to offer your arts funders evidence that you have met key performance indicators of excellence. How do you do that?
DQ: How do we get a universal gold standard of things we think are important?
JP: God forbid! Universal gold standards are the Stalinist route to art production! I think that one thing with the proliferation of prizes is it's incredibly important to get informed judges, who do put the time. When you get too many prizes, everyone is fighting over same judges. DQ: There aren't enough arbiters who can be trusted?
JP: I guess this is where Stella Rimington [who chaired this year's Booker] got attacked for looking for readability, partly because she was the non-expert judge. I don't think she should have been criticised for it, but that was why she became the focus, because it gave people the opportunity to say – what do you know? I was looking up who had been judging the Turner over the years and you notice the point at which they decided they needed international judges to raise the status of the prize.
OL: Do you worry, at industry prizes such as Oscars and Baftas, that it's the same faces each time?
DQ: Theoretically, both those prizes are voted for by peers, because you have to be a member of the academy to vote. But one hears lots of rumours about producers schmoozing people and sending them treats. Does that sway the voting? I don't know, but sometimes I'm shocked at who wins. They're not my choices! I think my taste is good – but maybe it's idiosyncratic.
JP: There are lots of stories of judges walking out in a huff, but I've seen some lovely changes of mind – of people managing to persuade each other. Mainly, it is people passionate about their art trying to convince other people to see the merits of work they've been moved by. And if you care, you do your hardest to get that piece of work seen.
The National Poetry competition accepts entries until 31 October (poetrysociety.org.uk). Diana Quick is director of the Aldeburgh Docfest, 11-13 November (aldeburghcinema.co.uk).
