Dr James Cateridge

How can the UK’s creative industries become better, more responsible employers in the face of continual challenges including endemic precarity, the Covid-19 pandemic and the cost of living crisis? What roles can mentoring play? Several studies have demonstrated the value of mentoring within creative enterprises in relation to both personal career development and increasing equitable access to creative occupations (Grugulis and Stoyanova, 2012; NESTA, 2014). However, these accounts offer only a limited depiction of the huge variety of mentoring practice which exists across the variegated set of industries which constitute the UK's creative sector. This article draws upon survey data generated in 2022 by an interdisciplinary research project which was supported by an industry policy body. We examine mentoring as a set of developmental, helping relationships (Desimone, et al., 2014), primarily at the formal initiative level across all sectors of the creative industries in the UK. Our investigation offers a new understanding of the nature of mentoring programme provision and the challenges the creative industries face in developing sustainable mentoring programmes since the Covid-19 pandemic. The findings indicate that while many mentoring initiatives are instigated to tackle the barriers of inequality for new entrants and existing employees, their outcomes are often compromised by sectoral precarity in the creative industries.

In December 2014, The Times interviewed several Scottish tourist operators who were running thriving tours based on the recent TV show Outlander (2014-). The newspaper found that the major draws for international fans of the show (and the best-selling romance novels upon which it is based) were Scottish folklore, the romantic landscape, and the desire to trace family roots. This article explores the relationship between genealogy as practiced by a large Scottish diaspora particularly from the U.S and Canada, romance and the sexual allure of Scottish masculinity as depicted by the tropes of heritage television drama, and the increasing phenomenon of television-induced tourism to Scotland. It argues that the narrative of the first season of Outlander and the subsequent character arcs found in the later novels are remarkably well-suited for a multi-media driver for international tourism. Its central time travel conceit places the protagonist in a similar position to the reader/viewer who must explore the unfamiliar fictional world together, and such a structure has potent appeal for the potential screen tourist. Just as Steijn Reijnders’ work on TV detective dramas illustrates the similarities between action within the shows and the later tours taken by subsequent tourist fans, the time travel narrative of Outlander presents opportunities for fans to conflate their future travel plans with the past. To compound the intrigue for viewers with an interest in tracing their Scottish roots, the time travel narrative is embedded within a psychosexual melodrama with openly-discussed genealogical implications. Outlander is therefore a fascinating multi-media text which repeats and multiplies (almost to a hysterical level) the discourses of landscape, romance and family history which, according to David Martin-Jones, have characterised media tourism to Scotland.