A Man with a Mission

Mick Smith, the new director of Bridport Arts Centre, talks about April’s From Page to Screen film festival and his plans to host international talent and encourage local arts and global music

- Stu Lambert

Mick Smith’s mission was revealed to him when he was travelling in India and Nepal last year. He didn’t need a saffron robe – he needed to beat a path back to Bridport. “I saw the job at Bridport Arts Centre (BAC) when I was in Bangalore,” he recalls. “I thought: ‘that’s what I’m supposed to do.’ I have run an arts centre before and I have brilliant memories of Bridport. It felt like my kind of mission.”

Mick’s mission took a little time to get going, as financial difficulties had made the future of Bridport Arts Centre uncertain. These have been solved by selling its building to Alasdair Warren, the owner of the Electric Palace (which is also in South Street), while continuing to occupy it. When Mick eventually arrived last September, “I had quite a lot to deal with, helping with the arrangements for that and restructuring the staff team,” he remembers. “For the last two or three years the organisation hadn’t had much money and so it had drifted into more mainstream programming. If you are getting regular funding from the Arts Council it means you’re not hitting their targets, so I have been leading the programming gradually back to where it should be.”

Mick’s early career was in the now-trendy mix of mental health and music – though he pursued these separately. He trained as a mental health staff nurse and progressed to managing mental health services in Dorset for a national mental health charity when he moved out of London in search of a better quality of life for his growing family. “I have three grown-up kids: a daughter Jessica just finishing her medical finals; middle son Dan, 23, who is fluent in Mandarin and is looking for a career that uses that, and my youngest, Tom, 20, is studying animation at Wolverhampton.”