Not immutable: Stephen King says great writers may be born but good ones are made (Stephen King CC BY-SA 4.0)

On the face of it, there has never been a better time to break into the arts, television, music or journalism. Look at the universities, and you can think that all the bragging about London being the creative capital of Europe, and British cultural dominance replacing British imperial dominance, is a simple statement of fact.

Our institutes of higher education offer training for every type of creative career.  You can learn how to act, paint and play classical music, as you always could.  But universities now train students for careers that no one imagined needed an academic qualification until recently. Every variety of print and television journalism is on offer up to and including sports journalism. (The pedagogues at the University of East Anglia have stepped forward to intellectualise this rough trade.) Every variety of film-making is covered too. Then we have courses on game design, game development, creative writing (both poetry and prose), animation, popular music (this at London’s Goldsmiths University), arts administration, children’s literature, creative and cultural entrepreneurship (“to commercialise on your creative and cultural practices and/or knowledge” — Goldsmiths again), musical theatre (Guildford  University offers both the singing and the dancing), and arts festival management (a niche occupation filled by sharp-eyed dons at Leicester’s De Montfort university).

As I learned journalism on the job, so to speak, I could sneer. Indeed, I find it hard not to sneer. But even this old hack must admit there is no harm in learning about any kind of work before starting it.

In his excellent guide on how to write, Stephen King scorned the idea that “writing ability is fixed and immutable”. Teaching had its place, if you recognised its limitations. He divided writers into four types: bad, competent, good and great. No amount of teaching could turn a bad writer into a competent writer, he said. Bad writers should give up and try something else. Equally, no teacher could produce a great writer. We cannot understand genius, let alone teach it. But it is possible “with lots of hard work, dedication and timely help, to make a good writer out of a merely competent one”. And so it is, as anyone who has sweated to improve their prose knows.

I might complain that across the aptly- named “culture industries” managers have passed the cost of training to potential applicants. They no longer pick promising recruits and pay them while they learn. They expect the graduate to arrive fully formed and fully trained, and to work for nothing for months as an intern.

An outrageous exploitation of the young, no doubt, but the new system has its advantages. Pretty much anyone with a basic aptitude can now take a shot at a creative career. Statistics are hard to come by, but I found that between 2004 and 2012, the number of UK film students grew from 1,625 to 5,530 — a 240 per cent increase. Last year, meanwhile, 77 universities offered journalism courses which provided vocational training for jobs as reporters, editors, photographers and cameramen and women in digital and print.