Yes, of course the extra £25m from Government to help regional, subsidised theatres and touring drama companies is truly wonderful news.

And I am particularly delighted that Brighton's Komedia Theatre has had a well deserved £95,000 boost to its funding - a 238 per cent increase.

I have been broadcasting and writing about the arts, and especially about the problems of arts funding, for too many years to be unaware of the desperate need in regional theatre for this windfall, but also of the rarity of such things happening. Inadequate funding for the arts is shameful in what we so routinely describe as this civilised country of ours.

Far, far too much of the Government's annual grant to the arts, via the Arts Council and the regional arts boards, is spent on non-creative administration. The result - not enough money reaches inspired, creative artists in any of the disciplines.

The growth of arts administration as a career has grown enormously for more than a decade. Its practitioners and their cronies, the consultants, accountants and lawyers, soak up huge chunks of grants to the arts. You have my absolute guarantee that much of this new £25m will end up in the pockets of these non-creative pen pushers who know the cost of everything and the value of nothing. They would not recognise a creative artist if one sashayed up to them and painted a rose on their collective backside.

These are the people who have transformed plays, exhibitions and concerts into "product". These are the people who have reinvented audiences and visitors as customers, or clients. Lesson number one for any arts company these days is that it must deliver product to the client - or else!

The arts are no longer the arts. They are the cultural industry. And if that does not convince you the bogeymen have moved in, try this gem from the Arts Council on how a good arts company should operate. It should deliver a "properly focused and researched product, appropriately diverse for its particular clients, consistent with its vision and targets while working to externally agreed and objectively measurable performance indicators".

I have long argued that the overstaffed, overcostly and overweening Arts Council should be scrapped.

It was an inspired idea when the economist Maynard Keynes conceived it back in 1945 and became its first chairman.

Now that partial funding of the arts by the state is a firmly established concept, there are cheaper and simpler ways of delivering money directly to artists.

But there is another aspect of the problems of regional theatre this £25m windfall cannot help with - nor was it intended to.

Large numbers of actors refuse to tour round commercial regional theatres because the pay and weekly allowances are so small they go home broke after ten or 20 weeks away.

It is an increasingly serious predicament the actors' union Equity, tour producers and theatre managers will have to confront before standards start to plummet.