WHEN next I hear anyone mouth the least gripe about the elitism of opera, classical or improvised music, or question scornfully the artistic merit of a work short-listed for the Turner Prize, I hope to have a tennis racket, football or bicycle to hand to insert slowly and painfully into the offending orifice. I will then enter the resultant installation for an award or performance art showcase.

The Sam Allardyce debacle this week may have had sports correspondents frothing with self-righteous indignation about the disreputable mire into which English football's national team manager has dragged the national game, but the story hardly stands in any sort of isolation. Football regularly supplies stories of players whose behaviour has been reprehensible if not actually illegal, while one of Scotland's biggest clubs provided an interminable tedious saga of nefarious activity off the field. Not a week goes by, it seems, without some garlanded sportsperson being linked with the use of some banned substance, or having been granted an exemption that would have disqualified someone else. Then there is the question of very wealthy winners on the lucrative international circuit declining to risk measuring themselves in an Olympic arena that does not promise quite the same rewards. Ironic that, when another major issue in sport – and it is as true of the paralympians as much as the able-bodied – is the concentration of funds on the medal-gunning elite rather than the improvement of the performance of the whole populace.

Those funds, like much of the money for the arts, come from the National Lottery. Would that culture was competing on a level playing field. After years of self-improvement, and encouraged by government, funding bodies and sponsors, it is instinctive for arts companies to reach out to the community and embrace equalities of opportunity and access. Gone are the days when companies complained of the tick-box requirements of an arts council application; these days audience-building is part and parcel of creative learning departments, and for many fine organisations it is their primary purpose. Even among our elite national companies, there is no suggestion of tokenism in the outreach projects beyond the main stage performances; take a look at the websites of any of them and you will learn the extent of their work. They have to be doing it for good reasons of their own, because – as in sport, perhaps – there is precious little evidence of them being held rigorously to account.

The Scottish Government divides cabinet responsibilities so that Health and Sport are in the care of Shona Robison, and Fiona Hyslop has Culture, Tourism, and External Affairs. However, you will look in vain at Holyrood for a parliamentary committee scrutinising the arts and culture these days, despite the crucial role just such a body had in the early days of the devolved administration in the establishment of the National Theatre of Scotland, and in the removal of the national performing arts companies from the funding responsibilities of Creative Scotland. You might expect that scrutiny of decisions on cultural spending by MSPs was even more essential now that Scotland's biggest arts companies are directly funded, but no such body currently exists. At Westminster the UK Government persists in bracketing culture and sport in the same portfolio and Staffordshire Moorlands MP Karen Bradley has, I learn, been Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport since July 14. Amusingly she was appointed from the Home Office, where she had been a Junior Minister for Preventing Abuse, Exploitation and Crime. You can only assume that will stand her in good stead for her dealings with the sporting fraternity.