TWENTY years ago at the start of May, I was ushered into the office of the director of the National Theatre (of Great Britain, not that there was any need of the distinction back then) to meet Sir Richard Eyre, then on the point of demitting office after ten years as only the third man in the post, following Sir Laurence Olivier and Sir Peter Hall. The resulting interview not only looked back over his time on the South Bank, many years before the publication of his compelling book about his time in post, National Service, but also set up his appearance at Glasgow's Mayfest, giving the inaugural Bill Brown lecture, invented by the festival in association with this newspaper, in memory of Sir William Brown, who had died at the end of 1996 shortly after stepping down as chairman of Scottish Television and the Scottish Arts Council.

The lecture went ahead, in the splendour of the University of Glasgow's Bute Hall, and took as its subject the question of whether Scotland should have its own National Theatre. It was not without its contentious points if I recall, and a version of it appeared in print in The Herald. However it was to be a unique occasion for more regrettable reasons, as that was the last ever Mayfest, and the only Bill Brown memorial lecture.

The memory of that time, and specifically the privileged access to the backstage and administrative areas of the National that it had afforded me, came flooding back as I read Nicholas Hytner's newly published memoir, Balancing Acts (Jonathan Cape, £20), about his time at the helm (12 years, to 2015). His introduction takes the reader through a working day at a breath-taking pace, with a vibrant sense of the geography of the building as well as the characters in it and the work taking shape. I know I will have added to my recollection of that day in May 1997, not least with more recent backstage glimpses of the Thames-side building during cinema relays of productions under the NT Live banner (a development Hytner oversaw), but my mental picture of the director's office is derived from that one occasion when the punctilious Sir Richard offered me my choice of seat, not excepting behind his desk if that would assist my note-taking. (I declined.)

Trevor Nunn's brief tenure between Eyre and Hytner now looks like a hiatus in the history of the National, albeit an entirely necessary one, with Hytner the more obvious successor to Eyre, and Rufus Norris, who has followed him, a continuation of the sequence. The memoirs both men wrote – and Hytner's has been serialised on BBC Radio 4 this week and is well worth a listen online – are both very fine pieces of writing by chaps who know how to tell a story, which is surely the first qualification of a theatre director. The combination of remaining a hands-on practitioner in the rehearsal room while also running a national institution is not an easy one, but both Eyre and Hytner proved adept at coping with the politics of the job as well as producing some of the finest work the venue's stages saw during their tenure. The National is now a secure and established part of the UK's capital city as much through the revenue earned by lucrative West End transfers and tours, and by those picture house screenings, as by the core support from Government, although I am not in any way arguing that should not continue. Sensible politicians, if you can find one, know that the kudos the state acquires from association with

quality in the arts – at home as well as internationally – is bought very cheaply indeed.

The transparency of both National Service and Balancing Acts also contrasts sharply with the current picture in the sporting world, both at home and internationally, which is always awash with self-serving memoir and accounts of triumphs that are light years from the self-deprecation in those books. It is now hard to think of a single sport that has not been tarnished by some accusation of corruption. Cash-rich football is a obviously a den of vice, and in athletics, tennis, cycling, rugby – you name it, there has been someone caught out cheating or dipping their fingers in the till. In the "elitist" world of the arts, however, which brought the popular success of War Horse and One Man, Two Guvnors in the Hytner era, a commitment to serving the nation while making every effort to balance the books extends far beyond the South Bank, and should be a real source of national pride.