Wallflower Press, £16.99
Alan Yentob, a key figure at the BBC for over 30 years, has recently come under attack, first for allegedly fiddling his expenses and then, it was claimed, for pretending to take part in interviews he hadn't actually turned up for ("Noddygate"). Amid all the excitement, no one seems to have noticed the elephant in the room. Who cares about expenses and "noddies" when Yentob stood by as one arts programme after another was closed down and serious arts coverage on BBC television was almost entirely stripped from BBC1 and 2 and marginalised on BBC4?
In a speech in 2003, Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger hit the nail on the head: "There has, until very recently, been a terrible failure of corporate nerve over the televising of serious arts programmes for mainstream audiences. How on earth did it happen that, for so many barren years, the BBC governors nodded on the job while the arts output all but withered away?"
This is the dark background to John Wyver's superb book, the best ever written about British television and one of the most illuminating accounts of British postwar culture. It is part history, part cultural criticism, managing to combine a scholarly account of arts filmmaking in Britain over 60 years with fascinating close readings of individual films and programmes. This may seem rather narrow, especially since much of the book is about the 480 arts films funded (or part-funded) by the Arts Council from 1953 to 1999, and two of the book's five chapters are about television arts programmes. However, Wyver never loses sight of the bigger picture: the rise and fall of public service broadcasting and a larger, more important battle over British culture, of which the crisis in arts broadcasting is just one part.
This could have been a dry history of institutions and policies. It isn't. What brings Wyver's account to life is his passion for art and for filmmaking. This is really a book about artists—on both sides of the camera. His pantheon ranges from Read and Basil Wright in the mid-1950s to Mike Dibb (Ways of Seeing) and Phil Mulloy, David Hinton and Marc Karlin, up to Vanessa Engle's films on Britart in the late 1990s.
Wyver doesn't like to speak of a golden age. He is too judicious for that. And yet it seems to be everywhere you look in the book. Most of his favourite films and filmmakers seem to be clustered between the 1970s and mid-1990s, and the basic shape of the story he tells is undeniable. Between the 1920s and 1940s, there was little or no arts filmmaking. From the 1950s to the 1990s, there was an extraordinary explosion of filmmaking for television and for the Arts Council. It was not just a matter of quantity but of quality, with two generations of talented filmmakers developing new forms and being given the chance to experiment and let go. And then came "victory for the middlebrow." Wyver quotes Michael Kustow's prescient words from 1988: "They [the arts] probably wouldn't disappear... More likely they would be pushed into blandness, made middle of the road, severed from the danger and struggle and challenge that are at the heart of creativity." Wyver goes on, "Two decades later, neither the words nor the qualities of danger, struggle and challenge feature in either arts broadcasting or the too often desultory discussions attached to it."
And yet he remains hopeful. In a short final chapter, "Future Vision," he lays out his faith in the opportunities presented by new technology and how non-broadcast institutions (art galleries, museums, independent production companies) can make their own DVDs and websites, offering new opportunities for viewers to make links between programmes, archives and alternative versions, whether by "pressing the red button" or clicking on recommended websites. For Wyver, this offers "a dazzling, provocative and above all accessible world of art and media. That's some kind of progress."
Vision On is both a carefully researched history and a tribute to a threatened art form. But above all, it is an example of how to write about television. No one today writes as well about television as Wyver, with the same knowledge of the form or its past. Himself a programme-maker for over 20 years, he understands the importance of changing technology and knows how liberating the arrival of 16mm film was in the early 1960s. And unlike most critics, he acknowledges the contributions of cameramen, editors and composers. Wyver reads films carefully enough to spot what's missing (where are Moore's studio assistants in Read's portrait of the sculptor?) and what's going on between the lines (the opening shots of Read's film of Graham Sutherland are as much about Englishness in the 1950s as about art).
Not everyone will share Wyver's passion for the avant garde, the mix of Marxism, feminism and multi-culturalism that was so fashionable in the 1970s and 1980s, or his optimistic faith in the new digital age. I admire his reluctance to be too over the top about what we have lost, but I think he underestimates the damage. At times (as in his accounts of The Late Show or The South Bank Show), he underestimates the differences between particular producers or, in the case of the former, programme editors. What made the great strands great, from Monitor to The Late Show, was their ability to embrace different kinds of talent and creativity rather than bully them into a house style.
However, this is small beer beside Wyver's achievements. He brings to life a great filmmaking tradition, reminds us of what television can be and shows us how television and culture should be written about. There are few cultural critics around today. The generation of Berger, Sontag and Said has passed and has not been replaced. Like
arts filmmaking, cultural criticism reached its heyday between the 1960s and 1990s. This coincidence should alert us to a larger change. In the middle of today's British culture wars, rather than gossiping about noddies and expenses, this is the kind of cultural criticism we need.
