Last May the Guardian television critic, Gareth McLean, reviewed the Channel 4 production of John Adams's opera The Death of Klinghoffer. McLean was underwhelmed. "It wasn't that The Death of Klinghoffer was bad, it just wasn't really my thing." He went on to consider ITV's The Forsyte Saga. "Damian Lewis and Rupert Graves are very, very good as Soames and Jolyon."
It is impossible to imagine anyone but a television critic writing like this. Who else would think that "wasn't really my thing" or "very, very good" is criticism? Can you see Michael Billington reviewing a play, or Philip French reviewing a film, and resorting to language like this? It is inconceivable in any other kind of cultural criticism, but routine in television criticism. Why is television criticism so bad?
No other form of cultural criticism resembles it. Film criticism has David Thomson and Anthony Lane. In theatre criticism we have Sheridan Morley and John Lahr. On art, think of Robert Hughes or John Berger. The list of major literary critics is long. But television criticism? Who, today, writes about television with the erudition of French, the polemical energy of Kenneth Tynan or Hans Keller? There is no FR Leavis of television criticism, no Andrew Sarris or Pauline Kael. It's not just a matter of individual names. The point is that no television critic has introduced any kind of conceptual innovation, or has revolutionised the subject. Tynan championed the angry young men of postwar theatre. Which television journalist has fought for a particular group of directors or producers and put them on the map? Sarris introduced the notion of the auteur into film criticism. Which television critic has introduced a single idea, other than making fun of David Vine? Leavis's The Great Tradition became the canon of literary studies in schools for decades. Which television critic has defined a great tradition in television?
Television critics have no distinctive critical language, either borrowed or created, and no sense of a larger context. No television critic makes connections between television and the larger culture in the way literary critics like Raymond Williams, Edward Said and George Steiner have routinely done. Programmes are reviewed as if they have no context, either in television or in society at large. Of course, some of these other critics were writing about high literature for an educated audience. Television is the most popular of all the new mass media, and television critics, even in broadsheet newspapers, can't assume the kind of specialist knowledge of someone interested in Samuel Beckett or Joseph Conrad. But then look at the references in rock reviews or film articles. These critics are not illiterate and they don't assume their readers are. Or compare television critics with theatre critics, and try to remember the last time you read someone writing about Jack Rosenthal or Alan Bennett in the way you would routinely expect Michael Billington, say, to write about Pinter. When reviewing a new play or a new production of an old play, any theatre critic would, as a matter of course, refer knowledgeably to past productions, make comparisons with previous plays or the work of other contemporary playwrights. But where, in television criticism, are the references to great producers like Rudolph Cartier, Adrian Malone or Mike Dibb, to the early television dramas of Ian McEwan, Mike Leigh or David Hare, or to past episodes of Monitor or Aquarius? Television is reviewed as if it has no past. Granada's recent two-part drama about Henry VIII was discussed as if no one would remember a famous series from 30 years ago. Comparisons would be fascinating: the different kinds of studio filming, the wordiness and intellectual ambition of the BBC series compared with the Tudor soap opera served up by Granada, the sheer length of the six BBC programmes, compared with ITV's fear of committing to six successive Sundays at peak time. All of this spoke volumes about how television culture has changed in such a short time.
Similarly, where were the informed comparisons between Granada's Forsyte Saga and BBC2's famous production? When critics raved about Steven Poliakoff's The Lost Prince, who compared it with his earlier television work - dramas like Hitting Town (1976) or Bloody Kids (1980)? All of this would be the mere minimum in any other area of arts reviewing but seems too much to ask of television criticism.
Television critics still write as if programmes are created by one person - the presenter in the case of a factual programme, or the writer if it is a drama. As a result, they have no way of explaining the diversity of a series like Andrew Graham-Dixon's history of British art, when the opening programme on medieval art was clearly better than one or two of the later ones because it was directed by Paul Tickell, one of the best arts directors around. Similarly, the scripts of Simon Schama's History of Britain varied, not because Schama had his ups and downs, but because some of the producers were more experienced and more knowledgeable than others. Think of the long-term relationships of producers like Kenith Trodd with Dennis Potter, of Jonathan Stedall with Alan Bennett, or of Mike Dibb with John Berger, and ask when was the last time you saw a television critic discuss the oeuvre of such producers?
This ignorance is especially surprising given that the battle over the importance of television has been won. For years, television was patronised by newspapers and academics. It was too ephemeral, too trivial. The left, too, was suspicious of it. The first issue of the New Left Review in 1960 had articles on cinema, theatre, pop music and a review of Lolita, but nothing on television.
That debate is over. Half a century of great programmes has killed the condescension. Television has been central to the lives of two generations, and yet the gap between the importance, at times the greatness, of the medium, and the banality of the newspaper coverage is still staggering. In the meantime, critics have gone down several different blind alleys.
First, is the court jester approach to television reviewing. It didn't start with Clive James, but his ten years as Observer television critic have cast a long shadow over the subsequent 20 years of criticism. His pieces on David Vine and assorted BBC sports commentators, on Sue Ellen and American soap operas, belong to any anthology of 20th-century humorous writing. No one has so relished the banality of bad television. It's a tradition admirably continued by AA Gill, Victor Lewis-Smith and Nancy Banks-Smith.
James's collected reviews capture the feel of the 1970s as well as any other book, and on the big issues he was usually right. He knew the BBC was being ridiculous when it withdrew EP Thompson's invitation to give the 1981 Dimbleby lecture or banned Brimstone and Treacle. James also knew that while good art is better than schlock, good schlock is often better than bad art - what he called "the higher trash." "Anaemic high art is less worth having than low art with guts," he wrote in a review of a BBC1 production of Michael Tippett's oratorio A Child of Our Time. He hated it all: "the caftans, the roll-neck sweaters, the portentous sets and the sententious lines." Roots was on in the same week. James concluded his review, "People who couldn't begin to understand A Child of Our Time will have no trouble remembering what happened to Kunta Kinte."
However, there are serious problems with James's legacy. First, his successors aren't as well read or as funny as James. The bigger problem, though, is that despite the wit, erudition and decent moral judgements, James didn't write television criticism. He might as well have been writing about literature, film or football. It would have been just as funny and every bit as clever and would probably have sold just as many copies of the Observer. This is not smart hindsight. Several contemporaries roasted James for his lack of engagement with the medium. In the New Statesman in 1977, Dennis Potter wrote that James only picked on easy targets like sports commentators, beauty queens and Richard Nixon. Your technique, wrote Potter to James, "depends on the deft snigger, your wit on the easy victim, your passing solemnity on assent to what is generally assented to." James's television column was "the best oiled, most spectacular schlock-crusher in the business but nothing very much more." Writing in the Listener in 1984, Mike Poole also took James to task for his jokey tone and "clever-dickery" but, above all, for his "blimpish hostility to experiment."
It is true: landmark programmes slipped through his net (Men of Ideas, World at War) or got short shrift. There was a saloon-bar philistinism, a knee-jerk hostility to Marxists, theorists and avant-garde figures of any kind. No highbrow has been so resolutely middlebrow in his tastes. Ingmar Bergman, Bertolt Brecht and Tippett, in particular, get the full emperor's new clothes treatment. James dismissed any attempt to theorise about television - or anything else. The problem is that this left him nowhere to go when he wanted to discuss television programmes more seriously. James began his review of Holocaust by saying, "It can't be done and perhaps ought never to have been attempted, but if you leave those questions aside then there should be room to admit the possibility that Holocaust (BBC1) wasn't really all that bad." On the direction of one of Alan Bennett's best television plays, Me, I'm Afraid of Virginia Woolf, James offered one sentence: "Stephen Frears directed with his usual sure touch." Discussing Richard Eyre's role in Ian McEwan's The Imitation Game, all James could manage was "Eyre directed with an unfailing touch." On Jack Rosenthal's The Knowledge we got a few predictable lines about taxi drivers, and James ended with, "Some of the acting was nearly as unsubtle as some of the writing, but the thing worked."
British television criticism emerged in the 1950s and 1960s, with critics like Philip Purser at the Sunday Telegraph, TC Worsley at the FT and Peter Black at the Daily Mail. It was a time when literary criticism, in particular Leavis, loomed large over British culture and literary criticism has dominated the way we think about television ever since. It is worth recalling that Purser wrote several novels and that Worsley went to Spain with Stephen Spender and wrote a pamphlet on education with WH Auden.
In his essay on the state of television criticism in the Listener, Poole noted this literary bias of so much television criticism: "Clive James leaves the Observer to complete his first novel. He is replaced by Julian Barnes, whose column at the Statesman is, in turn, taken over by another novelist, William Boyd, who subsequently leaves to be replaced by the poet Hugo Williams... Barnes's vacation replacement at the Observer is none other than Martin Amis; while the considerably younger novelist Adam Mars-Jones understudies at the Sunday Times... One of the Times's television reviewers is Peter Ackroyd..."
These writers, and other television critics, used literary criticism as a way of writing about television. Programmes were discussed as if they had a single author, so Eyre and Frears, two of the best television drama directors of the past 30 years, became spear carriers in James's reviews. Realism, or better still naturalism, was the accepted mode of television and any form of experimentalism was treated with suspicion. Most of the books written about television are about dramas and writers. Other genres only have the same prestige if they have a big-name presenter (Schama, David Starkey) or a "name" director (Molly Dineen, Rex Bloomstein or Roger Graef).
Television criticism became part of a more general belles-lettrism, usually written by people without any experience of television production. The template for this belles-lettrism is the newspaper book review: lots of literary and intellectual references, a bit of history, sensible politics and earnest morals, the occasional aper?u or deft one-liner doing the job of criticism.
Take a recent review by AA Gill, considered by many as James's successor. In his Sunday Times column of 23rd November he starts with Channel 4's "Adult at 14" week - lots of moral judgement and comments on New Labour hysteria about paedophilia, and Roy Jenkins liberalism. "The truth," writes Gill, "is... early sex is a messy, uncomfortable, cold and disappointing experience that is best got out of the way as quickly as possible. Nobody who has had sex as a grown-up would swap it for sex as an adolescent. The one thing teenagers really don't need is David Blunkett in bed with them."
This is supposed to be a review of a television programme, "a good and timely documentary," Sex Before 16 - Why the Law Is Failing. Why is it a "good" documentary? We will never know, although we are told that the reporter, Miranda Sawyer, "is comfortable and watchable in front of a camera." This is classic belles-lettrism: lots of opinions and a slack, inert bit of value judgement. Then we're on to BBC1's drama about Charles II. "One of the great delusions about television is that its audiences care about historical accuracy," begins Gill provocatively. "Historical truth is relative and shifting." I wonder whether Gill's father, Michael Gill, would have agreed when he was working as a producer on Civilisation, Alistair Cooke's America and Face of Russia?
Television criticism has on occasion wandered off the jokey belles-lettrist path. One was a cul-de-sac called theory or media studies. It took off in various universities and at the British Film Institute in the 1970s and 1980s, and quickly became an almost unreadable mush of Marxist theories of ideology, Brechtian aesthetics and French theory, with a bit of Tony Garnett and Ken Loach thrown in. The jargon was awful. "Initially," wrote Charlotte Brunsdon in an essay on Crossroads in Screen in 1981, "I should like to make a distinction between the subject positions that a text constructs and the social subjects who may or may not take these positions up." Ten years later, John Caughie wrote a piece called "Adorno's Reproach: Repetition, Difference and Television Genre," also for Screen, which includes sentences like this: "Thus Houston attempts to think through the difference which television's textual specificity presents to theories of the psychoanalytic and semiotic subject, while recognising at the same time the interrelationship between that specificity and the specificities of institution and viewing."
It is not hard to see why this kind of work remained marginal in the culture at large. At its best, however, it took television seriously and challenged our commonsense assumptions about television and culture, especially about notions of realism and naturalism.
Some of the best insights from these theorists were taken on board by a group of television critics writing in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Critics like Mike Poole, John Wyver, Paul Kerr, Carl Gardner and John Dugdale grew up on television, and started to write for Time Out, City Limits, Screen and the Listener under Russell Twisk during the early Thatcher years. Poole and Wyver together wrote a book about the television plays of Trevor Griffiths, Powerplays, which is one of the best books ever written about television. These writers knew their theory but wrote clear and accessible prose for a wider readership. They were left-wing, interested in theories of ideology, and wrote widely about television, from Sydney Newman to science programmes, from US cop shows to the final episode of Z Cars. Like James they were keen to take the unserious seriously, but were also aware of the political and historical context of programmes. Most of them moved into television later in the 1980s with considerable success, but they have had no real heirs.
The generation that followed - Mark Lawson, Andrew Billen (New Statesman), Tom Sutcliffe (Independent), Stuart Jeffries (Guardian) and Victor Lewis-Smith at the Evening Standard, among them - are television-literate and some have direct experience of making programmes. They are both less political and less interested in theory than the BFI theorists at Screen or the group at Time Out and the Listener and their writing has turned back to the Clive James belles-lettrist tradition: clever, funny, accessible takes on individual programmes with individual authors.
In his account of the history of television criticism, Mike Poole argued that "Fleet Street has never known what to do with television." As a result, we have ended up with television criticism as we know it today: a strange pantomime horse of Leavisite lit crit and funny one-liners. What is strange is that all television criticism now should be like this. Isn't it time for one newspaper or magazine, somewhere, to try something different and find a new way of writing about television?
