This summer, the BBC launches its new arts series, "Imagine", presented by Alan Yentob. If anyone can relaunch the arts on television it should be Yentob. In the late 1970s, he started "Arena" (BBC2), one of the most original arts series, and in the early 1990s he was an exceptionally creative controller of BBC2. But why should arts television need relaunching? Whatever happened to the arts on television?
What happened was, in part, a loss of nerve. This has taken various forms. First, expelling the arts from the main channels. We have seen the almost complete disappearance of the arts from BBC1. So, goodbye Omnibus, after 35 years. It was also decided that even BBC2, a "minority channel" for challenging programmes, shouldn't be cluttered up with the arts. So, if they survived the culling of the mid-1990s-when long-running series like "The Late Show" and "Bookmark" were killed off?arts programmes were booted onto BBC4. The BBC does not even have a music and arts department any more. It is now part of specialist factual programming.
Then there is the retreat from seriousness. Compare these two descriptions of St Paul's: "In spite of the awkwardness of imposing a Roman elevation onto a Gothic plan, Wren has achieved areas of such refined and inventive detail as to make St Paul's Cathedral the chief monument of English classicism. Wren's buildings show us that mathematics, measurement, observation-all that goes to make up the philosophy of science-were not hostile to architecture; nor to music, for this was the age of one of the greatest English composers, Henry Purcell."
Description two: "After the building boom of the middle ages no cathedral was built in Britain until St Paul's at the end of the 17th century. By then tastes in architecture had changed and the Gothic was decidedly out. The classical and baroque were in... Not surprisingly, St Paul's is a must-see attraction for visitors to London, but for people who run the cathedral it is a mixed blessing. All our cathedrals need the money that tourists bring in-St Paul's costs about ?5m per year to maintain-and there is no money from the state for their upkeep. At times you'd think St Paul's was more like an ecclesiastical theme park than a place of worship."
The first is from Kenneth Clark's "Civilisation", originally shown in 1969. The second is from Janet Street-Porter's series on British cathedrals, "Cathedral Calls", broadcast in January 2000. What is interesting is not only the shift in tone from plummy, common-room elite to friendly accessibility. It is the movement from the language of aesthetics and cultural history to a language of money and the bottom-line; from "classicism" and "architecture" to "tourists" and "theme park."
The heyday of arts television was the product of a different era, with different values and assumptions, reflected in several great landmark series, starting with "Monitor" (1958-65), presented by Huw Wheldon, which launched the careers of directors like Ken Russell, John Schlesinger and Melvyn Bragg, and famous arts documentary series such as Clark's "Civilisation" (1969), or John Berger's "Ways of Seeing" (1972). (The latter, in part a reply to the former, was buried in a late-night slot when first shown, but was quickly repeated and became the single most influential arts programme ever made.) The two longest-running strands were "Omnibus" (BBC1, 1968-2003), which included Ken Russell's film about Delius and Alan Yentob's documentary about David Bowie; and Melvyn Bragg's "The South Bank Show" (LWT), now 25 years old, which has included gems like David Hinton's films with Michael Powell (1986) and Alan Bennett (1984), Andrew Snell's films on Pinter (1978) and the making of the RSC's "Nicholas Nickleby" (1981), and Nigel Wattis's films on Martin Scorsese (1981) and Sam Fuller (1983).
"Arena", which began the same year as "The South Bank Show", had a different agenda, less reverential and more quirky, with films like Nigel Finch's "My Way" (1979) and "Chelsea Hotel "(1981), Alan Yentob and Anthony Wall's "Luck and Flaw" (1980), and Yentob's "The Private Life of the Ford Cortina" (1982) and "I Thought I Was Taller", on Mel Brooks (1981). "The Late Show" (BBC2, 1989-95) not only produced documentaries on everything from Foucault to Norman Foster's designs for Stansted, but also reinvented the studio programme, inviting historians like Alan Bullock and EP Thompson to give lectures, and writers like Rushdie, Amis and McEwan to interview fellow writers. These are the more famous landmarks and series. But there are dozens of less well-known individual arts programmes. My favourites include Paul Tickell's opening programme for Andrew Graham-Dixon's BBC "History of British Art"; John Whiston's "Absurdistan", about Czech culture before 1989 (which many people will remember for the linking device of an enormous bust of Stalin being driven around the Czech landscape); Mike Dibb's "Once Upon a Time" with John Berger (Channel 4); Roly Keating's "Bookmark" on "Robinson Crusoe"; Hugh Burnett's "Face to Face" interview with Evelyn Waugh; Alan Bennett's version of Plato's "Symposium, The Drinking Party"; and Melvyn Bragg's Dennis Potter interview.
What do all these programmes have in common? First, and above all, an un-cynical faith in the value of the work of the individual artist. Whether it is Bragg interviewing the dying Potter, Berger talking about Giacometti or Michael Ignatieff interviewing Czeslaw Milosz, the respect is clear, the value of art is unquestioned. And so is the ability of television to offer something unique: the artist close-up. It might be the sweat on Evelyn Waugh's face as he is grilled by Hugh Burnett or Potter talking about the blossom in springtime he will never see again or Steven Isserlis's expression as he played a John Tavener piece. It might be Nina Simone singing or Paul Durcan reciting a poem to camera. Or Welles or Billy Wilder in full flow. Nothing in print catches such moments in the same way.
Second, there is the belief that art and culture come in all shapes and sizes. Delius and Elgar, of course. But also Bennett and Potter. Chartres Cathedral and medieval English art but also klezmer music and "Gone With the Wind". In the late 1980s and 1990s, programmes like "Arena" and "The Late Show" acknowledged no unbridgeable gulf between popular and high culture. An early Yentob BBC documentary was about the painting "The Green Lady", that masterpiece of visual kitsch which had become a byword for low culture?others followed on the Ford Cortina and the song "My Way". "The Late Show" took this further. Anything, it seemed, was possible, from a parody of the British Rail "Relax" advertisement to a tribute to Rudolph Cartier, a pioneer of television drama; from Maya Angelou singing "We Shall Overcome" to Les Negresses Vertes. "The South Bank Show" has filmed everyone from Mailer and Dolly Parton to Gilbert and George and new wave Iraqi film-makers.
David Hare famously argued on "The Late Show" that television's young Turks had gone too far. Keats, Hare said, was clearly of greater value than Dylan. Artistic hierarchies matter. High culture endures. But is enduring all that art does? What about fun? What about the pleasures of kitsch and trash? Is it television's job to exclude, to act like some officious bouncer, keeping out Jack Rosenthal and Tony Warren while ushering in Constable and Chartres? Or is it television's job to say, this matters to someone out there, we need an alternative pantheon alongside the great and the good, and we need to rehabilitate the forgotten.
If we shouldn't exclude the popular or the forgotten, nor, of course, should we leave out the highbrow. In its heyday, almost 20 years ago, Channel 4 invited Susan Sontag to talk about the work of Pina Bausch, and John Berger to talk about storytelling. At around the same time, they gave Udi Eichler and "Voices" the opportunity to produce discussions with Bruno Bettelheim and George Steiner, Umberto Eco and Stuart Hall, John Searle and Joseph Brodsky. Ten years later, the baton had passed to BBC2, which gave almost two hours of airtime to Michael Ignatieff interviewing Isaiah Berlin and allowed enthusiastic producers at "The Late Show" to make programmes with Eric Hobsbawm and EP Thompson, and to make films about Althusser, Camus and Foucault.
All this for the sake of a simple idea: that viewers could come across something that might surprise and delight them. They might see or hear about someone they had never known about before. I had never heard of Steven Isserlis until I saw him playing that piece by John Tavener on BBC2. I had never seen Pina Bausch until I saw her dance company on Channel 4. I had never heard Barber's Adagio until I heard it in John Bush's documentary about Albania after Hoxha. These are moments which enrich your life forever.
Why is most of this piece written in the past tense? Why so elegiac? This is where this article becomes a professional suicide note. As a freelance arts producer who has made programmes for the arts departments at Channel 4, the BBC and LWT, I risk incurring the wrath of today's executives. But it is true. The golden age of arts television is over. Of course, "The South Bank Show" still exists, BBC2 still shows programmes about Constable, Channel 4 still commissions series about the novel and "Newsnight Review" is sometimes a stimulating review programme. But something has changed. It is not just the disappearance of those series like "The Late Show", "Omnibus", and "Arena"?it is a change in values. There is no one who is prepared to champion the obscure, the esoteric, the forgotten, the surprising. Anyone can say we should make programmes about Constable and Leonardo, and find a well-known presenter to utter some conventional pieties about them. Anyone can call up Charles Saatchi, years after Britart has taken off, and make a programme publicising the most hyped art collection in Britain?as Alan Yentob has done for one of the first programmes in his new "Imagine" series. Anyone can make a series about bestsellers over the past five decades or a programme about Tolkien after "The Lord of the Rings" has stormed the box office.
But who is making programmes about subjects so lowbrow or highbrow that they fly under the radar? Who ventures beyond the British and US bestseller lists to find interesting and?who knows?enduring voices from across the channel or even the world? Who rescues forgotten names from the condescension of posterity? Yes, let's have an "Omnibus" about JK Rowling and a series with Rolf Harris, but let's also cast the net wider and embrace the margins.
One of the great cultural treasure houses of the western world is the BBC archives. Here you will find extraordinary things, including most of the great western cultural figures of the last 50 years. But besides this treasure house, the archives of the past few years are a black hole. Posterity will wonder what happened in the late 1990s and the beginning of the 21st century. Arts television today has become blander and less curious, more mainstream and less opinionated. When was the last time an arts programme started a debate, in the way Berger or Hare did?
This narrowing applies to formats too. Now we have mainly the set-piece interview or the documentary series. The short quirky film, the drama-doc, the process film, following the creation of a particular work, the topical discussion, have all gone for the moment. What made Bragg's famous interview with Potter so memorable was not just the quality of the conversation, but the setting?filming it in a television studio with the bits and pieces of machinery and technology in full view. This was a statement about Potter's place in television, that he was not merely a great writer, but a great writer for this particular medium. Or think of Anand Tucker's conceit of interviewing "talking heads" lying on Hampstead Heath in a short film about Constable's sky paintings. This kind of risk-taking has almost completely disappeared.
Why the caution? Are television executives running scared or merely being realistic about changes in the television audience? When Clark presented "Civilisation" over 30 years ago there were only three channels. Now there are multitudes. The audience, it is claimed, has fragmented and is now watching the many channels that didn't exist in the 1960s and 1970s. Or it is not watching television at all and is at the pub, doing DIY, going to the movies, gardening, or watching videos or DVDs. So, maybe the new executives are right to try to make the arts more popular?to opt for Rolf Harris on art or Janet Street-Porter on cathedrals rather than a grand old man with a verbal three-piece suit, or a young academic with his ferocious jargon. And why shouldn't they have what they want? Who am I (or George Walden or John Tusa) to tell them what they should watch, when they pay their licence fee? The old paternalism has gone, the new "democratisation" is in.
But is this true? If you examine the audience figures for serious art programmes they have been going up not down. Back in 1969, and notwithstanding the lack of choice, "Civilisation" attracted an average audience of 800,000. Thirty years later Andrew Graham-Dixon's "Renaissance" attracted an average audience of 1.2m. Moreover, "Omnibus" attracted average audiences of 3m to 4m throughout the 1980s and 1990s.
Is it a dumb culture which flocks to Tate Modern, embracing Britart in all its weirdness, which acclaims difficult writers like WG Sebald, rediscovers lost forms like klezmer, and adores clever American films and dramas like "The Usual Suspects" and "The West Wing"?
Is it the culture which has dumbed down or is it the television executives? The advertisements for BBC4 hint at an answer. They showed a number of well-known cultural figures?Philip Glass, Ian McEwan, Susan Sontag?mostly dressed in black, on their own in some isolated spot. Perhaps that is how they see the arts now?a lonely pursuit, far from the madding crowd. While everyone else is partying at Borders, Homebase and HMV, poor old Philip Glass and Ian McEwan sit alone in some godforsaken place. But the imagery is misleading. McEwan's latest novel, "Atonement", has sold over 750,000 copies?a success of Hornbyesque proportions?and Philip Glass's soundtrack to "The Hours" is piled high at HMV. An older generation of television executives?men soaked in high culture in all its forms, like Jeremy Isaacs and Melvyn Bragg?is moving on and being replaced by a different generation with very different assumptions about culture and television. When they say the audience has changed, they actually mean that television executives have changed.
There is also a question of fashion. At one time, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, television arts and culture were in. We had never had it so good. Themed nights, long-running strands, hot and cold running culture everywhere you looked. History on television, however, was languishing. No one cared about the Tudors and Stuarts. Now, Schama, Starkey and Niall Ferguson are in, and so are Henry VIII and Elizabeth and the computer-generated imagery that can recreate ancient civilisations or the world of cavemen. No individual executive has done more to change this than Laurence Rees at the BBC, but on every channel history is back. So perhaps arts too will again have its day.
Even the strange and the obscure, though? Surely, that is gone forever. The other night I saw a clip from an extraordinary early 1970s BBC drama about Erik Satie. Nothing like that is remotely conceivable now. But why not? Isn't that what the licence fee is for? To support minority tastes, from foreign films to medieval art, from coverage of parliament to ballet? If the BBC doesn't believe that, then take away the licence fee and give it, as Melvyn Bragg has suggested, to people who want to make programmes about the arts (and history, religion and science).
Let us hope Alan Yentob can kickstart an interest in the arts on television. I hope his series will produce a new generation of exciting programmes, comparable to "My Way" and "Absurdistan", both of which he made possible. The best way to do that would be to remember the words of a great pioneer of arts television, who said: "you create the mainstream on television." The words were spoken by the BBC's new head of music and arts in 1985?Alan Yentob.
