I am a pretty keen consumer of culture. I read two books a week, some for work but most for pleasure. I go to the theatre, ticket prices allowing, twice a month, and sometimes more, dividing these visits between big venues and smaller stages. I’m crazy about art, and I try to see as much as I can, both in London, where I live, and elsewhere; a train journey is nothing to me if there’s a decent gallery at the end of it. Between now and Christmas, I have tickets for half-a-dozen concerts. Lastly, there’s television, which I love.
You might, then, expect me to have been thrilled by the announcement that, this autumn, BBC2 will junk the repeats and devote Saturday nights to the arts, all the more so because I have no beef at all with the euthanasia by stealth that has mercifully taken The Culture Show from our screens (it always seemed superficial and a bit try-hard to me). But, alas, I am the diametrical opposite of thrilled by the prospect of a film about Adrian Mole creator Sue Townsend; a documentary following Alan Bennett as he visits “iconic” places in his life; an interview by Julie Walters with Willy Russell, writer of Blood Brothers and Shirley Valentine; and a celebration of the travel writer Jan Morris by Michael Palin.
At times, reading about what is soon to be on offer at the Beeb was not unlike flicking through back issues of Radio Times: if the names of Russell Harty or Catherine Cookson had appeared, I would hardly have been surprised. Last week, as excitable talk of BBC2 as a “cultural destination” emanated from Broadcasting House, all I could think was: why would anyone stay in for this flavourless, geriatric stuff, let alone choose it ahead of Strictly Come Dancing?
Yes, there were a few concessions to the youthful and – contain yourselves – the highbrow. Some good contemporary poets, Liz Berry, Andrew McMillan and Sean O’Brien among them, have been commissioned to “interpret” the stories of passengers on board a train from Glasgow to London, in what the BBC is billing as a reworking of WH Auden and Benjamin Britten’s Night Mail. The critic Alastair Sooke will explore the life and work of the great Robert Rauschenberg, ahead of Tate Modern’s major retrospective of the American artist. The writer and spoken-word artist Kate Tempest will perform live from the Battersea Arts Centre (I once saw Tempest in Manchester, in a hall full to the brim with the kind of hip young crowd that the BBC struggles to attract; she was completely breathtaking).
But elsewhere, even when the commissioners had apparently hit the mark, I couldn’t help but sniff compromise and shoehorning. I would, for instance, be quite interested to see a documentary about Marlon James, the Jamaican writer who won the Man Booker prize in 2015. But why must it be presented by, of all people, Alan Yentob? I wouldn’t mind, too, watching a film about the history of the Turner prize, though why anyone would choose to tell its story through its winners and judges I can’t imagine. Even those who treat the Turner with utmost seriousness know it has lately teetered on the brink of irrelevance. Why not take a more provocative approach? Why not lob the odd Molotov cocktail in its direction?
How strikingly odd it is that the BBC, whose funding model insists that it must cater to minority interests as well as to the mainstream, should have such trouble programming good and exciting arts television. After all, its director general, Tony Hall, arrived from the Royal Opera House promising more of a focus on culture. And elsewhere in the organisation, by which I mean on the radio, coverage of the arts thrives. Last week, I listened to Melvyn Bragg’s essays celebrating the history and culture of the north on Radio 4, every blessed moment of which was replete with interest and the right kind of informed passion.
Yet still it goes on, this feeling that output is designed by committee, the better to tick certain boxes: the favouring of the general over the particular, the old and the established over the new and the untested; the overreliance – often, one size fits all, irrespective of expertise – on certain key presenters; the conviction that things must always be e-x-p-l-a-i-n-e-d because no one (save those who work at the BBC) can possibly understand them otherwise; the sense that things aren’t interesting in and of themselves, but must be made interesting; a determination that a certain kind of deadening earnestness must trail something that is supposed to be pleasurable; and, above all, the fear of appearing elitist.
The BBC makes much of its partnerships with other organisations, yet it seems to be incapable of learning anything from them. At the National Theatre, risk-taking is beginning to pay off – the number of audience members under 35 has grown by 75%. Ticket sales are good – on average, 88% of capacity– but there is also a tacit acknowledgement that not everyone will like everything and that this is perfectly all right. When I recently saw Our Ladies of Perpetual Succour, Lee Hall’s ribald musical adaptation of Alan Warner’s novel The Sopranos, the middle-aged woman sitting next to me walked out after 40 minutes. But if she loathed it, others were wild for it, and better to have that, you might say, than an audience that felt, well, kind of neutral. Sometimes, neutral is just bored by another name.
Meanwhile, the media hail Nicholas Serota, the director of the Tate who is to leave the gallery after 28 years to chair Arts Council England, as “the man who taught us to love modern art”. However you measure it – whether by visitor numbers, the burgeoning of contemporary galleries outside London or the frequency with which politicians name-check the cultural economy – I think there is, Turner prize aside, some truth in all this.
However, the more pressing question is: how did Serota do it? Mostly, I think, he simply said: “Look at this.” Even as attention fell on the Tate’s glamorous new buildings the work was always what mattered. And he, too, was prepared to bet on the future, to countenance the esoteric and the idiosyncratic as well as Matisse and Picasso and (the formerly esoteric and idiosyncratic) Damien Hirst.
Serota’s ethos is stubbornly high-minded, almost Reithian you might say. And therein lies the irony. The BBC craves, above all else, ratings: how else to explain its attachment to Bennett, Palin and Walters? In the end, though, there is more than one way to put backsides on sofas and the right kind of backsides – younger, more diverse.
Let art, and those who make it, speak. Trust them, not your wretched committees.
