Is Classical Star a musical circus? Photograph: BBC/Shine
A society that revels in others' public distress or humiliation, filmed in intrusive close-up, is a pretty sick society. The BBC's Classical Star harks back to the worst excesses of the Roman arena. The children are exhibits in a human circus. The judges use the thumbs up/thumbs down technique of the Roman Emperor; they offer us pretension, patronage and a deep sense of self-importance, which is not mitigated by designer stubble or trendy phraseology. We are all being coarsened by this continual diet of exploitation.
More importantly, though the programme is clearly designed to be populist, I very much doubt if one person watching it would be inspired to take up an instrument as a consequence. This is a spectacle for passive viewing, not a stimulus to action.
At the heart of the programme lies a fundamental fallacy. Most commercial music has so little substance that it is inevitably more about the performer's personality than anything else. This is not true of classical music, which requires the performer to be the servant of the composer. A classical musician should want the audience to leave the hall thinking of the composer first, and the performer second. Of course, to give a great performance requires great talent and a real musical personality, but these are at the service of the music, not the other way round.
Some of my criticisms of Classical Star can also be levelled at the BBC Young Musician competition. But Young Musician enables a much greater number of talented children to have a less destructive experience of competition, surrounded by judges who truly understand their instruments, and who generally go out of their way to keep negative comments off-camera. The cult of personality is underplayed. The process of selection enables the public to have a sense of pride in the depth and variety of young musical talent in this country, even after years of neglect, by both political parties, of the need to nurture instrumental tuition in schools. Young Musician celebrates the competitors, not the judges.
It is the self-regard of some of the adults in Classical Star that makes the stomach churn and reduces something really important - the development of rare and exotic talent - to the cheap and talentless universe of Big Brother.
