Results tagged “bbc” from Slipped disc

The BBC's Culture Show is making a film about the decline of arts criticism in print media. It starts from the premise that the Daily Telegraph sacked some critics nine months ago in a cost-cutting drive and now pays freelances a pittance for their reviews.

The story is neither new, nor confined to one newspaper, but it takes BBC television a very long time to wake up to what's going on in the arts world and the Culture Show, its supposed monitor, is not only off the pace but absurdly ill-equipped to discuss the topic.

The Culture Show was created five or six years ago in response to criticisms, led by John Tusa and myself, that BBC TV had abandoned its chartered duties to 'reflect the nation unto itself', by failing to report the arts.

Instead of a hands-on arts current affairs show, like Front Row on radio 4, or a high-pressure think tank, like Night Waves on radio 3, what we got was a critic-free zone, dedicated to 'celebrating' all that is PR-driven and media-friendly in the creative industries.  

The Culture Show is a travesty of the real world of creative decisions, a puff pastry fronted  by occupational presenters that is deplored and ignored by arts professionals. For BBC TV to moan that newspapers are cutting critics when it has abandoned arts criticism for more than a decade is a matter of blatant hypocrisy. Is there an arts critic on BBC staff? Not one.

The BBC has just appointed yet another arts 'supremo' to its top-heavy executive layer, but at roots level it has no clue what goes on canvas or on stage, day in, day out. Nor is it in any position to comment on unsubsidised newspapers that are forced to reduce their arts spend.

The Culture Show is years behind the real story and the BBC undermines its own future by such feeble and belated half-stabs at arts journalism.

Several colleagues in British media have expressed surprise at Manuela Hoelterhoff's direct questions about God in the Holocaust and my equally direct answers in our conversation on Bloomberg Muse.

We were talking about my new novel, The Game of Opposites, and Manuela wanted to know if I agreed with an opinion voiced by one of the characters. So we set about the issue in a few concise lines.

'Couldn't happen here,' said a senior newspaper editor. 'God only gets dealt with in the God slots' - the statutory Saturday space for clergymen - 'or from a Richard Dawkins perspective.'

'So true,' said a BBC boss. 'God is off the agenda here, except for atheists and politicians.'

But why is that? Why can media discuss every human organ and intimacy in clinical detail, but not the issues of faith and doubt that trouble intelligent and sensitive readers? Why does the BBC appoint self-proclaimed agnostics to be head of religion? Why is serious talk about the sorrow and the pity blanked out on British media?

Discuss.

The Today programme, a live breakfast serial of political hard talk and cultural whimsy, flirts daily with on-air disaster but rarely comes unstuck as it did this morning with an item about 80 young composers seeking inspiration from paintings at the National Gallery.

Two of the composers, Rachel Lockwood and Benjamin Vaughn, were in studio with artist Ganya Pelham, but the music we heard was by a different composer and, as the presenter politely covered up, the item unravelled at about twice the speed of Gordon Brown's Cabinet.

More than an hour after transmission, no-one on the Today team had dared to clear the item for podcast. See/hear for yourselves. Maybe they were cleaning it up before upload.

Normally at the BBC, someone in the production team gets carpeted after cock-ups. But this was such an entertaining island of fallibility in a sea of political and economic gloom, such a triumph for humanity over the gritted teeth inteviews of sinking politicians, that I would recommend instant promotion for the guilty parties. Up to Cabinet level.

The BBC's Culture Show ran a 30-minute special last night on Alfred Brendel. It went out at 11.20 pm and showed no more than 30 seconds at a stretch - at least so long as my eyelids stayed up - of the cheeky chappie doing what he used to do best, which is playing the piano.

Instead, the media-savvy conductor Charles Hazlewood quizzed Mr Brendel reverentially about his poetry, which he recited with seesawing eyebrows, a feat I have not seen replicated since the early years of television comedy.

Mr Hazlewood expressed polite surprise that the rhythm and metre of the poems was so musical. Mr Brendel was charmed by that exceptionally acute critical observation.

What was the BBC doing putting out such obsequious blether? Nothing for classical music.

Take one of the great living pianists, but don't show him playing a movement of a Beethoven sonata. Oh no, that might lose audience share, even when the show is carefully put out after all but the night shift have gone to bed.

BBC Television is frightened and ashamed of classical music. Mark Thompson, the director general, wishes it were otherwise. But his policy directive has so far made no impact whatsoever on the production teams and the channel controllers.

Imagine what went on at the planning meeting.

Charlie: Alfred Brendel is about to retire - you know, the great pianist.

Adam: What does he play?

Charlie: Beethoven, Mozart, a little Schubert.

Adam: Not for our audience.

Charlie: He does other things, you know. He writes nonsense verse.

Adam: That's interesting.  Like Edward Lear, you mean?

Charlie: More T. S. Eliot.

Adam: Wasn't he the one that wrote Cats with Andrew Lloyd Webber? OK, go for it - but no classical music, mind. Not on my watch. 

My big hero of the financial crash is Marcel Reich-Ranicki who, given an achievement award on German's second TV channel, ZDF, thrust it back at the presenter and denounced the whole of public television as 'rubbish'.

Reich-Ranicki, 88, is Germany's foremost literary critic and, as a result of his hour-long weekly discussion programme on the screen, a national figure. No respecter of reputations, he has fallen out with every leading author from Gunter Grass down when their books fell below his exalted standards. Now he has publicly bitten the hand that fed him - and the result is an attack of rabies panic among German media bosses.

In an effort to mitigate the shock of rejection, the awards show host Thomas Gottschalk offered to stage a televised debate between Reich-Ranicki and the heads of public television - an offer accepted with alacrity by the executives and, after appropriate reflection, by the critic himself. That is going to be one fun show.

The focus of Reich-Ranicki's attack was on the dumbing down of public broadcasting, the reliance on reality shows, talent contests and talentless celebrities. Gottschalk admitted in a subsequent interview that if television were made to the critic's rules, he would be unemployed.

Beyond the confines of a German spat, however, this has lessons for all of us who ply a trade in the creative arts. All my writing life, I have accepted persuasion from publishers and career makers to go on TV whenever asked, and on the BBC without a second thought. Now, I hardly ever accept without strict guarantees.

Television has become a dishonest medium, distorting facts to fit the visual image and contorting ideas into cliche. Information programmes, so called, are voyeuristic garbage and even sport has been subsumed by the cult of celebrity.

The time has come for all creative people to join the Reich-Ranicki rally and denounce public television for the rubbish it is - until the dustcarts come along and the act is cleaned up.

Let's all say No to TV.

Sign below to join the rally.