Afternoon:
10°c
The demise of the South Bank Show and the retreat of 69-year-old Melvyn Bragg from ITV are being treated in some quarters as some kind of cultural calamity. Almost entirely mistakenly, I think.
It's true that sustaining a run of more than 30 years is impressive and only Bragg's zeal made it possible.
But as the dominant arts programme of our time, what effect on the culture has the South Bank Show really had? The problem is not so much who the shows - 719 of them! - have been about, although some choices lately have looked a bit questionable and certain favourites have appeared a little too often.
What matters more is that they have become so undeviatingly celebratory. Every programme has been effectively a mini-coronation.
A few trendy artists - Grayson Perry, Jack Vettriano, Isabelle Allende? - didn't merit congratulation at all but even the majority who did should have been assessed properly too. They never were.
You can see how it happened. Bragg fought a long battle to keep arts coverage on a main commercial channel at a peak time.
To make the artists seem deserving of such prominence, he had to make the shows acclamatory. The South Bank Show has thus played its part in making this our default attitude to the arts now: they are all good, they can never be sufficiently encouraged.
It ain't necessarily so. A great artist, Degas, for one, thought differently. "Il faut décourager les arts," he said: we should discourage the arts. Maybe, sometimes? Maybe, quite often.
Then again, the South Bank Show, with a few brave exceptions, such as programmes about Vermeer and Camus, always insisted that the artist be available to socialise with Melvyn on camera.
Those who refused to oblige could not be featured - so there were shows on Vivienne Westwood and Michael Flatley but not on, say, Samuel Beckett. Worse, it meant too that the great art of the past could not be tackled.
All of these distortions were an inevitable result of trying to maintain an arts programme on prime-time commercial TV. The strain of keeping that improbable conjunction going is simply no longer worthwhile.
On the one hand, we have dedicated minority channels for the arts such as BBC4. On the other, it's apparent that as a mass medium, television works best with the likes of Britain's Got Talent.
Happily, Lord Bragg himself continues to mastermind In Our Time on Radio 4, the most rewarding, adventurous and unyieldingly intelligent discussion programme in any medium, not frightened of any topic, not shy of the past, either. It's his greatest achievement.
On radio, you can do anything, with a will and just a little money. It's where the licence fee is still justified.
The latest Rajar figures show that radio altogether is currently more popular than at any time in the past 10 years.
Even Radio 4 is getting its largest audiences since 2003. Now that genuinely is worth celebrating.
Kenneth's grumpy triumph
Marvellous news. Three more Henning Mankell novels about the grumpy Swedish detective, Kurt Wallander, are being filmed for the BBC, by the same team, with Kenneth Branagh in the title role.
I had never taken to Branagh in the past, not in his earnest Renaissance Theatre Shakespeare productions.
He was always a slightly embarrassing male lead, an actor I took care to avoid.
But then he was cast as the graceless, porky, diabetic, bad-tempered, always tired, usually hungover churl Wallander, moping around southern Sweden, struggling dimly with his cases — and bingo! Branagh had found the role he was born for — deservedly, the series won him a Bafta — and, oh joy, we had found, when it seemed beyond all hope, a wholly satisfactory replacement for Inspector Morse, for years to come.
Poetry: do keep it in the family
I'm sorry that Simon Armitage did not become poet laureate this time around, as had been confidently predicted.
Still, Armitage is only 45 — so even if Carol Ann Duffy stays the course for the whole 10 years, he may not be too old next time around. His publishers will be disappointed though.
They've just rushed out new paperback editions of his memoirs, Gig and All Points North, presumably in the hope that they would coincide with the appointment. But Armitage himself has endured worse snubs, Gig reveals.
There he tells the story of wandering around a strange town after a reading and finding "a copy of one of my early volumes in a dump-bin on the pavement outside the charity shop.
"The price is 10 pence. It is a signed copy. Under the signature, in my own handwriting, are the words 'To Mum and Dad'."
What's missing the laureateship to that?
• There's a gruelling new book of essays out called Being British: The Search for the Values That Bind the Nation, edited by Matthew d'Ancona, based on an idea by Gordon Brown. Profits go to charity, so we must try not to be too harsh.
But I draw the line at Gordon Brown's introduction. He not only more or less orders us to all start thinking explicitly about Britishness, because that will "strengthen us as an open, diverse, adaptable, enabling and successful modern state", he ends up claiming the volume is itself "as good a reminder as we could ever have of all the things that inspire us about the country we love".
Really? If so, we're finished.
Reader views (1)
I can't believe there has never been a programme about Homer or Greek Mythology.
- Paul, Bromley, 08/05/2009 17:32
Report abuse
