Front Row: an insult to theatreland?

“Do you find the theatre stressful?” Do you hate having to wait for intervals and sitting on uncomfortable seats? Has it been years since you went to a play, owing to the fact that the 7.30pm curtain clashes with your children’s bedtime? “If so,” said Denis Staunton in The Irish Times, “perhaps you should consider presenting the BBC’S new arts show”. Last week, Front Row, a spin-off from the Radio 4 arts programme, launched on BBC2. Ahead of the first show, the three new presenters – food critic Giles Coren, radio presenter Nikki Bedi and the BBC’S media editor, Amol Rajan – revealed that for various reasons, including parental duties, none of them were keen theatregoers. Their remarks triggered a furious response. The theatre director Deborah Warner lamented “the march of the Philistines”, while The Telegraph’s theatre critic asked why the BBC had given such an important job to this “melange of lightweights”.

The presenters don’t deserve all this stick, said Anoosh Chakelian in the New Statesman. Coren’s complaints about theatre seats and the lack of loos may be “banal”, but they’re true. As for the derisive reaction to Rajan’s admission that, while he hasn’t been to many plays lately, he loves Shakespeare’s Globe and enjoyed a recent musical, this was “nothing but snobbery”. “If the presenters’ comments gave away a little too much about their attitude to the arts, the theatre world’s response says far worse about its own.”

It doesn’t worry me that Bedi is the only one of the trio with an arts background, said Andrzej Lukowski in The Stage. You don’t have to be an expert to host an arts show. But I am dismayed by their apparent attitude to the arts. At best, their remarks suggest that they see “theatre as a chore”; at worst, they hint at “a calculated anti-intellectualism”. They gave no sense of appreciating the importance of their role fronting the BBC’S flagship arts programme. “Members of the professional presenter class famous for doing other things, they’re like jaded diplomats moving on to their next posting, grimly bracing themselves for the fact that they might have to mingle with the natives in between G&TS.” British theatre deserves better.