A brave new dawn for the arts? Hardly, Tony Hall
Last week, the BBC announced a new initiative, collaborations with major arts organisations around the UK. Director-general Tony Hall has been beavering away at this since returning to the BBC four years ago. Now he dubs it “the greatest commitment to arts for a generation”.
This claim may sound odd to anyone who perceives the public popularity of the Proms and BBC radio’s longstanding encouragement of artists of every kind. It is as if Hall thinks BBC radio has, for decades, ignored all stages, pages, galleries and screens.
That, as any listener knows, is not true. BBC television may not have kept pace with what happens in the arts and sciences. Radio has, and does. Where is BBC television’s equivalent of Radio 4’s Inside Science, of Radio 5 Live’s Kermode and Mayo weekly film review, of Radio 2’s Folk Awards, of Radio 3’s vital patronage of all musical genres, of radio drama’s support of such writers as Lee Hall and Michael Bartlett and, in particular, of how radio is leading the new digital culture? Isn’t it somewhat Soviet of Hall to sweep all such aside in order to proclaim a new BBC dawn?
It wouldn’t matter if there weren’t worrying signs that BBC radio seems about to lurch down that TV path to where personalities outweigh ideas. Take, for example, Radio 4’s Only Artists, the show that last week replaced the long-running Midweek. The first edition featured potter Grayson Perry asking writer Naomi Alderman about the appeal of the computer games she invents. He was sceptical, she was ardent. Their conversation was punctuated by his laugh, big, raucous, somewhere between a bark and a cough, a frequent exclamation mark in sound. He made a convincing plea for the arts as refreshment and replenishment. She tried to explain the duality of games playing: is the character in the game you (eg: an assassin) or are you controlling the character? People spend hours in this pursuit, immersed in the emotions it arouses. Perry, trying it, felt “trapped in someone else’s imagination”.
The series will develop as a chain. Yesterday, Alderman asked Chi-chi Nwanoku, founder of Europe’s first professional orchestra for black and ethnic musicians, why music matters to everyone. Next Wednesday, Nwanoku will talk to Yinka Shonibare, cross-media artist, Turner Prize nominee. And so on, until programme 6 when the final chosen artist interviews Grayson. So far it all seems to groan under good intent without offering real conversation or memorable insights. Doesn’t Radio 4 realise we can absorb thought without some producer trying to make ideas gambol?
Of course it does. Think of physicist Jim Al-Khalili’s Tuesday morning series in the same 9am slot, The Life Scientific. This long-runner, a product of Radio 4 controller Gwyneth Williams’s sharp mind, transmutes the explanation of ideas into discovery. The listener always feels in the same room as the speakers. In showing non-scientists why science offers so many paths to discovery it has no equal. This week, palaeontologist Nick Fraser revealed the layers of his career with quiet zest. I could see the little bones he found, gradually grasp their significance.
Think of other programmes across the networks, from 5 Live’s unfailingly revelatory Sunday Science to Radio 3’s current Free Thinking, nightly excursions across science, philosophy and history. They all show that ideas don’t have to be dolled up.
This rule should apply also to BBC statements of policy. Radio 4 has just announced that, come September,
Saturday Review will vanish, its replacement being a sixth edition of Front Row. Sounds good. Except this is a compilation edition or, as expressed in current BBC marketing lingo, “an expertly presented, one-stop digest of the best Front Row content of the week”, part of “difficult decisions on how we can best safeguard the overall range and breadth of content on Radio 4 while delivering savings”.
Message received and understood. But savings needn’t mean a loss of media memory. New Front Row presenter Stig Abell recently did a lengthy tribute to Adrian Mole at 50 without even a mention of how radio drama producer John Tydeman spotted Sue Townsend’s talent, got her a publisher and, on air, helped develop Adrian into a classic. On Tuesday, John Wilson did a long item on a new film, one of several, based on the Hatton Garden robbery of 2015. Was he, or his producer, even aware that Radio 4 broadcast Philip Palmer’s superb play about it a mere week ago? Maybe they should listen to more radio.