Here's a radical suggestion for the BBC's next poetry season. How about making some programmes about poetry? Not poets' unhappy marriages or their sex lives, but actually having someone who knows and cares about poetry talking about language and verse.
The worst offender of the recent BBC poetry season—which ran from 20th May to 13th June on BBC Two and Four, as well as on Radio 3 and Radio 4—was, predictably enough, the historian Simon Schama. It is now a decade since his book on Rembrandt and 20 years since Citizens, his great history of the French revolution, which made his name. Those were the days when he wrote about what he knew. Now he'll talk about anything but.
There was much to be grateful for in Simon Schama's John Donne (BBC Two). No ghastly cheap dramatisations, as in the infamous Caravaggio episode of Simon Schama's Power of Art in 2006. A simple format, even glimpses of the words, and Fiona Shaw, one of the best actresses of her generation, reading the poems. There was even someone who knew about Donne, the literary critic John Carey. The problem was that there was someone else who didn't and he did most of the talking.
The worst moment came when Schama reflected on why Donne was called a metaphysical poet. This was puzzling, he said, because he could hardly think of a more physical poet. This is crass. If Schama didn't know, was there really no one at the BBC who could have explained to him the basic idea behind the term metaphysical? Of course, this might have taken us closer to the subject at hand: poetry, form and language. John Donne as opposed to "Simon Schama's John Donne."
Finally, there's seeming to talk about literature, when you're actually saying nothing at all: " 'Nothing else is.' Everything important and intense about love distilled into one perfect phrase. And that's why John Donne is a really great poet." As opposed, of course, to "a great poet." Or, comparing Donne's sonnets with Shakespeare's: "They were like Shakespeare's only they were rougher and truer." It's a cute idea: television's Renaissance man on a Renaissance poet. But what we get is the Schama school of lit crit. "Right between the sheets," "shove off sun," "rougher and truer." It's perfect for Mark Thompson's BBC. The illusion of culture, but never the thing itself.
Thompson was very proud of the poetry season. Here was one of Britain's best known historians talking about Donne. Not, of course, one of Britain's leading critics or poets. But that's the point of celebrity culture: that's why the programme has Schama's name in the title. If you liked Schama on British history or art, it's assumed, you'll like him on slavery, (meta)physical poetry or cheese soufflés. Celebrity presenters have taken over. We've had Ian Hislop's Changing of the Bard, Michael Wood on Beowulf (not Seamus Heaney, of course), Armando Iannucci on Milton. There was Simon Armitage on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, but he was banished to BBC Four, where it's safe to put poets (you can tell he's a poet because his name wasn't in the title).
But Thompson would argue that we had a 90-minute documentary on TS Eliot on BBC Two at peak-time. Well, that's not the most we expect from the BBC, it's the very least. But there's another point here. In 1987, producer Adam Low made a superb trilogy on Evelyn Waugh for BBC Two. Not just one peak-time programme, but three. And then another trilogy on Noel Coward in 1998. In between, Arena made The Graham Greene Trilogy in 1993. When did trilogies get reduced to single programmes? And when did that become a subject for pride at the BBC?
The argument is that it makes literature more accessible. The assumption, hidden in the small print, is that poets and critics can't do this, that trilogies won't do this and that what we need is a world in which a few celebrities talk about everything.
