The timing is perfect. In the run-up to the renewal of the BBC's charter, BBC2's 40th anniversary gives the corporation a chance to polish the family silver and show off the classics of yesteryear. Prepare for lots of The Forsyte Saga, Civilisation, Our Friends in the North and Yes, Minister. Over the past 40 years BBC2 has been one of the great treasure-houses of British culture.
There is a snag. The more the BBC reminds us of the glories of the past, the more we will realise that BBC2 is not what it was. What would its controller, Jane Root, choose from the last five years to put up against these classics? The League of Gentlemen, The Office, and Stephen Poliakoff's Perfect Strangers, certainly. Perhaps Marion and Geoff. What else? The Big Read? Great Britons?
There's a bigger problem. Now that BBC4 has been created as the smart channel, the place where Root can shunt all the arts and ideas programmes she doesn't want, what is BBC2 for?
This debate goes back to the earliest days of the channel. BBC2 began with a disaster. The opening night was blacked out by a power cut in west London. Worse was to come. Tuesday nights were particularly bad. On 19th May 1964, BBC2 started off at 7.30pm with Maths '64 or New Trends in Maths, followed by a series about the City of London, Materials for the Engineer and Power in British Politics. Then came half an hour of jazz, the news and closedown at 10.35.
BBC2 was rescued by David Attenborough. He went back to the drawing board. The new channel needed to be distinctive and original, but what did that mean? "BBC2 must provide programmes... that cannot be watched elsewhere," he said. This meant signing up artists like Dudley Moore and Peter Cook in Not Only... But Also, experimenting with whole evenings dedicated to a single subject, but, above all, it meant rethinking the audience. Attenborough saw BBC2's audience not as a mass, with one set of interests, but as a cluster of minorities, interested in everything from golf and jazz to foreign films and science. These interests weren't catered for by the two existing channels.
We usually think of BBC2 as a highbrow channel, and for good reason. One of its very first programmes was a debate between Isaiah Berlin and AJ Ayer, both in their prime. From Berlin to Ayer in 1964 to Jacob Bronowski and Men of Ideas in the 1970s and then Francis Fukuyama, Czeslaw Milosz, Umberto Eco and George Steiner on The Late Show, it is a glorious tradition.
Programmes about ideas, however, were only part of the remit. As Attenborough said, BBC2 was a channel for "all levels of brow." Think of those terrible US imports, The Virginian, High Chaparral and then The Waltons, over 30 years of Gardeners' World, Barbara Woodhouse and Two Fat Ladies. Sport has always been a key staple of the channel, from floodlit rugby league and one-day cricket to Pot Black and Sunday Grandstand. Perhaps BBC2's greatest achievement has been in comedy, from Pete and Dud in the 1960s to The Young Ones and Absolutely Fabulous.
This strange mix of brows produced a channel which at times seemed like a pantomime horse, one part Michael Ignatieff, one part Top Gear. What held all this together, giving BBC2 its distinctive feel? In part it was the absence of competitors. For 20 years, BBC2 was the one smart channel. Of course BBC1 and ITV had their moments, but if you wanted to see Heimat or Ingmar Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage, BBC2 was where you went.
Something else held BBC2 together: a set of values. In his autobiography, Life on Air, David Attenborough describes commissioning Berlioz's L'Enfance du Christ: "it would bring real distinction and innovation to BBC2's Christmas." He hears that Stravinsky will be conducting the LSO. "Clearly an event of real importance," he writes. "The network also paid proper attention to Britain's pre-eminent composer of the time, Benjamin Britten." "Proper attention" tells us everything about the values that inspired Attenborough and his channel.
When Alan Yentob reinvented BBC2 in the late 1980s, he brought a similar passion, with a different sense of style, from the new channel idents in 1991 to John Whiston's themed nights. Take a few days in May 1990. There is the same jumble of sports, cooks and comics: Grand Prix, Top Gear, Italian Regional Cookery and Rory Bremner. But look at the weekends: Saturday 12th May, a two-hour concert by the London Sinfonietta; Sunday 13th May, Yo-Yo Ma: A Month in Tanglewood followed by Kieslowski's Ten Commandments. The following weekend, an Arena documentary on Kino Perestroika, followed the next night by a 70-minute documentary on the Kirov Ballet - all at the centre of the schedule, in prime time.
These are the programmes that made BBC2 great. That passion for the esoteric and the exciting is what we will be celebrating on 20th April. Take that away and you're left with just another channel wondering what it's for.
Let us be clear what we are celebrating, because there is much to celebrate. But let us also be clear what is not worth celebrating - a channel that has lost its way.
