There are three things wrong with BBC2's The Culture Show: wrong slot, wrong editor, wrong idea.
If you are creating a new show to help correct the decline of the BBC's arts coverage, why put it on at 7pm on Thursday? You are running against both Channel 4 News, which attracts a big chunk of your natural constituency, and Front Row, Radio 4's arts magazine, which pulls in the rest. Repeating The Culture Show at 11.20pm - the old Late Show slot after Newsnight - just adds insult to injury. It is too late at night, and invites comparisons which don't do it any favours. The programmes are worlds apart. The Culture Show is a magazine programme, with seven or eight items, none of them running at more than ten minutes. The Late Show constantly rang the changes, running items at anything between three and 23 minutes and sometimes dedicating a whole 40 minutes to an important figure or subject.
When The Culture Show had Robert Hughes reporting on the reopening of Moma, did no one think, "We've got a big subject, a major critic, let's run it for 30 or 40 minutes"? All we got was a desultory eight minutes. By then, anyone interested would have read Hughes's piece in the Guardian anyway, so the whole thing smacked of bad timing and loss of will. The Late Show would not have made the same mistake.
This is about a bigger difference: a lack of passion. Someone who asked Robert Hughes to make a longer film about Moma would only have done so because they believed Moma matters - it's the biggest art story of the year - and because they believed what Hughes had to say mattered. All four editors of The Late Show had this in common: they passionately believed some things mattered more than others. They commissioned whole programmes on the death of Rudolf Nureyev or William Golding, or on the work of Tony Harrison or Czeslaw Milosz, or whole weeks on Russian, French or Italian culture, because they thought these things mattered. All The Culture Show's little six or ten minute items betray a loss of confidence at the top, an inability to say that one thing matters more than another.
The question of editorial commitment is closely linked to a key feature of The Late Show: the importance of opinion and polemic. On The Late Show, when Tom Paulin attacked Larkin, when Edward Said defended Rushdie against the fatwa, when Michael Ignatieff paid tribute to his friend Bruce Chatwin, or when David Hare rubbished The Late Show, they all spoke with passion. The Late Show ran discussions and interviews, pieces to camera and engaged reports. It tried to make things happen: to start debates and champion the work of some and criticise others. It brought performers into the studio - Steven Isserlis or Les Negresses Vertes - and introduced viewers to the new and the strange. The Culture Show's decision not to use a studio is a declaration of intent. We won't see performers in action, we won't see people argue. This is low-carb, decaf culture.
The Culture Show is a product of the BBC's topical arts unit - a good hint of the corporation's attitudes to culture - and is edited by a former Newsnight editor, although it doesn't have much of a sense of "hold the front page." On the day that Arafat died, it began with a story about a new arts centre in West Bromwich. You could hardly hear architect Will Alsop for the sound of people switching channels. Promoting The Incredibles or reviewing the shortlist of the Whitbread prize was topical only in the most anodyne sense of the word.
The Culture Show is a product of its time: timid and parochial. Worse still, all the pieties of today's BBC are there. Lots of regionalism: from Alsop in West Bromwich to the Welsh Millennium Centre. Of course, we should have arts and artists from all over the country. It is the tokenism of it that is damning. You can almost see the team ticking off the checklist of regions as they go. Then there's the parochialism. In the first three programmes, non-British culture was represented by Hughes on Moma, The Incredibles and a six-minute item on Asian cinema (which suffered by comparison with Mark Cousins's recent article in Prospect). That was it.
Finally, there is the populism. The ill-fated item on Will Alsop's new arts centre contained an interview with a supporter of the project: "We don't call it art or culture," she said. "Because of our way of making it all really accessible," people won't feel that they're involved "in an 'art' activity."
I was a bit puzzled by this. Then it clicked. This is The Culture Show's credo. Don't call it art or culture. Make it all "really accessible." If people feel they are not involved in an "art" activity, they will watch. Except, of course, they won't.
In the second programme, the composer James MacMillan was asked whether modern composers should try to be more accessible. He replied: "It's not a case of composers adapting what we do to fit a debased culture. What our culture needs to do is to rediscover what it means to listen, patiently and actively." When they bury The Culture Show, perhaps we can have some programmes which try to rediscover what it means to listen and watch, patiently and actively. The BBC has to go right back to the basics of arts television.
