Shakespeare in school

I really wanted to like When Romeo Met Juliet (BBC2, Friday). Television loves new clichés, and since the success of Gareth Malone in The Choir it has decided that getting a bunch of people who wouldn’t know art from a hole in the ground and persuading them to do something artistic makes for great viewing. Up to a point. It also proves that people will do almost anything — even learn to sing, or memorise a script — if they might get on to television. This remains true, even though there are now something like 90 channels. As a friend of mine put it, rates on some of these are so low that you could advertise your missing cat, except that nobody would see it.

Clichés have their own internal clichés, known to the pretentious as ‘the grammar of television’. There have to be cynics, who have no time for whatever it is they’re being asked to do.