Not that long ago the BBC trumpeted a new Stakhanovite project to big up the arts in its many and various hues. And praise be, this it is jolly well doing with all sorts of dad rock docs, homages to painters and poets, while Sralan Yentob (as he surely ought at the very least to be, and soon) continues to knock frock-coated on doors like a highly remunerated person from Porlock.
Before multichannels and multi-platforms, great arts coverage was (if memory serves) done without much song and dance. Lest we forget, Yentob was once a progenitor of Arena. Long the haven of burgeoning filmmakers such as Mary Harron, James Marsh and some bloke called Scorsese, Arena is 40 this month and it’s still the best. If you know what’s good for you, watch Night and Day, its typically oblique trawl through its own archive on BBC Four this Sunday.
But there’s still good stuff elsewhere. In the quivering bubble that is the arts, the deselection of Mark Lawson as Front Row’s head chef caused a minor kerfuffle. My own view is that his radio interviews were growing grandly self-referential. By contrast, his hour-long encounter with David Hare on BBC Four (Sunday) had room to spread out, and was a reminder of how little breathable one-on-one conversation makes it on to television these days. Whatever you make of the plays, Hare knows how to charm the birds from the trees in reasoned paragraphs. Also he persuasively embedded the story of his postwar upbringing — and promotion via a scholarship to the middle classes — into the wider story of Britain’s slow, anxious unbuttoning between 1945 and 1970, which is roughly when he started writing plays. He was candid, albeit unapologetic, about his capacity for causing irritation, ‘a quality in me over which I can do very little’.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in