Excuse me while I comment on television for a moment. When ITV dumped The South Bank Show, it is sad to reflect that a majority of viewers could not have cared less. There is diminishing room and popular appetite for intelligent and creative cultural programmes, as television becomes more a moneymaking mechanism rather than a medium to inform, educate and entertain. The priority is hard cash.
TV is evolving into a manipulative device to condition us to buy, think and vote in certain ways. Instead of developing brainpower and the human spirit by thinking outside the box, we are being drawn into it and conditioned to become red button-pushing and text-messaging dupes. Junk TV – with cack-handed chat shows, endless panel games, quizzes, reality and so-called “family entertainment” programmes – is just there to tease and tempt us into its voracious clutches. It seems that more Ant, Dec and Piers Morgan, along with a conveyor belt of the usual celebrity suspects, is what we are stuck with and anyone interested in an intellectual discussion will have to work harder and harder to find such programming on the small screen in the future.
So, thank goodness for radio – still wavelengths ahead of anything TV can do on serious discussions and analysis. I listen to Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time and, to be honest, I don’t always understand what is being said and struggle with some of the professorial highbrow talk. But I love the idea that, as a listener, I am allowed to wallow in this world of knowledge and insight. I am permitted to enter this brainy club. I am not embarrassed to say that occasionally the discussions go over my head. However, every now and then, I get it. I’m with it. I understand.
In Our Time is a series that is not afraid to wear its academic heart on its sleeve. In recent months, it has covered Dante’s Inferno, Aristotle, Saint Paul, the Dreyfus Affair, the Samurai and Elizabeth I. At the end of each programme, I am a little bit more knowledgeable and a little bit wiser. The point of the programme is to challenge and educate the audience – not things of which much of television’s output can be readily accused.
The recent discussion on Edvard Munch’s most famous painting, The Scream, was compelling. I have looked at it a number of times over the years and just liked the image of the open-mouthed person, depicted with hands cupped on either side of a skull-shaped head. It is a painting, of course, but even if you did not know its title, the sound of a howl would spring to mind immediately. It is a fascinating work.
One of the panel related Munch’s memory of how the idea for the painting came about. “I was walking along a path with two friends, the sun was setting. Suddenly, the sky turned blood-red. I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence. There was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city. My friends walked on and I stood there trembling with anxiety and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature.”
It would be churlish to mock such a dramatic description but, in the spirit of Melvyn Bragg’s exemplary programme, it fits beautifully with his intentions to carry on the tradition of serious discussion about art, history and culture despite the demise of his flagship TV show.
ITV’s loss of interest in specialist programmes is depressing, but radio – especially BBC radio – continues to excel in its pursuit of quality airtime and the nation should feel grateful and richer as a result. In our time, we have much to fear from the broadcasting meddlers and ratings chasers, and that is certainly not something to brag about.
