Screen test

Why is it so difficult to make engaging television programmes about classical music?

Why is it so difficult to make engaging television programmes about classical music? Time and again I have watched earnest and expensive attempts fail, despite every care in the planning, coming away grateful that the effort was made but aware that nothing lasting had been achieved. I felt like this after seeing the most recent episode of Sacred Music, dedicated to Byrd and Tallis and broadcast as part of a series on BBC4, with the admirable Simon Russell Beale as presenter.

Ever since it became mandatory for peak-time television to entertain more than to educate, programmes about our cultural traditions have had a big problem of definition. This has never seemed quite so crippling with the other arts as it has with music — programmes about the history of painting, for example, never seem to struggle for the right tone. Robert Hughes just gets on with it. But there is an awkwardness in what is said about music which makes it hard to decide who the producers thought their audience was going to be. If it is not educational then it cannot have been for those who have visited the oft-told Tallis/Byrd story before, since the bare bones, many of the buildings and quite a lot of the music would be already well known to them and the bouncy, five-second sight-bites style of presentation demeaning to the topic. If it is merely entertainment, then those who know nothing about Byrd and Tallis, but who might be tempted to take an interest in them, must have wondered what on earth the trick filming and the repeated views of housing estates on the outskirts of London, not to mention the dual carriageways which link them, were all about.

In fact we were being shown the land on which Byrd once lived. What has that got to do with anything worth having? And what is the hired-in famous presenter supposed to do with such material? I have watched very good actors stumble in this compromised role, and not surprisingly. Does anyone now remember Alan Bennett introducing a much-hyped series of television programmes about 19th-century music, which I think got as far as three episodes when it was billed to be 12 before it flopped without trace? Simon Russell Beale makes a first-rate Hamlet, but there is a limit to how wide even his eyes can repeatedly open at the wonders being unfolded by the experts he is ‘interviewing’.

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