The public arts
Clemency Burton-Hill 5:16pm
At a press conference at the Hay Festival this week, broadcaster-comedienne Sandi Toksvig began with a wistful reminiscence of what arts broadcasting used to be like when she started out. ‘You could have an idea, go and see your editor, and they’d say okay, let’s do it’ she explained. ‘Now, you go to, ahem, certain broadcasters, and they say, okay Sandi, good news, we can have your idea up and running in three years.’ Three years? The alternative to this is – well, what, exactly? The BBC may be dutifully putting out quality arts programmes on their hinterland digital channels (you can pretty much forget going to BBC2 for the arts anymore) but ITV, as their axing of the South Bank Show show proves, have decisively relinquished any commitment to providing a mainstream British television audience with the arts; they’re also slashing drama budgets and will presumably be stuffing schedules with yet more cheap-as-chips reality TV and ‘talent’ shows in their stead. As John Cassy, the channel manager of Sky Arts jokes: ‘Britain may have talent, but ITV don’t know their arts from their elbow’…
Happily, his dynamic team look more and more ready to step into the breach and rescue the concept of high-quality but accessible arts broadcasting. Unpretentious and bold, the channel—which currently hosts the only dedicated books programme in the UK and has exclusive British broadcast rights to La Scala and the Met—will this summer show Glyndebourne operas over four weeks (one a week) before going live from the opera house mid-August; will build on their relationship with English National Opera and Ballet by being both front and backstage at the Coliseum; will broadcast live, every day for a hundred days, from Anthony Gormley’s Fourth Plinth project in Trafalgar Square; as well as launching Theatreland—a behind-the-scenes adventure at the Haymarket Theatre—and Theatre Live, an ambitious new approach to bringing live drama back to television involving six new plays, five top directors and twenty superb actors.
Of course, on one level Sky has an easier job of it than other channels, being subscription-based rather than publicly subsidised, but nevertheless, they have no commercial imperative to make such a commitment to the arts (four dedicated channels and counting, if you count the HD output). No doubt there will be some arts people out there who will be snooty about Sky’s customer base, not to mention its owner, but if they genuinely care about the future of the arts in this country they should probably get over themselves: on the evidence here, I’m impressed and grateful that a major broadcaster is still getting excited about the idea of bringing the arts to as wide an audience as possible.
On other fronts, it’s been a relatively quiet mid-week here at Hay, with a few notable exceptions (the ecstatic cheers of Barcelona fans watching a live beam-back of the Champions League Final on the Sony Screen last night among them). But alongside some literary and philosophical gems, including a session about Fidel and Che’s friendship ahead of one on the rise and fall of Communism, it has been a remarkable couple of days for music. I was left shaking and speechless by the superlative music-making of Boris Giltburg, a 25-year-old Russian-Israeli pianist who played what to my mind is the greatest piece of classical music ever written – Bach’s monumental Chaconne from the violin Partita in D Minor – as adapted for the piano by Busoni, and then followed it with a breathtakingly musical rendition of Grieg’s Sonata in E minor, op.7, and a technically ravishing, emotionally sensitive interpretation of Rachmaninov’s second piano sonata in B-flat minor. It was recorded live for broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on 5th August at 1pm, and I urge you to listen if you have the chance.
In addition to Giltburg, in the past 48 hours I have been lucky enough to hear live in concert: the phenomenal South African trumpeter Hugh Masekela, a living legend if ever there was one; the great baritone Sir Thomas Allen, who sang a glorious programme including Beethoven, Ives and Barber; the monks of the 15th-century Tashi Lhunpo Monastery in Tibet; and Tai Murray, an exciting young American violinist who played Dvorak, Stravinsky and Suk with real gusto, accompanied brilliantly by the Swiss-born Gilles Vonsattel. Not bad for a literary festival, eh?
Today it’s the Battle of the Bishops, as Hay hosts both Rowan Williams and Desmond Tutu, and I’ve noticed a number of men of the cloth strolling around the site, clerical collars proudly on display. Apparently, over the last ten years, every major world religion has reported a rise in membership. In the middle of a jam-packed day, which also includes a visit from new Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy and Miles Davis’ drummer Jimmy Cobb, who played on Kind of Blue (which celebrates its fiftieth birthday this year), Economist editor John Micklethwait will be talking about his new book God Is Back: How the Global Rise of Faith Will Change the World. Now that’s what I call inspired programming…
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Juliana
May 28th, 2009 5:48pm Report this comment'I was left shaking and speechless.'
Oh purrrlease.
GeoffH
May 28th, 2009 6:08pm Report this commentI wouldn't mind paying for the Arts channel but I'm b*gg*r*d if I'm going to subscribe to Sky to get it.
Put it on Freesat, open an honesty subscription box and I'll pay.
The Rake
May 28th, 2009 6:41pm Report this commentNow that Joan Bakewell has her free bus pass, has Clemency Burton-Hill become The Thinking Man's Crumpet?
I think we should be told.
Austin Barry
May 28th, 2009 6:42pm Report this commentEarly evening in Hay. Downing a local brew in the Kilvert's beer garden as the light declines. Enter Bishops Tutu and Williams necking bottles of suds. Tuto accidentally nudges Williams who spills some beer. Williams curses Tutu in rotund tones. Tutu loses it and nuts Williams: the Canterbury kiss. Williams retaliates with a succession of cassock-shaking kicks. Tuto retaliates. They are pulled apart by effete incanabulists. The air is electric with clerical violence. Not bad for a literary festival, eh?
DB
May 28th, 2009 6:54pm Report this commentAt a press conference at the Hay Festival this week, broadcaster-comedienne Sandi Toksvig began with a wistful reminiscence of what arts broadcasting used to be like when she started out. ‘You could have an idea, go and see your editor, and they’d say okay, let’s do it’ she explained. ‘Now, you go to, ahem, certain broadcasters, and they say, okay Sandi, good news, we can have your idea up and running in three years.’
And then Sandi said, 'But luckily I'll never be out of a job because Radio 4 will always love jokes about George W Bush being stupid. My brand of cutting edge humour will never grow old at the BBC.'
Nicholas
May 28th, 2009 7:43pm Report this comment"The BBC may be dutifully putting out quality arts programmes on their hinterland digital channels"
They must be well disguised then. Do you mean "quality" or "trendy"? Don't forget this is the BBC who turned The Culture Show fronted by a serious female folk musician into The (Yoof) Kulcher Show fronted by a female Jonathan Ross impersonator.
Verity
May 28th, 2009 8:17pm Report this commentWhere did the money for this festival of delights come from? All those big names ... must have cost a pretty penny.
Austin - Brilliant pastiche!
mac
May 28th, 2009 8:22pm Report this comment@Austin Barry:
With the addition of the regulation catamite (perhaps he could be from Rio?), your prose is surely the opening lines of 'Earthly Powers II'?
Jeremy
May 28th, 2009 9:29pm Report this commentThe impression I get is that the BBC spends too much on salaries and expenses and too little on programme-making. And that the programmes which do get made (and I am thinking particularly of drama) are of a very low cultural, artistic and intellectual value. They seem to be designed, primarily, not to upset any particular ethnic group or religion in our multicultural wonderland. Unless, of course, they be white and Tory, in which case they are fair game. What this means in practice is that edgy writing, provocative writing, writing which goes against the grain and challenges the fashionable orthodoxies of the day simply is not encouraged and - if submitted at all - does not get chosen for production. This has contributed to the impoverishment of our culture. Gone are the days of Dennis Potter, Mike Leigh and Play For Today. Now all we get is wallpaper TV - a seemingly endless stream of American imports, cheap "reality" TV and pap soaps'n'sci-fi. Plus, of course, the ubiquitous detective serials and hospital dramas. It is a very sad state of affairs. Particularly when you consider that in the not-so-distant past the BBC used to produce some of the most controversial and artistically brilliant television in the world.
Susan Hill
May 28th, 2009 10:35pm Report this commentVerity. They get HUGE audiences and they don`t pay contributors a brass farthing. They are also sponsored by a newspaper. I know they don`t pay a brass f as I have done plenty of gigs there in the past.
Bexleyite
May 28th, 2009 11:34pm Report this commentI'll pay for the arts when the arts produce something worth paying for.
Austin Barry
May 29th, 2009 12:37am Report this commentMac, a fellow Anthony Burgess fan. Greetings. I once met little man Wilson in the Stag pub in Dublin. He was Guinness-incoherent but paradoxically the sanest man you ever met. And if that is a candidate for Pseuds corner, so be it.
Verity
May 29th, 2009 2:33am Report this commentDon't pay your license fee. Bugger them.
The most people they get sentenced to prison for not paying their extortionate and loony fee is ... single mothers - their, in theory, favourite group.
But not when it threatens the hell the perks. Toss those single mothers in the cells! Social services'll look after the kids!
So what we are talking about here is a money transfer between social services and the BBC.
The BBC is going to win, because they have to pay Cro-Magnon knuckle draggers like Jonathan Ross £6m a year for something.
John Lea
May 29th, 2009 9:30am Report this commentDB - nice one! Sandi Toksvig has never been funny. She is the female equivalent of Paul Merton.
THX1138
May 29th, 2009 10:05am Report this commentJonathan Ross was parent at my daughters school, he very nice actually!
Edmund Jerk
May 29th, 2009 12:22pm Report this commentMove the crypto-luvvie arts blogging somewhere else it's getting in the way of the politics.
Fearless Frank
May 29th, 2009 12:48pm Report this comment"Sandi Toksvig has never been funny. She is the female equivalent of Paul Merton"...
Worse than that, she sounds like the parody of Robin Cooke they used to do on Dead Ringers.
An irritating voice in a class of its own.
Ronnie
May 29th, 2009 12:53pm Report this commentI would deny you all access to the Arts and make you watch re-runs of Big Brother and listen to Simon Callow's cliches for the next ten years.
Clemency takes the trouble to inform you of what's going on at this inspiration event, to be greeted by this barrage of curmudgeonly drivel.
Enjoy your grey world.
THX1138
May 29th, 2009 2:03pm Report this commentRonnie- hear,hear we need much more culture on the blog not less.
All you sneering kill joys just don't click the link just move on to the millionth post slagging off Brown and wringing the last bit of juice out of "moatgate.
I'm putting on the new Grizzly Bear Album and then I'm off to the NT for some subsided theatre this evening. Thanks for all your tax donations...!
Clemency keep up the good work- Oh and I love Hugh Masekela too
For you Hugh Masekela
http://tinyurl.com/93bjka
Performing the great Coal Train Live- Enjoy!!
Drivelling curmudgeon
May 29th, 2009 2:18pm Report this commentWhat a week I've been having there was a real bitch-fight between Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama over the last cocktail sausage but I hardly noticed it because I was in such raptures over Anthony Omwukwe playing the spoons on Busoni's transcription of the Walkabout of the Wombat King accompanied by Sandi Toksvig on didgeridoo and J Arthur Rank on gong but worse was to come when dear dear Julian Barnes insinuated that La Belle France was a riddle wrapped up in a mystery inside a pain au chocolat and then it was off to Dusty Bin on the transcendental suspension of the ethical just pausing to kiss the air either side of Prof Marcus du Sautoy whose L-functions over p-adic fields just have to be seen to be believed and then just when I thought I couldn't take any more the clouds parted and Noel Edmonds appeared with his deal or no deal box and told me confidentially that it was very flat, Norfolk, which left me quivering a hyperventilating and incosolable by anything than one of my all time heroes P J Proby on washboard accompanying Kirsten Flagstadt in Snoop Doggy Dogg's transcription of the Liebestod continues forever … and ever ...
Drivelling Curmudgeon II
May 29th, 2009 7:48pm Report this commenthttp://www.bbc.co.uk/cultureshow/
I rest my case. See also predictable yoof bio of predictable yoof presenter Lauren Laverne (yawn). Time for a nap before watching Grey World VI.
Alf Tupper
May 29th, 2009 11:19pm Report this commentTHX
'subsided theatre'? Sunk to a new low perhaps?
I've Googled it and can't make any headway. This must be real cutting edge stuff.
Grey Worlder
May 30th, 2009 12:52am Report this commentOh, colour me fragrant, gambolling Clemency. Arty, drooly, lipsmackin' adverbs and 'How the Global Rise of Faith Will Change the World'. Tra la la, Tra la la.
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