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Saturday 30 August 2008

Screen test

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

And then what about the music itself? Should whole pieces be presented or just extracts (whole series in the past have fallen down over that one)? No classical music was written for the exigencies of modern television. And why does the choir in this series sound so characterless, when I know it contains some very talented singers? Is it that televisions even now don’t have nearly good enough speakers for this kind of programme? (And why were the BBC Singers not invited to provide the examples for a series which was so obviously made for them; and why was the Chapel Royal choir not credited at the end?)

I have longed to see a good television programme about any aspect of classical music since admiring Kenneth Clark’s way with all the other arts on Civilisation. Apparently even he nearly didn’t get the job of presenter: concerns about his too-academic delivery troubled the up-beat producers of as long ago as 1968. How wrong they were, which in his case was a point proven; the moral being that, if there is to be a presenter at all, he or she must be an acknowledged expert in the field, projecting obvious authority.

However, I would argue that this role could be suppressed altogether. The greatest contemporary documentary film-maker is Ken Burns, whose many series for PBS have set standards which make the BBC’s knee-jerk quest for relevance in all things seem mindless. Burns has revisited every aspect of how to make a documentary, in particular moving quickly between a team of brilliantly chosen experts, filmed very close-up: his dynamic version of talking heads. Every detail of Burns’s films shows the kind of trouble he takes in making them, which may simply be beyond the resources of the BBC; but his series on jazz (starring among others Wynton Marsalis) is the only music programme on television I’ve ever found convincing.

It raises hopes. The ideal television history of classical music will be expensive, and it will have to include a lot of straight talking about technical musical matters, but I’m convinced it can be done, despite all the evidence to the contrary.

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