Telly is such shite, except for Newsnight and some of the stuff on BBC4. The channel has been showing programmes about arts programming recently and there was a great one on a couple of nights back where Brian Sewell laid about him with the jawbone of an ass. He may be a plummy-voiced, ruddy-faced, self-loathing pooftah and an elitist of the most appalling sort but he is also right on the money about dumbing down. Sister Wendy Beckett took the first blow to the head; "a clown who got in the way of the pictures" was Sewell's waspish judgment, the getting in the way being both literal and metaphorical. He was also unsparing about Rolf Harris, whose series Rolf on Art was extremely popular when shown on BBC1. I wish I'd noted down exactly what Sewell said because all I can remember now is that it quite took my breath away. "That man's not a painter," he declaimed, in a tone suggesting astonishment that anyone could be taken in by such shallowness and chalatanry. The very idea. The gist of it was that broadcasting VT of a celebrity reinterpreting well known works of Impressionism is not arts television. Quite right, it is entertainment - and art is seldom entertaining. Painting certainly isn't. Painting ought to blow your head away, turn you on, turn you off, turn you upside down, make you want to run or make you want to stay and stare, but entertain you is the last thing it should do. Sewell even pilloried the medium, complaining that when he made a programme about the Grand Tour, the idea of the Grand Tour was lost under the bonnet of a gold-painted Mercedes grand tourer or hidden by vistas of cypress trees and hills and blue, blue sky. The producer's constant refrain of "can we just do that again, Brian", drove him to despiar and the thing became a travelogue rather than a discussion of what made such and such a painter do such and such a thing and what it meant then and what it means now. The point is this: we don't need docu-dramas on Leonardo (not da Vinci, you ignorant swine, that's merely where he came from!!); we need crafted verbal essays with pictures discussed in a historical, religious, cultural and architectural context. That, plus reading and looking and trudging around, is how you learn. So, if the forthcoming BBC4 series about the Medicis gets just a few thousand viewers, it's fine. People who aren't interested can watch something else and then at least we'll all be spared talk from some simpering ninny about making things accessible to a wider audience. The wider audience, on the whole, doesn't give two hoots - and thank God it doesn't.
