Why can’t the BBC ever get their commitment to classical music right?The latest blunder in quite a long line of missteps is their dedication of Saturday nights to the arts.
Laudable. To an extent.
Landing it on a Saturday night, a veritable ratings graveyard for BBC Two is simply an admission that they should stop competing. If they’d made a commitment to a midweek arts night, it would actually have demonstrated that Tony and his cronies are serious about putting arts at the heart of the schedule.
I suppose they didn’t want any risk – however small – of cannibalising their own ‘alternative’ schedule of baking, sewing and, no doubt at some point is in the future, celebrity candlestick making.
It’s not that I don’t like poetry. Or Julie Walters for that matter. But, let’s be honest, do we really need to hear Kate Tempest darken this world yet another hip-hop version of someone else’s more original idea?
So in this cornucopia of the arts, where is the classical music?
Non-existent. You’ve got more chance of hearing a countertenor in X Factor.
What about the Proms, I’m sure the BBC will argue. Run by the BBC since 1927, it’s hardly new. And the very few concerts that are broadcast on television are on BBC Four. So basically relegated to the garden shed of television, just past the compost heap of BBC Three.
Young Musician? Similarly, a faux commitment to young talent sidelined because quite possibly unlike the endless programmes about young people making it in the ‘real world’, the BBC doesn’t consider an aspiration to becoming a world-class musician a ‘real job’.
The same for Cardiff Singer. A wholly missed opportunity.
And what about such ventures as Maestro at the Opera, or the new venture to find an amateur orchestra for the Prom In The Park? No. That’s not commitment. It’s badly oroduced entertainment and the BBC finding s way to simply fill their supposed arts quota with cheap fodder.
Sky Arts recently gave us the Bayreuth Ring. When was the last time the BBC gave us an opera? It’s been a while.
When will the BBC commit to an arts strategy that is meaningful and universal?
Rather than continuous slip of the banana skin of false intention to fall unceremoniously on its arse?
Probably never.
LietoFineLondon 