Channel-surfing idly a few nights ago, I stumbled across a TV show from 1975 that the BBC had dug out of the archives. It was a programme so outlandish that it was hard to believe such a thing had ever existed, so deeply shocking that it could not possibly be made nowadays. Its name was Face the Music.

For the benefit of younger readers, Face the Music was a panel game show entirely devoted to classical music. Celebrities who were well-known at the time, including Joyce Grenfell, a young David Attenborough, and an extraordinarily knowledgeable broadcaster and actor called Robin Ray, were set a series of challenges, all of which revolved around identifying musical extracts. 

There were a number of variations on the theme. The panellists had to solve a crossword puzzle with musical extracts as clues. They were shown a video clip from an opera, accompanied by music from a different opera, and asked to name both. Most bizarrely, they had to identify a piece that the host, Joseph Cooper, hammered out on a silent “dummy piano”, with only the rhythmic thuds to go on. And time and time again, they got the answers right, sometimes even throwing in keys and opus numbers for good measure. Anyone who thinks David Attenborough is only an expert on lemurs and the like has profoundly underestimated the man.

In the middle of this, a special guest would come on — a contemporary composer, perhaps a professor at one of the London conservatoires, who would chat to the host about his training, or his colleagues, or be quizzed jocularly on whether he had to teach “these way-out composers”, and he too would be asked to identify obscure clips of music (Herbert Howells’s Piano Quartet, anyone?) and inevitably got it right.

This was a series that ran on BBC2 for thirteen years, from 1966 to 1979 (which is to say it was on our screens for longer than sitcoms such as Not Going Out or Outnumbered), before being revived in 1983-4 for a last hurrah on BBC1. It attracted some 4m viewers, which is roughly equivalent to the audience that watched the BBC’s coverage of the 2024 UK election (4.2m) and puts the ratings for Masterchef (3.5m) — one of the most popular shows on TV today — to shame. 

So how could a quiz that was apparently so erudite  possibly qualify as mainstream broadcasting? First, because it sat within a broader televisual context where cultural content was visible. The 1970s was a decade when both the BBC and ITV broadcast countless operas, which also attracted audiences in the millions. Even the tabloids thought this was a good thing. In 1975 The Daily Mirror chose a relay of Monteverdi’s Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria, composed in 1640, as its TV choice for the August bank holiday, and this was far from an isolated event. Meanwhile, over on Blue Peter, Valerie Singleton was busy interviewing Yehudi Menuhin. Classical music broadcasting, in other words, was something ordinary rather than something extraordinary, and a Face the Music viewer might well recognise some of the tunes from other TV shows. 

It wasn’t only serious music buffs who tuned in. Conversations on Twitter/X about the programme led to an outpouring of warmth from people who had fond memories of watching it. It was clearly the highlight of the week for many, whether they knew much about classical music or not. People wrote of watching it in council houses, of families watching together, of colleagues discussing it at work, and of how important it was in fostering a love of classical music they hadn’t previously had. Many said the deep learnedness on display was inspiring rather than off-putting. 

We are worlds away from all this now, and it is hard to see any way back. Of course, it would be naïve to expect a programme exactly like this ever to be made again. Mannerisms change quickly and the received pronunciation, jackets and ties, and polite formality in speech undeniably seem old-fashioned and quaint now. But there are far more reasons than this why it would be unthinkable for such a programme to be commissioned today. 

Today we can have nothing too “niche”, nothing too “clever”

Watching Face the Music reminds us of the extent to which television channels have pursued a race to the bottom, with infinite channels and so much mindless pap, truly a case of water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink. Lest someone should cry “snob”, I can sit semi-comatose in front of Masterchef or Ambulance with the best of them, but how greedily I lap up those meagre scraps of intelligent televisual fare — Fake or Fortune and the (very) occasional Proms concert or arts documentary. Only Connect and University Challenge are the last bastions of clever people simply being clever, but it is perhaps telling that even here the music rounds tend to be dreaded.

More fundamentally, watching Face the Music provides a salutary lesson in how attitudes towards the arts have changed. We live in a world where the person who wants to get a programme about classical music commissioned, a book about it published, or a course about it validated has to hack their way through an impenetrable thicket of inverted snobbery and profound suspicion. Today we can have nothing too “niche”, nothing too “clever”, and arts programming often has to be smuggled in covertly under another guise: a celebrity going on a journey; a talent show where unlikely people “have a go”. 

When people were given quality arts programming on television, they consumed it

Lead a horse to water and it will drink. When people were given quality arts programming on television, they consumed it. In fact, they craved more. Face the Music presented classical music undiluted and without apology, and treated viewers with respect, recognising that they were capable of grappling with things that might be unfamiliar. All that has been achieved by pushing ‘highbrow’ programmes to the margins, or off the schedules altogether, is that the arts have become alien, invisible and “irrelevant”. And some in television, and in other areas of public life, evidently now consider it arrogant — offensive even — to presume that people might take an interest in such things. It is all part of the same old story: our collective determination to turn on our own cultural achievements, to invent a fake narrative of “elitism” and reprehensible “Eurocentrism” with which to flagellate ourselves. And what, really, has any of this achieved?