This article is taken from the August-September 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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It’s not often that a single career can be said to exemplify the rise and fall of an entire industry, but reading the obituaries of Tristram Powell, who died in March at the age of 83, I realised that almost alone amongst his contemporaries he had managed to pull off this notoriously difficult trick. In case there should have been any doubt as to the symbolic nature of Tristram’s achievements, the Daily Telegraph’s summary of his life went so far as to note that he “flourished in the golden age of BBC arts coverage” — the implication being that this golden age was now as superannuated as the era of the passenger pigeon.

But the flourishing, whilst it lasted, was spectacular. Joining BBC Two on its foundation in 1964, he began as a production assistant on a highbrow panel game called Take It Or Leave It in which distinguished literary types such as Cyril Connolly and Angus Wilson struggled to identify quotations. Within a year he was directing New Release, a fortnightly magazine edited by his old Oxford chum Melvyn Bragg.

This, as the Telegraph helpfully glossed, was an era “when BBC directors were allowed to follow their own interests”, which in Powell’s case meant profiling Yukio Mishima, working with a young Patti Smith and collaborating with Beckett.

And then what happened? It was not that Powell’s career went into decline — he directed Michael Palin in American Friends (1991) and brought several of Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads monologues triumphantly to the small screen — merely that, as he grew older, the Elysian fields of his youth were bulldozed over to make way for a new set of television protocols.

There were far fewer contributions to Omnibus and Arena and a lot more directorial stints on Foyle’s War, Judge John Deed and Kavanagh QC. Sixty years after he arrived at the BBC, the atmosphere of his early days at the Corporation seems simply incredible.

Which is to say that nobody makes these kinds of programmes here in the 2020s. What was once a fairly substantial commitment to “culture” in the old-fashioned sense has vanished into the Arthurian mists.

What went wrong? To examine the BBC’s attitude to the literary end of the liberal arts since TV arts coverage got going in the early 1950s is to descry a long saga of high ideals shading into melancholy, cash-strapped decline. In the old Reithian days, BBC arts programmes slotted neatly into what used to be known as the “Herbivore” tradition of New Statesman-cum-Third Programme uplift.

Even in the image-conscious and egalitarian 1960s, the sheer novelty of the medium meant that all kinds of unapologetically highbrow material made it onto the small screen. The TV arts programmes which A.S. Byatt satirises in The Game (1967) and Babel Tower (1996), in whose originals she took part herself, may be modish and self-regarding, but no one could doubt their sincerity or the levels of intellectual attack on display.

If you had to identify a symbolic moment when the BBC gave up on its ancient highbrow tradition, it would probably be the launch of BBC Four back in 2002.

One of the crossest letters I ever received from an arts world eminence rolled in during the week of the launch party, courtesy of its founding controller, Roly Keating. It was objecting to some remarks to this effect in a weekly magazine. But the point seems unexceptionable.

By establishing BBC Four and turning BBC Two into an invalid’s home for property makeover programmes and repeats of Blackadder, the Corporation was effectively ghettoising “culture” and, to nobody’s great surprise as the years went on, starving it of the resources necessary to allow it to flourish.

Two decades on, there are perhaps five main reasons why nobody at the BBC makes the kind of programmes that Tristram Powell and his colleagues used to make. They are fear, money, celebrity, diversity and corporatism, and of them by far the greatest is fear.

No one who has the slightest dealings with the Corporation can fail to notice the atmosphere of terror that hangs over its corridors: terror of the Right (always ready to pounce on alleged squandering of public money), terror of the Left (for failure to follow the progressive agenda) and above all that terror of being thought patronising which is, in itself, a form of patronage.

The suspicion of intellectual expertise which this inspires is altogether stifling. One of its consequences is that something the old-style BBC used to be rather good at — putting clever people in front of a camera and encouraging them to talk — is frowned upon as liable to give offence.

As for item two, again no one who has ever supplied what Simon Raven once called “distinguished cultural services” to the BBC can have failed to notice how little money there is available for them and how almost every kind of engagement ends up in a series of embarrassments and humiliations. You spend time being interviewed for BBC Four and find the fee is barely sufficient to pay your train fare home.

You are asked — flatteringly — to provide “consultancy advice” on the third tranche of a three-part series whose opening stretch is already in the can with the promise of featuring as a talking head, only to discover the enterprise is so chronically underfunded that there can be no appearance or indeed payment, although, to do them justice, everyone is very apologetic.

Then there is the BBC’s celebrity-deference, which means that prime time programmes about writers and artists stand a chance of being commissioned only if they can be helmed by someone of whom the punters have heard. So a documentary about George Formby has to have Frank Skinner playing his ukulele, and the BBC Two books programme Between the Covers is fronted up by a Radio Two DJ — a modus operandi which, oddly enough, never seems to apply to other parts of the Corporation’s output.

Match of the Day, for example, is staffed by ex-footballers such as Gary Lineker, Alan Shearer and Micah Richards rather than a row of opinionated lads from the terraces. So why not a books programme presented by the Merton Professor of English Literature or the literary editor of The Times, rather than the admittedly sparky Sara Cox?

The problem of diversity is closely allied to the problem of fear, meaning that as the idea of a cultural mainstream continues to recede, there will always be nervous arguments about how to negotiate the void left in its wake. More often than not, a determination merely not to cause offence crowds out any good ideas the director may have had.

So is the problem of corporatism, which prefers a safety-in-numbers approach to decision-making as a hedge against something going wrong (one notices this even in radio, where some of the old-style BBC commitment to excellence endures but no individual producer can do anything without much agitated relaying of what “they” want and what “they” think appropriate for the notional audience.)

Still, of course, occasionally and almost in spite of itself, the BBC continues to produce material of absolutely outstanding quality. I was transfixed, back in March, by Julie Perkins’s documentary about the Irish rock band Microdisney, an ensemble of whom most BBC Four watchers would scarcely have heard. By the time Perkins had finished with them, they were established as a great, if marginal presence on the 1980s music scene. Significantly, it turned out that the project had initially been crowdfunded and only bought by the BBC and RTÉ when it showed signs of succeeding. Rarely do items like this get made in-house any more.

As for the bright, unyielding future, the difficulty facing anyone keen on bringing a bold and imaginative approach to the BBC’s treatment of the arts lies in the fact that it would mean espousing a series of attitudes that are desperately unfashionable in modern arts world practice. It would, for example, mean committing yourself to excellence, if not didacticism.

It would mean suggesting that some art forms (and some artists) are better than others. It would mean fighting against the BBC’s increasing centralism (see “money, lack of”) and making programmes about poets in Cornwall or Aberdeen rather than grime artists in Peckham. And it would mean allowing individual directors and producers an autonomy that most of them no longer possess.

Above all, it would mean taking upmarket “culture” seriously in a way that the BBC is always reluctant to do. Curiously, this is not as anti-egalitarian as it seems. After all, if you feed people on a diet of potatoes, then potatoes is what they tend to like.

Why not try them with something else and see how they get on? Why not, to go further, select some prototypical Tristram Powell or Melvyn Bragg out of the graduate intake, train them up, give them their head, and — a thing that no member of the BBC committees and output-monitors ever seems to do in our corporate age — trust their individual judgement?

As for a decent literature programme, which has been missing from our screens since the 1970s, it would be absurdly easy to contrive. Get some opinionated young critic to front it. Populate it with a tableful of reviewers, both professional and amateur. Announce that no submissions from publishers will be allowed, meaning that ideas will be generated from within. Allow slots for debutant authors and overlooked bygone talent. Make a point of lampooning famous names and the publishing industry itself. Set out to annoy and confound.

And have Tristram Powell’s portrait hanging on the studio wall. All this, inevitably, will mean relying on that modern bogey figure, the value judgement, but as my old Oxford tutor used to say, “We’re here to make them.” So should the BBC.