TV THAT WOULDN'T GET MADE NOW

Works of art often rely on support, financial or otherwise, to reach the public. Eddie Morgan, head of the BBC College of Production and former editor of BBC2’s “Culture Show”, and Jonathan Meades, a writer and broadcaster, continue our Intelligent Life mini-series on classics that might not get a green light today.

WAYS OF SEEING, THE BIG POLITICAL INTERVIEW, NOGGIN THE NOG

The only constant in television is change. Changes in technology, economics, demographics, public policy, regulation, public taste, sheer fashion—all combine to drive ceaseless change in what is made and watched.

There’s a host of terrible programmes of the past that would not even be contemplated today: “The Black and White Minstrel Show” (pictured)—rubbish plus racism, which attracted audiences of 15m+ in the 1960s. Or “That’s Life”, “The Good Old Days”, and the wrestling that used to fill long Saturday afternoons. There is no longer a big family audience for such weird, confected blandness. The other side of this coin is a coyness about sensitive issues. Catching the occasional snippet of Johnny Speight’s “Till Death Us Do Part”, I’m staggered at Alf Garnett’s reactionary racism. It’s funny, shocking, sad and kind of true, not drivel like the Minstrels. But I suspect that a Speight of today would be quickly shown the door.

In those days, there were also big factual series with an ideological drive, such as John Berger’s “Ways Of Seeing” (BBC2, 1972). I doubt it would be made today, not because commissioners would turn it down, more because so few programme-makers have a coherent political ideology. Adam Curtis (“The Power of Nightmares”) is a possible exception. But would an Ian Nairn—passionate and angry about our urban myopia on “Nairn’s Travels” (1970)—get on mainstream, peak-time TV today? Or would we opt for the opiate formula of another property show?

Another fixture of TV gone by, nearly extinct today, was the hour-long, forensic political interview. If the BBC’s Robin Day invented it, ITV’s “Weekend World” and Brian Walden took it to new heights. Good as it is, the daily joust at 8.10am on the “Today Programme” can’t match the painstaking rigour of the in-depth interview. Walden and co were killed off not by viewers, who never watched in large numbers anyway, but by the political class deciding that ten minutes on a sofa with David Frost was a safer bet. ITV is in desperate need of some fresh thinking. So how about reinstating the full-length political interview and outflanking rivals at a stroke?

As a parent, my hunch is that mainstream TV is unlikely ever again to make the brilliant, surreal children’s programmes that were part of growing up in the 1960s and 1970s. Think of the genius Oliver Postgate—“Bagpuss” (pictured), “The Clangers”, “Noggin the Nog”—or the didactic clarity of “Blue Peter” under Biddy Baxter. Only Nick Park’s “Wallace and Gromit” comes close to that innocent wonder. ~ EDDIE MORGAN

THE SINGLE PLAY

“The Wednesday Play”, “Play for Today”, “Armchair Theatre”... For about a quarter of a century from the early 1960s to the late 1980s, British television was high-minded enough to transmit fiction in the form of the single play. Some were pretentious, others boorishly hectoring, more still entirely unmemorable, but there was gold amid the dross. If British cinema looked flimsy beside the French nouvelle vague, it was because all the best writers were working for the small screen. Peter Nichols, Clive Exton, Donald Churchill, David Perry, David Rudkin, David Haliwell, David Mercer. Some drifted into obscurity. Others—David Hare, Howard Brenton, Tom Stoppard—would enjoy stellar futures.

Today no editor has the nerve, the will, the taste to commission telly fiction that trespasses outside the comfy bounds of genre work. It is not a question of money but of the clerical treason of the populist clots who run television, convinced that the general public is as stupid as they are. We are all the poorer for their patronisation, for their slavish mantra of “accessibility”. ~ JONATHAN MEADES