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Alexander Larman

What happened to the Rishi Sunak I knew at school?

Ever since it became mandatory for peak-time television to entertain more than to educate, programmes about our cultural traditions have had a big problem of definition. This has never seemed quite so crippling with the other arts as it has with music — programmes about the history of painting, for example, never seem to struggle for the right tone. Robert Hughes just gets on with it. But there is an awkwardness in what is said about music which makes it hard to decide who the producers thought their audience was going to be. If it is not educational then it cannot have been for those who have visited the oft-told Tallis/Byrd story before, since the bare bones, many of the buildings and quite a lot of the music would be already well known to them and the bouncy, five-second sight-bites style of presentation demeaning to the topic. If it is merely entertainment, then those who know nothing about Byrd and Tallis, but who might be tempted to take an interest in them, must have wondered what on earth the trick filming and the repeated views of housing estates on the outskirts of London, not to mention the dual carriageways which link them, were all about.

In fact we were being shown the land on which Byrd once lived. What has that got to do with anything worth having? And what is the hired-in famous presenter supposed to do with such material? I have watched very good actors stumble in this compromised role, and not surprisingly. Does anyone now remember Alan Bennett introducing a much-hyped series of television programmes about 19th-century music, which I think got as far as three episodes when it was billed to be 12 before it flopped without trace? Simon Russell Beale makes a first-rate Hamlet, but there is a limit to how wide even his eyes can repeatedly open at the wonders being unfolded by the experts he is ‘interviewing’.

And then what about the music itself? Should whole pieces be presented or just extracts (whole series in the past have fallen down over that one)? No classical music was written for the exigencies of modern television. And why does the choir in this series sound so characterless, when I know it contains some very talented singers? Is it that televisions even now don’t have nearly good enough speakers for this kind of programme? (And why were the BBC Singers not invited to provide the examples for a series which was so obviously made for them; and why was the Chapel Royal choir not credited at the end?)

I have longed to see a good television programme about any aspect of classical music since admiring Kenneth Clark’s way with all the other arts on Civilisation. Apparently even he nearly didn’t get the job of presenter: concerns about his too-academic delivery troubled the up-beat producers of as long ago as 1968. How wrong they were, which in his case was a point proven; the moral being that, if there is to be a presenter at all, he or she must be an acknowledged expert in the field, projecting obvious authority.

However, I would argue that this role could be suppressed altogether. The greatest contemporary documentary film-maker is Ken Burns, whose many series for PBS have set standards which make the BBC’s knee-jerk quest for relevance in all things seem mindless. Burns has revisited every aspect of how to make a documentary, in particular moving quickly between a team of brilliantly chosen experts, filmed very close-up: his dynamic version of talking heads. Every detail of Burns’s films shows the kind of trouble he takes in making them, which may simply be beyond the resources of the BBC; but his series on jazz (starring among others Wynton Marsalis) is the only music programme on television I’ve ever found convincing.

It raises hopes. The ideal television history of classical music will be expensive, and it will have to include a lot of straight talking about technical musical matters, but I’m convinced it can be done, despite all the evidence to the contrary.