TELEVISION A note in last week’s Radio Times magazine commended the arts programme Imagine (BBC1 Tuesday) but asked why it was on the BBC’s mass viewing channel when it was perfect for BBC4, the intellectuals’ niche. This was more ironic than the writer of the note had likely thought: this week’s programme was on the benefits of culture for the common man (as the common woman is also known). Imagine is on BBC1 so that the common man will happen upon it; indeed, this happenstance is part of the BBC’s many-splendoured mission. Yet art for the common man, and much of the art that enjoys the largesse of the common man’s taxes, is appreciated most of all by a cultural elite. Cultural policy, and the BBC, must live with such contradictions.
This, the first of a two-parter, told of the make-work schemes developed under the Roosevelt administration. During the Depression, it put more than 40,000 artists of various kinds to work – painting, sculpting, versifying, photographing, writing, directing. As presenter Alan Yentob warned, subsidising art does not guarantee its quality. Much of it was bad but photographs of the impoverished south, especially, imprinted many images on many retinas. Among writers, Arthur Miller (proudly), Saul Bellow (ironically, no doubt) and John Cheever (shamefacedly – he disguised his state-sponsored apprenticeship) all began on the Works Progress Administration programme.
The WPA’s proudest moment was a Macbeth played by a black group in Harlem and directed by Orson Welles, the future cinematic genius. Welles, interviewed in the 1970s, growled and wheezed that the 1936 production was also the pride of his career and noted with pleasure that Shakespearean verse was wonderful in the mouths of those who had never heard it before.
The bard of this period was Woody Guthrie, though he barely joined the programme, preferring to work for what markets he could find. His daughter told Yentob that he always thought the piper’s paymasters called the tune.
Still, the Radio Times had a point: a programme as didactic as this one – praise, in my book – if happened upon by the common man was likely to be switched off fairly fast. Would he stick with Desperate Romantics (BBC2 Tuesday)? This dramatic rendering of the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood tries to lure an audience into art history by mixing in a lot of sex: Holman Hunt’s sexual initiation with a prostitute; Dante Gabriel Rossetti finding love, and a relief from womanising, with his muse Lizzie Siddal; the critic John Ruskin primly upbraiding his lovely young wife for demanding sex with him (making no excuses, he leaves, to pore over pornography by candlelight).
And the art? Not much viewed: a quick glimpse of works now hallowed; some discussion, between episodes of mid-19th-century cultural laddishness in the pub, of the revolution the lads were launching against the Royal Academy-approved art of the time. Nothing coherent but, perhaps for that reason, it piqued the curiosity to see more.
The Street’s second episode (BBC1 Monday) is something all men and women, common and uncommon, should watch, for this series is a fine piece of work. It was also free from progressive or other clichés: true, the central figure of the prostitute, Dee, beautifully played by Anna Friel, did have a heart, if not of gold, at least dedicated to her two boys. For their sake, she turned her tricks; for their sake, she sacrificed (as she thought) love; all to get them out of their below-standard comprehensive into a grammar school.
The scene in which she begged to have them accepted into an institution that she saw as an escape from crime and drugs was as affecting a piece of television as I’ve seen. On the day it was shown, the former cabinet minister Alan Milburn, introducing a report calling for greater equality, said he wanted more parents to use sharp elbows to get their children a good education – Dee used her stilettoes.
Millions of people watch The Bill (ITV1 Thursday) and New Tricks (BBC1 Thursday), competing head-to-head, and you can see why. These are the TV equivalents of the airport novel – efficient, they hook you early and have sharply differentiated but static characterisation. Last week’s episode of The Bill showed another prostitute whose love for her son both sustained and ruined her. The son was cleared of the crime of which he was suspected but her heart was broken anyway by his death in a police chase – a genuflection to a centuries’ old fictional morality that affirms that the whore always gets it.
The ageing gang of detectives in New Tricks, who are put to work to solve unsolved crimes, last week showed some autumnal anger over the discovery that a scientist’s apparent suicide had actually been a murder, executed by the CIA. The scientist had found out that an Agency jet carrying nine British citizens, suspected of being terrorists and snatched off the streets to be transported to Guantánamo, had crashed, killing all. Guantánamo deserves obloquy: this, with its deliberate echoes of the suicide of David Kelly in 2003, conjured up fashionable paranoia. That such a theme should find itself taken out of the subsidised stage into popular TV drama shows how far this trope has now spread, and how routinely the US, dream goal of the common man for two centuries, is seen in art as darkly evil at its heart.
john.lloyd@ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/lloyd
