Drunken quarrels, flouncing, pomposity — whatever happened to late-night arts TV?
Things to see and do
Tracey Emin’s appearance on Is Painting Dead? (1997): “Are there really real people in England watching this programme now? Are they really watching, really watching it?”
Darling, John Schlesinger’s clever, funny, 1965 film about a 20-year-old woman and her vain search for happiness in swinging London, has been restored and is screening in cinemas this month.
In the film, Diana, the skittish, sybaritic protagonist played by Julie Christie, is presented with three romantic options: a dreary Italian aristocrat more than 30 years older than her; an advertising spiv and frequenter of overly complicated sex parties; and Robert Gold, who is nothing like either of his rivals.
If an aristocrat embodies the rigid past and a spiv the empty, permissive present, Gold, played by Dirk Bogarde, represents a third possibility: an intellectual future. His name is a clunking great clue to which of the three we’re meant to be rooting for.
Gold is, of course, a journalist, but this is 1965 so he is a very modern kind of communicator. He is a broadcaster, presenter of an earnest TV show called Art and You, the format of which is instantly recognisable as belonging to a terrestrial television genre that started in the early 1960s and ended soon after the millennium. From Late Night Line-Up (BBC, 1964-1972) to The Late Show (BBC, 1989-1995) via The South Bank Show (ITV, 1978-2010), unashamedly high-minded arts magazine programmes, often screened live and late at night, offered a cultural education on the margins of schedules. Such shows have vanished — and we are poorer for it.
They were far from perfect. Formats tended to be more relaxed than current affairs programming, typically helmed by liberal types who prized loose structures over itemised agendas, which meant they could slip into rambling tedium. These guiding voices also invited their friends on as guests, which didn’t help with either the elitism or the content. There were no shortage of complacent contributors offering banal observations. And they could be prescriptive. The cultural tastes and preoccupations of programme makers were all audiences needed to know, and that was that.
Such programmes often assumed audiences would be agog at whatever they were talking about, no matter how esoteric. This interview by Joan Bakewell with an elderly Nicolai Poliakoff, AKA Coco the Clown, from a 1965 edition of Late Night Line-Up, is nearly 13 minutes long.
Art and You satirises all this brilliantly. A corduroy-jacketed Bogarde as Gold, broadcasting live from a darkened set, gravely informs viewers of the death of his friend, a novelist he considers a literary giant of the 20th century, but whose books — inexplicably for a literary giant — are out of print. Gold veers into a morose, hectoring lecture about the decline of British culture. It’s spectacularly pompous.
But despite its faults, late-night arts TV was the epitome of Reithian principles. For arts-curious kids stranded in parts of the country where not much was going on, Clive James, Melvyn Bragg, Mark Lawson, or whoever, made it clear that esoteric cinema, strange performance art, difficult music or experimental ballet was for you — if not now, then some day. Art need not be impenetrable and it did not have to be ridiculed. Clever, imaginative people who took the arts as seriously as they took themselves could be right there, in your living room, opening up possibilities. Late-Night Line-Up also featured, at various times, Allen Ginsberg, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Marcel Duchamp.
A sense of infinite possibility in the South Bank Show title sequence
Some shows even defined an era. A drunken Tracey Emin, smoking furiously and clashing with Roger Scruton during a 1997 live discussion about the Turner Prize — hilariously titled Is Painting Dead? — ends with Emin flouncing out. Emin — bright, working-class, insolent — cuts through what would otherwise have been a dry debate and turns it into a culturally significant moment: a new generation of artists had no time to listen to the art establishment’s opinions on whether their work belonged in the Royal Academy or not. Had the show been pre-recorded, it would never have aired.
“Don't you understand? I want to be free. Get this f***ing mic off."
Much of my early cultural education came from Tony Wilson’s The Other Side of Midnight, made in the late 1980s by Granada and broadcast nationally. Here’s an episode so eclectic it’s verging on bonkers: Jesse Jackson, Lemn Sissay, The Fall, George Kuchar, Edward de Bono. It’s muddled and it’s demanding. But it credits the audience with the mental agility to keep up. And, being Wilson, it’s determinedly regional: there’s nothing about London in it at all.
“Edward de Bono. Remember him? Lateral whatever”
Such ambitious cultural programming has mostly vanished, though the ghosts of late-night arts TV are still around. Later… With Jools Holland is so-called because it was a spin-off of The Late Show and broadcast immediately afterwards — it is now adrift from its original context. Front Row on Radio 4 has gravitas and breadth, though it is often just as concerned with the business side of what has become known as the creative industries as with audiences’ experiences of them — a bit like a trade magazine for radio. Sky Arts revived The South Bank Show briefly in 2014, but axed it after two series. It also tried Sky Arts Late in 2020. That ran for one series.
What killed the late-night arts show? Endless rounds of cost-cutting by terrestrial broadcasters (that did for The South Bank Show). The long, slow decline of linear television viewing. According to Ofcom, far fewer people are watching traditional TV channels for far less time, with steep declines year on year, which makes live TV for niche audiences seem hopelessly idiosyncratic. New priorities: Channel 4 now commissions artists to make programmes about us, rather than it making programmes about arts. The BBC is clear that it does not commission overviews or surveys; it wants documentaries, binge-able programming about single topics and one-line sells. I’m sure there are more reasons.
But without guiding voices, the arts feel less immediate and a lot more remote. And as Maxwell Blowfield, who writes the arts Substack Maxwell Museums, pointed out to me this week: “Podcasts are exactly this, people sitting around discussing things. There must be an audience for television.”
In Darling, Diana, running out of options in her endless search for novelty, marries the aristocrat. She chooses a life of airless perfection over a future with Gold and his “intellectual friends”, with all their tweedy geniality and their televised worrying at the cultural state of the nation. As have we.
Darling is at the BFI this month
Other things:
For the Financial Times this month I reviewed Girl on Girl, Sophie Gilbert’s book about the unfiltered misogyny that characterised UK and US pop culture at the turn of the millennium, the latest in a line of books on a similar theme. (This much longer review in The New Yorker by Danya Tortorici is interesting.)
This is a massive, sculptural stone sphere, about 2 metres high and made from reconstituted limestone. It’s also a prototype: in future, human remains could be mixed with the limestone to make more such spheres. Each cadaver would get a layer.
Urna, by Andrew Borg Wirth, Anthony Bonnici, Mathew Attard Navarro, Thomas Mifsud and Tanil Raif
The piece, called Urna, was on show in the Maltese pavilion at the opening of the London Design Biennale in Somerset House, and I liked it because it represented a new way of dealing with death. Cremation was legalised in Malta only in 2019, and it’s a small island. Massive memorial gardens are not practical. A giant sculptural sphere could hold the cremated remains of 200-odd people within one form. “They would become fossils, artefacts held in stone, suspended in time and bound in silence,” as the architects behind it put it.
I asked one of its architects what the biggest obstacle might be to persuading people to inject their powdered remains into a massive, anonymous sphere alongside dozens of strangers, rather than be memorialised with an inscription. “Ego,” he said.
London Design Biennale runs until June 29
What else am I working on?
A long-form piece about secret culinary lives
A story about what makes urban places successful
More book reviews
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My website, where you can find a selection of my work, is here.
Ah, I used to love The Other side of Midnight.
Wonderful piece! And thank you for the shout out!