Interesting comment on BBC from Steven Berkoff.

[french frank]

I'm surprised that an actor would think television is a better place to see Hamlet and Death of a Salesman than the theatre

But he wasn't 'an actor' back in the days when he could find such things on television. He was a teenager, no doubt discovering some things that he'd never heard of before.

he switches on BBC1 on a Saturday evening and is surprised not to get high culture - quite honestly where has he been for the past fifty years ?

Again, I'm not sure that he's surprised - merely lamenting. And with BBC Two and BBC Four now, he's not likely to find it there either any day of the week. 'Drama' means Casualty, Doctor Who. (I don't think there would even have been a BBC Two when he was a teenager.

[eighthobstruction]

It seems salymap that BBC4 have phased out a lot of home grown drama....and in fact the Taylor-Burton prog' last week was the LAST in house drama being made for BBC4....

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/jul/21/burton-taylor-bbc4-drama-cuts

[Mary Chambers]

Hard to believe but Channel 4 in the Eighties (the Isaacs era) ran a whole stream of quality classical music programmes including "Sinfonietta" with Paul Crossley. I remember an illuminating performance of Pierrot Lunaire conducted by David Atherton, IIRC. If one looks at their schedules now it's enough to make one weep.

They also did some master classes from Aldeburgh.

[Bryn]

Hard to believe but Channel 4 in the Eighties (the Isaacs era) ran a whole stream of quality classical music programmes including "Sinfonietta" with Paul Crossley. I remember an illuminating performance of Pierrot Lunaire conducted by David Atherton, IIRC. If one looks at their schedules now it's enough to make one weep.

Fine programmes on Varèse, Messiaen and Berio, IIRC. The one on Berio had a stunning presentation of his Sinfonia, conducted by Rattle. I have them on VHS somewhere. I transferred the Berio to DVD-R, but the recording quality was not all it might have been.

[David-G]

The comment from "James Wonnacott" was interesting:

I gave up watching television years ago, seeing it for what it is- politically correct social engineering.
But it's not just the television programmes, I used to listen to Radio 3 whilst working and would enjoy the variety of classical music and intelligent presentation. This has now been replaced by 3 minute bleeding chunks cut from the best known great works punctuated by the mindless babble of presenters asking listeners to text their requests, advertisements for what's "coming later" and idiots 'phoning in to tell the world how much their budgie loves Mozart.
The BBC should have stayed above ITV and Classic FM, instead they ditched their natural audience to try and grab that of their perceived rivals.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

I'm surprised that an actor would think television is a better place to see Hamlet and Death of a Salesman than the theatre

I thought he meant that TV is/was/would be an excellent place for people who don't go to The Theatre to become aware of a repertoire - not that it is/was/could be "a betterplace to see" that repertoire.

the BBC has always done 'light entertainment' (particularly at primetime Saturday evening I would have thought)

he switches on BBC1 on a Saturday evening and is surprised not to get high culture - quite honestly where has he been for the past fifty years ?

- Well, quite. (In fact, for most of those fifty years it has been Brucie presenting the programmes. Some traditions are sacrosanct. I just wish the Beeb's attitude towards Radio3 content and presentation showed as much respect and concern for its audiences' tastes and concerns.)

[gurnemanz]

Totally agree. And whilst he may have a few salient points, I found even the edited highlights of this rant against the world thoroughly dispiriting.

I agree.
When I was growing up in the Sixties, the BBC and had little to do with the popular culture I liked. Pirate stations and Radio Luxembourg were my source of broadcast music. The pendulum has clearly swung since then and obviously criticism can be levelled at the BBC, also by me, but I can generally find more than enough good stuff to watch and just ignore the rubbish. I tend to find recordings queueing up on my hard drive. I have little sympathy with Mr Berkoff’s angry posing, which actually makes me slightly angry.

Some recent things come to mind:
The War Requiem film. Colin Davis Kullervo introduced by Davis and Simon Russell Beale.
Films about Holst, Vaughan Williams, Malcolm Arnold (about whom I had previously known very little and which encouraged me to buy the excellent Naxos Complete Symphonies Box ), David Hockney and a lot of good art (the numerous Andrew Graham-Dixon progs are usually excellent + a nice Art Deco series recently, Manet with Waldemar J. earlier this year).
Numerous science documentaries (recent very good series on the Rise of Continents comes to mind). Michael Wood's recent India series was one of the best of its kind. In March a very good concert on BBC Four with one of our greatest living guitarists (Richard Thompson).
John Eliot Gardiner’s Bach A Passionate Man was on BBC2 on a Saturday night for 90 minutes in March. The ROH Eugene Onegin was on a Beeb 2 Friday night in April. Russell Beale’s Sacred Music and God’s Composer about Tomas Luis Victoria on BBC in April. Pappano's Essential Ring on BBC Four.

Nowadays, if there is nothing there you want you can easily get DVDs or Blurays. Last year I acquired Parsfial on Bluray and the complete BBC Shakespeare series on 37 DVDs for £70. I do not really feel a pressing need to watch classical concerts or stage plays on TV, preferring either live performances or just the hifi sound. Sky Arts shows quite a lot of classical concerts but I rarely tune in.

What is the point of boringly harping on about Eastenders? I can't comment because I don't watch it, but many people seem to enjoy it.

[eighthobstruction]

I agree.
When I was growing up in the Sixties, the BBC and had little to do with the popular culture I liked. Pirate stations and Radio Luxembourg were my source of broadcast music. The pendulum has clearly swung since then and obviously criticism can be levelled at the BBC, also by me, but I can generally find more than enough good stuff to watch and just ignore the rubbish. I tend to find recordings queueing up on my hard drive. I have little sympathy with Mr Berkoff’s angry posing, which actually makes me slightly angry.

Some recent things come to mind:
The War Requiem film. Colin Davis Kullervo introduced by Davis and Simon Russell Beale.
Films about Holst, Vaughan Williams, Malcolm Arnold (about whom I had previously known very little and which encouraged me to buy the excellent Naxos Complete Symphonies Box ), David Hockney and a lot of good art (the numerous Andrew Graham-Dixon progs are usually excellent + a nice Art Deco series recently, Manet with Waldemar J. earlier this year).
Numerous science documentaries (recent very good series on the Rise of Continents comes to mind). Michael Wood's recent India series was one of the best of its kind. In March a very good concert on BBC Four with one of our greatest living guitarists (Richard Thompson).
John Eliot Gardiner’s Bach A Passionate Man was on BBC2 on a Saturday night for 90 minutes in March. The ROH Eugene Onegin was on a Beeb 2 Friday night in April. Russell Beale’s Sacred Music and God’s Composer about Tomas Luis Victoria on BBC in April. Pappano's Essential Ring on BBC Four.

Nowadays, if there is nothing there you want you can easily get DVDs or Blurays. Last year I acquired Parsfial on Bluray and the complete BBC Shakespeare series on 37 DVDs for £70. I do not really feel a pressing need to watch classical concerts or stage plays on TV, preferring either live performances or just the hifi sound. Sky Arts shows quite a lot of classical concerts but I rarely tune in.

What is the point of boringly harping on about Eastenders? I can't comment because I don't watch it, but many people seem to enjoy it.

yeah berk off

[french frank]

This is an extract from a speech made by Mark Thompson at the Banff Conference in 2000 when he was BBC Director of Television (not yet Director-General) - apols to those who have seen it before :

"Keeping faith with the most ambitious artistic achievements and the biggest ideas of our civilisation is an imperative which goes beyond the question of audience size. Nor does it mean curating a museum devoted to a dead classical canon. Serious music is alive and well in Britain: a few weeks ago we broadcast Mark-Anthony Turnage's brilliant new opera The Silver Tassie, for example. It was watched by perhaps an eighth of the normal audience for BBC TWO, but so what? It's a musical landmark. And of course even that modest TV audience was many multiples of the numbers who saw it on the stage."

"Sometimes proponents of high culture really do sound as they believe we're talking about 'pearls before swine' - the only irritation being that now the swine have somehow got hold of remote controls. We can't think that.

"BBC Radio solved this problem in the 1960s by segmenting out into a suite of stations with quite different remits: a classical music station of real seriousness, Radio 3; a rock and pop station Radio 1; an MOR station Radio 2; and a news-led speech station, Radio 4. Each has pursued a public service agenda, but in very different ways."


The new Director of Television, one of Tony Hall's early appointments, is Danny Cohen (39), promoted after a quick spell as Controller of BBC One, and Controller of BBC Three before that.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Nowadays, if there is nothing there you want you can easily get DVDs or Blurays. Last year I acquired Parsfial on Bluray and the complete BBC Shakespeare series on 37 DVDs for £70. I do not really feel a pressing need to watch classical concerts or stage plays on TV, preferring either live performances or just the hifi sound. Sky Arts shows quite a lot of classical concerts but I rarely tune in.

I think that's the point, gurny - because the Beeb's output of Live performance art events is so meagre*, those of us who already love it have to buy DVDs. There is no opportunity for those who don't already love it to encounter it by chance by switching on a TV set as there was for me in the 1970s.

* = of your list (and they were all smashing programmes, I agree) only four programmes included a complete performance of a work without voice-over commentary.

[aeolium]

There is another point, which is that the BBC's increasing disinclination to cover classical music, opera as well as new and classic drama provides an opening for others using new broadcast technology: the increasing number of companies providing live to cinema (and live to internet) broadcasts of plays, operas and concerts. As the internet becomes more widely available on TVs (smart TVs) more people may turn to the offerings of those competitors and the BBC's already declining TV audience will decline further (and become increasingly hard to distinguish from commercial broadcasting). At that point serious questions will be asked as to what is the point of retaining the license fee, public service broadcasting etc.

[Sir Velo]

Fine programmes on Varèse, Messiaen and Berio, IIRC. The one on Berio had a stunning presentation of his Sinfonia, conducted by Rattle. I have them on VHS somewhere. I transferred the Berio to DVD-R, but the recording quality was not all it might have been.

Top drawer stuff - remember them well.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Fine programmes on Varèse, Messiaen and Berio, IIRC. The one on Berio had a stunning presentation of his Sinfonia, conducted by Rattle. I have them on VHS somewhere. I transferred the Berio to DVD-R, but the recording quality was not all it might have been.

I think that the Rattle Berio Sinfonia was from a different series from Sinfonietta (possibly the late Michael Hall's [I]Leaving Home[/I)]. The fact that Channel 4 had both Sinfonietta (two series) and Leaving Home in the 1980s & '90s is something that, if you tell kids today, they don't believe you.

(There was also an entire series of programmes devoted to Harrison Birtwistle, including a ninety minute documentary, at around the time of the premiere of The Mask of Orpheus. AND Boulez on Music Today - a series of documentaries IN FRENCH [+subtitles]. Happy Days.)

(Which reminds me - the complete Beckett on Film, too!)

[edashtav]

O Taste & See

I think that's the point, gurny - because the Beeb's output of Live performance art events is so meagre*, those of us who already love it have to buy DVDs. There is no opportunity for those who don't already love it to encounter it by chance by switching on a TV set as there was for me in the 1970s.

* = of your list (and they were all smashing programmes, I agree) only four programmes included a complete performance of a work without voice-over commentary.

[my emphasis] A powerful point, ferneyhoughgeliebte. Free-to-air services on the BBC have been a powerful, chance, educational tool. The youth of our country are being deprived by the BBC in both cricket and serious music - two pillars of our culture. With a little help and support, minority interests can thrive and add vibrancy to our cultural life. The last Introit that I sang was RVW's "O Taste & See": a good exhortation for R.3 and BBC 4.

[french frank]

There is no opportunity for those who don't already love it to encounter it by chance by switching on a TV set as there was for me in the 1970s.

Tragic - instead it's Create your own Content, picking what you like and not bothering with what you don't already know.