Culture, thinks Melvyn Bragg, is not a bonus feature of reality: it actually is life itself. Or – as the veteran broadcaster puts it in his new Sky Arts documentary – art “isn’t the cherry on the cake; it’s the cake”. To this end, the 84-year-old interviews a series of modern greats, including Tracey Emin, Lenny Henry, Armando Iannucci and Antony Gormley, about their careers and the crucial role art has played in their lives. Bragg also has a story of his own: after having a nervous breakdown at the age of 13, it was “heavy reading” – ie consuming challenging books – that led to his recovery.
As a premise for a programme, it feels rather general, slightly indulgent and a bit extraneous. Bragg – who made his name as the host of the seminal arts programme The South Bank Show – is preaching to the choir here; anyone tuning in to Sky Arts presumably already subscribes to this worldview. Suitably, the chats featured tend to be gratingly self-satisfied. Although I suppose everyone involved does have good reason to be extremely pleased with themselves: they have all winkled fame, fortune and acclaim from the pursuit of their artistic passions.
Yet, Art Matters isn’t merely an opportunity to gloat. The reason Bragg is hammering home art’s significance is to lend urgency to his belief that “culture is on the ropes”, a sentiment he shoehorns into each of these conversations. The problem is that Bragg himself never articulates how or why art in Britain is in peril, or what should be done about it. The scaffolding for this documentary is our host’s recent speech in the House of Lords (he was given a peerage by Blair in 1998), which called for an “industrial revolution” for the arts. But beyond the government investing more money, it’s difficult to identify any of his supposedly revolutionary ideas.
It’s true – and gutting – that after 14 years of Tory rule the arts are criminally undervalued in UK schools. Yet the only real statistical insight comes courtesy of Gormley, who references research that showed annual government funding for music, arts and cultural programmes amounted to just £9.40 per pupil in 2021 (according to analysis done by the Labour party). Bragg could have brought up another statistic: since 2010, arts enrolment has dropped by 47% at GCSE and 29% at A-level. It’s a shocking decline, but this fact also opens a can of worms whose very existence seems far beyond the superficial tutting of this programme. Because who would encourage their child to pursue a career in the arts in this economy? We hear endless tales of the insecurity and poverty of those working in creative jobs; streaming has shrivelled the middle and lower rungs of the music industry, while TV budget cuts have made production work extremely unstable, a disaster in the current cost of living crisis.
A sharp, sober examination of these issues with proper socio-historical context would have been welcome, but Art Matters is not that programme. Instead of buzzing ineffectively around a subject far too unwieldy for an hour-long chummy chatshow, Bragg should have tackled a smaller topic – which he does briefly touch on. The South Bank Show ran from 1978 to 2010 on ITV, then moved to Sky Arts in 2012, and united high and popular culture by profiling everyone from Arthur Miller to Blur. But before that, Bragg earned his stripes on numerous BBC arts programmes, a time he refers to as the “golden age of arts television”. Now the genre is in its extinction era. When arts programming does occasionally appear, it is either aimed at children or is stuffy and staid, if not an all-out gerontocracy. Art Matters opens with Lord Bragg sitting in a plush study, working on his aforementioned speech. The prospect of any contemporary arts presenter reaching such dizzying heights is completely absurd.
It would have been fascinating to hear Bragg delve into the demise of arts broadcasting. Can it be resurrected? Should it be? Then again, he might have had to acknowledge that this programme is part of the problem. No form can thrive when dominated by the over-80s. And why not recruit more than one contributor under 50 (the exception being 25-year-old wunderkind cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason)? But instead of thinking about the genre’s existential problems, Bragg quickly redirects his attention to the wider issues of BBC underfunding. It’s another incredibly broad and complicated topic that this programme can only skim over, but at least it highlights one way the Beeb can count its blessings: it didn’t waste any time or money on this frustratingly shallow and unenlightening documentary.
• Art Matters With Melvyn Bragg aired on Sky Arts and is on Now
