In Memoriam: culture for the masses. Trevor Dolby on the future for arts on television So. Farewell then Richard and Judy , And Belvin's South Bank Show . Bringers of books and culture To the great unwashed. You proved that housewives can read, Bus drivers love art. You proved Vera, Chuck and Dave Are not so stupid. Not so TV executives. (Apols to E J Thribb) I know Peter Fincham, ITV's Director of Television, a little. I like him, he's thoughtful and has a reputation in TV as a man who is good with talent and defends creativity.
He established TalkBack with Griff Rhys Jones and Mel Smith, and oversaw the production of iconic shows like Alan Partridge, Never Mind the Buzzcocks, Smack the Pony and Da Ali G Show; he also produced Stephen Poliakoff's Shooting the Past, for which alone he should have a knighthood. He was controller of BBC1 for a year, leaving after the affair of the creatively edited RDF trailer for the programme A Year with the Queen was broadcast.
Peter is quoted as saying TSBS was ending because Melvyn (Christian name only required as in Delia, Nigella, Jamie maybe he should go into cooking next?) at 69 has decided to quit. Well OK then. If Peter says so. But you are not going to tell me that in a room somewhere over on Gray's Inn Road the excuse to make the decision to axe a show that wasn t bringing in the advertising and ratings when ITV was losing money hand over fist was not welcome. I m sure it was done with regret, but nevertheless it has been done, no matter how much hand -wringing went on behind the scenes.
One thing is for sure: we are all poorer for its passing. The world will close over and it will be applauded in the future in the same way as those who remember Sir Huw Wheldon's Monitor.
But Monitor was the start of a whole glittering raft of arts programmes, such as Humphrey Burton's Aquarius, which lead directly to The South Bank Show in 1979. I fear that the end of TSBS is the end of the line for arts programmes in the independent sector. Indeed, maybe the end per se if you look at what passes on the BBC for an arts show.
I hope Melvyn forms a consortium to get a UK version of HBO off the ground. He can certainly have a crisp brown tenner from me to get the ball rolling.
My unshakable belief is that there is an audience for good arts programmes and indeed books. Forget the 'It's our duty as TV makers and publishers to maintain culture in this country.' And I m certainly not going to get into the government subsidy argument. Quite simply, I think, like much else, if we can find a formula there's an eager audience out there.
In the same week, we hear that Richard and Judy are sliding off the sofa for the last time, a casualty of low viewing figures. This from a TV company which only a year ago was trumpeting digital as the, er, new mass delivery system .
It was a bold move by Amanda Ross to create the Richard & Judy Book Club. The initial reaction of pundits was: Why? The programme, these same pundits maintained, was moving wallpaper aimed at housewives who had nothing else to do of an afternoon except iron and wait for the kids to come home from school before opening a tin or two for tea. How deliciously wrong they were.
And now the party is over - well, unless we can, as publishers, turn Billy's into Blitz.
R&J is a terrific legacy for publishers to build upon. We now know that if we can only get to them there is a mass of people who want to read books. There was a stat that 50% of the population don t read books. When I was at Orion, we came up with the line Selling books to people who don t buy books misery memoirs and celeb biogs and the like (OK, probably lots of people thought of it). But we never imagined that these people would, over time, become regular readers and book buyers. We hoped they would but expected that they wouldn t. Hurrah for them, and hurrah for Amanda.
So what future for arts and culture TV if a fellow like Peter Fincham can only acquiesce under the weight of shouts for more and more crap? With the catastrophic decline in ad revenues, independent TV is slashing and burning, leaving - well, what exactly? Well, the BBC exactly. And what do we do when the BBC is mentioned? Shout monopoly, unfair competition, unaccountability! Well, the BBC may be a pig's ear but in TV arts terms it may also be our last hope.
Trevor Dolby is Publisher of Preface