Losing arts and minds

Hunters of the grizzly bear in Alaska report that the moment of greatest danger is when the quarry rises high on its haunches and sniffs the air. This is how the BBC stands today, circled by predators and prepared to fight.

A stalker Government has used the Hutton Inquiry as justification for a far-reaching but far from independent review of the corporation's entitlement to charter renewal in 2006. The same Government has authorised a merger which creates an ITV monopoly and legislation which will permit such alien interests as Rupert Murdoch and the German-based magnate Haim Saban to acquire terrestrial channels.

Newspapers owned by Murdoch have abandoned any pretence of neutrality in reporting the BBC. Other parts of the press, many of which have broadcasting interests, are piling on pressure. Never in eight decades has the BBC been so friendless in the public arena.

In the past, when at bay from Harold Wilson and Margaret Thatcher, the BBC could rally cultural leaders to campaign for its cause. Not this time, though, because the bridges are broken. During the 1990s the BBC determinedly reduced arts output on television to a sliver of its former magnificence, losing the love and loyalty of the creative community.

BBC2 may once have relayed too many symphony concerts, but to go from musical glut to no classics at all beyond the Proms was a reckless, self-isolating strategy. Play For Today used to bore for Britain on BBC1, but to have abandoned both new drama and the repertoire of the national theatres was a retreat too far.

Two years ago, a new chairman, Gavyn Davies, ordered a review of arts strategy with a view to restoring normal service. Davies is now taking soundings, both professional and national, to see how the changes are playing from the Groucho Club to the Potteries. The initial response is not encouraging. Seven million may watch Rolf on Art as a background to their Sunday tea, but there is nothing to suggest that blather and daub enticed them into galleries or taught them to distinguish between a Matisse masterpiece and a middle-period Rolf Harris.

A late-night arts strand, Imagine, which has begun its second season on BBC1, is attracting audiences of two million but, for reasons which will become apparent, has failed to convince culture vultures of the BBC's good intentions - the more so since the corporation has not officially admitted the extent of its cultural betrayal or understood the anger that it provoked.

A symptom of its executive confusion was exposed last week when Mark Harrison, the BBC's creative director for arts, addressed wary members of the Society of Authors. Dr Harrison, a former history don at King's College, Cambridge, is no philistine. Yet he opened with the axiom, "Everyone hates arts programmes."

The proof for his startling assertion was a BBC survey which showed that only seven per cent of viewers admit to watching arts documentaries, while fully two-thirds read books, watch films, visit country houses and engage in other activities which could be considered cultural. Harrison is committed, quite properly, to reaching the other 93 per cent. He argued that the BBC had fallen into the hands of "arts film-makers who talked increasingly to themselves". His remedy was to forsake the expert route of reporting and analysing art and replace it with "event television", which involves the public voting for lists which celebrities then gush over. That, said Dr Harrison, was "more democratic".

The success of Great Britons, Restoration and The Big Read was proof of his theorem. These ventures engaged millions in debate on matters beyond the normal purview of the saloon bar. By forging links with publishers, libraries, book clubs and educational trusts, The Big Read has spread a degree of enlightenment across a land that had for too long been starved of mental stimulation by the BBC. Harrison, searching the archives for side-bar films on Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Isaac Newton, gave up in despair and commissioned his own. He was unable to find factual profiles because the BBC had failed, in recent memory, to make them.