Nicholas Hytner recently complained that the BBC was "neglecting the arts". Melvyn Bragg has said that "I'm disappointed at the way the arts seems to be shrinking on the BBC."
But both Hytner and Bragg are one letter out. The "arts" conjures up images of committees of bores, worthily reverent exegesis, the horrors of dance, the misfit between opera and even a 42-inch screen, and ancient avant-gardist cliches – "ahead of its time", "ground-breaking", "controversial". Bragg and Hytner, the National Theatre director, would have been on the mark had they omitted the "s".
Yes, "art": television is capable of creating its own art, which is not dependent on other arts, or is at least a mongrel synthesis of them. It is capable of a sort of fabrication that is peculiar to the medium, of highly individualistic, highly crafted work that, like anything of merit, defies classification – although the very structure of the BBC's commissioning processes militate against the non-generic.
The commissioning is also too centralised. Channel controllers at the BBC enjoy an increasing autonomy that has resulted in decreasing diversity. The deluge of gardening programmes on BBC2 a few years ago was caused by the then controller's solipsistic assumption that the channel's audience was as entranced by the sod and the trowel as she was.
A brutal demolition is required. Simon Jenkins once observed that the idea that a newspaper is like an oil tanker and can be turned round only very slowly is false. A newspaper is like a speedboat. It is remade afresh every day. Television is necessarily slower, but change can be swiftly effected if the will and the wiles are there.
Of course programmes are formulaic, and of course ratings are relentlessly pursued, and of course they are regarded as the measure of value when the criteria are set by a senior management that has been recruited from such places as the marketing department of Coca-Cola, a product that has always to be the same. In the quarter century that I have been making shows for the BBC, its management has swelled in direct proportion to the diminution of programme budgets.
This management is a parasite that believes itself to be the host. It is a pusillanimous, jargon-ridden, self-perpetuating proof of Parkinson's law. (There are some things that even digitalisation cannot change.)
Tony Hall, who starts on Tuesday as the new director general of the BBC, ought to look back to Friday 13 July 1962: Harold Macmillan's Night of the Long Knives. Don't worry Tone Boy, no one died. Supermac merely shafted a third of his cabinet. During his brief tenure in the job, George Entwistle had already begun to dismember the bloated structure installed by John Birt, the improbable beneficiary of the Mendips camorra of William Rees-Mogg and Marmaduke Hussey (those are the truly guilty men).
The BBC does not have to continue on the path that it wrongly chose after the dismissal of Alasdair Milne as director general. The way in which the licence fee, nothing more or less than a poll tax, is divvied up between channels demands urgent overhaul. There is no reason why a channel that drools out light "entertainment" should receive a disproportionately hefty slice simply because it has always done so.
It is within the power of the director general to overturn this inverted order. Why are former footballers like Alan Hansen and the one who looks like a porky hairdresser paid more than Jeremy Paxman, the most authoritative broadcast journalist in Britain? Is it because they invent new units of measurement – "half a yard" – or model provincial disco clothes, or talk drivel about "role models"?
Were these dorks themselves "role models" as broadcasters they might learn to parse syntactically and grammatically correct sentences in comprehensibly accented English. (The BBC's eschewal of received pronunciation – RP – is inverse snobbery: it was a useful instrument of pan-British comprehensibility. The regional accents that have replaced RP are vocal manifestations of identity politics, of parochial apartheid.)
The fear of seriousness, and the assumption that seriousness is necessarily humourless, has to be overcome. There are manifold audiences. There is no evidence that the majority are as dull and backward as the BBC assumes them to be. The diet of gruesome "reality TV" (there is no such thing) and witless "lifestyle" shows is corrupting – it is a betrayal of the British. And I mean that.
As well as emulating Macmillan, Hall should also follow the example of another Scot, Lord Reith. Oh, I know: autres temps autres moeurs. But the BBC's capacity and duty to educate and to inform has been all but jettisoned in its hideously successful attempt to become just another commercial broadcaster.
Which has meant creating an ethos of gross sentimentality and predatory bullying. Such job descriptions as "magician and children's entertainer" should have set alarm bells ringing. So obviously should have lowlife freaks such as Jimmy Savile, long ago described by Anthony Burgess as "the most evil man in Britain". The BBC's managers were less perceptive than the great novelist. Their quality can surely be gauged by being the only people in the country who had not heard that Savile dated mortuary corpses, kerb-crawled in a camper van and was an enthusiastic nick-sniffer. Deaf? Cut off? Wilfully immemorious? Mendacious?
There's a lot of cleansing to do. Untermenschen who merely make programmes ought all to get behind Tony Hall as he takes his Karcher to managers and prescribes Depo-Provera to "entertainers".
Jonathan Meades's most recent book is Museum Without Walls
