Review Show review
Yes, I know, from the same people that brought you the Department of Redundancy Department.
Now 33% longer! And on as quarter as often. That seems to make about a third as much, in toto, if my mental arithmetic serves. And, I hate to plead too much from my own weirdly screwed-up body clock, but... They're calling 8pm a "primetime" slot. In BBC4 terms, 8pm is practically daytime TV, as it generally only fires up at all around 7. And it's still light out! No late-night repeat at first wink, which seems odd in the light of Four's general propensity to show own-programming (quite literally!) thrice-nightly. Maybe it's on again another night? And if you're going to put out a show on a monthly basis, which seems to have immediately defeated the "series link" function on my satellite box, why the third Sunday? Wouldn't the first one, or the last one, be more mnemonic and navigable? I hope it's just my personal paranoia that's fearful this is starting to seem like an exercise in setting a programme up to be seen to "fail".
OK, the actual show. It seems much the same as it was. These days they're on separate colouredy chairs, as opposed to the pair of red sofas they had the ever-so-slight set change before that. No reinstatement of the fourth guest they lost a while ago. ("Panel now 25% larger!" They missed a marketing ploy there.) Perhaps the most striking change was that the musical guest, British Sea Power, was in "full band" mode, and played two songs, bisecting as well as playing out the show. Well, I say "full" band. I think there were six of 'em when they played Cork, it apparently goes as high as seven, and the "core" seems to be four, give or take whatever they do for "acoustic" sets. Here they were five (unless I was missing someone bricked in under the stage, in the manner of U2's keyboard player, which is entirely possible given my tiny current TV and my bleary eyes). I did also catch the tail end of their set at a festival in Germany... but that's a memory challenge too far. Quite enjoyed their numbers, alarmed at just how many BSP albums I'm behind now, and resolved to think seriously about catching up with them on their next set of Irish dates. (Don't quite have the get-up-and-go for another buspedition to Dublin just yet, this time around.)
The panel was pretty good. Kirsty Wark is the best chair by a mile. Martha Kearney is an urbane presenter, but considerably more "hands off", which I don't think is a virtue in this type of programme. Guests are apt to go off on self-involved tangents, yammer across each other, and just occasionally actually have an outbreak of complete groupthink. Wark's able to keep matters on track with some questioning with a level of content-specificity and inquisitorial detail, and putting a contrary view when it's needed. The third-string bloke they wheel on occasion, whose name I can't even be bothered to google, is very weak sauce indeed. The least said the better about anyone else that's done it as a one-off, the better. I did briefly wondered if part of the "monthly" plan was to enable Wark to present it regularly... but no, Kearney's doing the next one. Huh. So we're now going to get Wark doing it bi-monthly?
Hadley Freeman's been on a couple of times, and I think has been pretty good. Not quite as hilarious as she is in print, but hey, this is TRS, not standup. At least when A. L. Kennedy isn't on. Paul Morley is a bit of a twerp on occasion, but he was the logical person to have on for "Record Store Day" -- or as Ian McMillan insists we should be saying to fight off the encroachment of US English, "Record Shop Day" -- and was on pretty decent form generally. Most other ex-rock-journos would have been much further up the "strong urge to punch this person" scale. Sarfraz Manzoor is far from my favourite of the "panel of panelists". I'm sure there's a production meeting in which they decide who the designated pretentious person is that wee-- eh, month, and who'll they'll have on with an especially grating accent (I know, G. B. Shaw). He's quite the double threat. Handy, I imagine, in these times of austerity and fewer guests. If I had my druthers I'd have Natalie Haynes on as "permanent guest" (I'm trying to resist comparisons with Alan Davies), or maybe lob in Bidisha occasionally when Nat couldn't make it up on the train, or they needed a handgrenade thrown in.
I'm not going to get quite so involuted as to review the actual reviews... not least because I've seen any of the works under discussion, and amn't sure I'm going to any time soon. Oh well. Hey, that's why getting regular chunks of celchyur vicariously is so key!
I'm not that thrilled by arts coverage on TV in general right now. The BBC's "arts editor" is a complete berk. I think that's mainly a post-Daily Show-level peacock title, rather than indicating Will Gompertz is Actually In Charge of All the Arts Things. He gets to be Senior Seniority Correspondent, as it were. Or at least, one can only hope so. The visible part of his job, at any rate, is doing two-minute pieces on the six o'clock news in which he talks complete bollocks. Recent lowlights included a piece about David Bowie which led on whether he was a "mere entertainer" or not -- and apparently he's actually a Bowie fan, so he must actually think that high-versus-low cultural sneering is an integral component of his job description. He also did an item on the reopening of the main building of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, in which the critical qualifier "main building" was entirely absent. Had one not known better -- by for example having visited it during the time period he was talking, and seen the artworks he was talking about on display -- one would have formed the clear impression that them "having the builders in" meant that for the entire past decade it had shut up shop entirely, and The Night Watch and so or were in big drawers in a basement someplace all that time. (OK, a hellabig drawer, in that case.)
Channel 4 News replaced their pretty good arts correspondent with a terrible one, a while back. (Who was, ironically enough, slagging off the BBC for their changes to TRS.) There's occasionally something good on Sky Arts, but my overall feeling about those channels is probably best expressed in their "Sky Arts Rieu" fortnight-long EPG stunt. OK, each to his or her own, but lowbrow classical? Isn't that like alcohol-free beer, as my father once said, in that it completely defeats the point? The only real selling point is its ossified privileges to sneer at johnny-come-lately blow-in "lower" arts, which is somewhat radically undercut by madcap populist capering.
Still, could be worse. Could be, for example, the state of science programming on TV. I think I'll save that for a another post, though. Maybe the next time Horizon isn't on a medical theme, doesn't have a "celebrity" presenter, and isn't on a central topic that could be fully explained in a sentence. It might be a while.
Now 33% longer! And on as quarter as often. That seems to make about a third as much, in toto, if my mental arithmetic serves. And, I hate to plead too much from my own weirdly screwed-up body clock, but... They're calling 8pm a "primetime" slot. In BBC4 terms, 8pm is practically daytime TV, as it generally only fires up at all around 7. And it's still light out! No late-night repeat at first wink, which seems odd in the light of Four's general propensity to show own-programming (quite literally!) thrice-nightly. Maybe it's on again another night? And if you're going to put out a show on a monthly basis, which seems to have immediately defeated the "series link" function on my satellite box, why the third Sunday? Wouldn't the first one, or the last one, be more mnemonic and navigable? I hope it's just my personal paranoia that's fearful this is starting to seem like an exercise in setting a programme up to be seen to "fail".
OK, the actual show. It seems much the same as it was. These days they're on separate colouredy chairs, as opposed to the pair of red sofas they had the ever-so-slight set change before that. No reinstatement of the fourth guest they lost a while ago. ("Panel now 25% larger!" They missed a marketing ploy there.) Perhaps the most striking change was that the musical guest, British Sea Power, was in "full band" mode, and played two songs, bisecting as well as playing out the show. Well, I say "full" band. I think there were six of 'em when they played Cork, it apparently goes as high as seven, and the "core" seems to be four, give or take whatever they do for "acoustic" sets. Here they were five (unless I was missing someone bricked in under the stage, in the manner of U2's keyboard player, which is entirely possible given my tiny current TV and my bleary eyes). I did also catch the tail end of their set at a festival in Germany... but that's a memory challenge too far. Quite enjoyed their numbers, alarmed at just how many BSP albums I'm behind now, and resolved to think seriously about catching up with them on their next set of Irish dates. (Don't quite have the get-up-and-go for another buspedition to Dublin just yet, this time around.)
The panel was pretty good. Kirsty Wark is the best chair by a mile. Martha Kearney is an urbane presenter, but considerably more "hands off", which I don't think is a virtue in this type of programme. Guests are apt to go off on self-involved tangents, yammer across each other, and just occasionally actually have an outbreak of complete groupthink. Wark's able to keep matters on track with some questioning with a level of content-specificity and inquisitorial detail, and putting a contrary view when it's needed. The third-string bloke they wheel on occasion, whose name I can't even be bothered to google, is very weak sauce indeed. The least said the better about anyone else that's done it as a one-off, the better. I did briefly wondered if part of the "monthly" plan was to enable Wark to present it regularly... but no, Kearney's doing the next one. Huh. So we're now going to get Wark doing it bi-monthly?
Hadley Freeman's been on a couple of times, and I think has been pretty good. Not quite as hilarious as she is in print, but hey, this is TRS, not standup. At least when A. L. Kennedy isn't on. Paul Morley is a bit of a twerp on occasion, but he was the logical person to have on for "Record Store Day" -- or as Ian McMillan insists we should be saying to fight off the encroachment of US English, "Record Shop Day" -- and was on pretty decent form generally. Most other ex-rock-journos would have been much further up the "strong urge to punch this person" scale. Sarfraz Manzoor is far from my favourite of the "panel of panelists". I'm sure there's a production meeting in which they decide who the designated pretentious person is that wee-- eh, month, and who'll they'll have on with an especially grating accent (I know, G. B. Shaw). He's quite the double threat. Handy, I imagine, in these times of austerity and fewer guests. If I had my druthers I'd have Natalie Haynes on as "permanent guest" (I'm trying to resist comparisons with Alan Davies), or maybe lob in Bidisha occasionally when Nat couldn't make it up on the train, or they needed a handgrenade thrown in.
I'm not going to get quite so involuted as to review the actual reviews... not least because I've seen any of the works under discussion, and amn't sure I'm going to any time soon. Oh well. Hey, that's why getting regular chunks of celchyur vicariously is so key!
I'm not that thrilled by arts coverage on TV in general right now. The BBC's "arts editor" is a complete berk. I think that's mainly a post-Daily Show-level peacock title, rather than indicating Will Gompertz is Actually In Charge of All the Arts Things. He gets to be Senior Seniority Correspondent, as it were. Or at least, one can only hope so. The visible part of his job, at any rate, is doing two-minute pieces on the six o'clock news in which he talks complete bollocks. Recent lowlights included a piece about David Bowie which led on whether he was a "mere entertainer" or not -- and apparently he's actually a Bowie fan, so he must actually think that high-versus-low cultural sneering is an integral component of his job description. He also did an item on the reopening of the main building of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, in which the critical qualifier "main building" was entirely absent. Had one not known better -- by for example having visited it during the time period he was talking, and seen the artworks he was talking about on display -- one would have formed the clear impression that them "having the builders in" meant that for the entire past decade it had shut up shop entirely, and The Night Watch and so or were in big drawers in a basement someplace all that time. (OK, a hellabig drawer, in that case.)
Channel 4 News replaced their pretty good arts correspondent with a terrible one, a while back. (Who was, ironically enough, slagging off the BBC for their changes to TRS.) There's occasionally something good on Sky Arts, but my overall feeling about those channels is probably best expressed in their "Sky Arts Rieu" fortnight-long EPG stunt. OK, each to his or her own, but lowbrow classical? Isn't that like alcohol-free beer, as my father once said, in that it completely defeats the point? The only real selling point is its ossified privileges to sneer at johnny-come-lately blow-in "lower" arts, which is somewhat radically undercut by madcap populist capering.
Still, could be worse. Could be, for example, the state of science programming on TV. I think I'll save that for a another post, though. Maybe the next time Horizon isn't on a medical theme, doesn't have a "celebrity" presenter, and isn't on a central topic that could be fully explained in a sentence. It might be a while.