Surfacing out of a sweet dream of trivia last week, I switched on the radio to hear someone in mid-disquisition about the Judaeo-Christian tradition of tragedy compared with the Greek tradition. The differences are substantial, as you probably already knew. I didn't, but I do now. A few days after, in the same 9am Radio 4 slot, I learned about quantum physics and Schrodinger's cat.
Later, on the Tube, I took note of what people were reading. Most had newspapers or magazines; about a quarter had books. A sniffling youth next to me was engrossed in A Tale of Two Cities; a woman was read- ing Louis de Berniere's Captain Corelli's Mandolin (still); there was a Time Out Guide to something and one man was reading a Bible.
Why are we all so worried that the nation is dumbing down? The latest to join the doomsayers is Sir John Drummond, former controller of Radio 3 and now chairman of the Theatres Trust, a government watchdog. He believes that theatre is suffering because of Labour's policy of "access over excellence". All that will soon remain of theatre are "two-handers" in pubs, a report from the Trust warns. "I cannot believe that a few years of well-intentioned but unthinking populism can be allowed to destroy a tradition that has played a key role in the European mind for over 2,000 years," said Drummond.
It is Drummond's job to remind the government that theatre will not thrive on market forces alone and that it needs backing from public funds, just as the BBC's management has constantly to remind parliament - as it did on Tuesday - that public service broadcasting cannot survive on international sales of Teletubbies alone. Like Big Issue sellers, such people have to be irritatingly and regularly noisy in order to get the government to empty its pockets of small change.
But is there any truth in their fundamental premise that the natural trajectory of unsubsidised public taste is downwards? The middle class has always feared that its books, plays, films and preferred music will be submerged by populism. As Drummond described it, "the growing tendency [of government] to believe that nothing has any value unless it reaches vast numbers of people". Over the decades, the intelligentsia has expressed such anxieties loudly and often.
Once we had municipal concert halls offering Beethoven and Rachmaninov; now we have a nation of young people deafening themselves with monotonous electronic rhythms . . . Where newspapers once ran foreign news, they now cover only celebrity weddings, anorexic models and football . . . Where television offered high-quality drama, it now gives us wall-to-wall lifestyle - gardening (sometimes with sex), cookery and house decoration . . . Hysterical television game shows engage families who would once have elevated themselves by a visit to the public library or the theatre . . . "Bonkbusters" will oust serious books from the best-seller lists if the bookshop giants take over the independents.
All have proved demonstrably false. Try getting a ticket for Falstaff at the newly reopened Royal Opera House, or a ticket for Handel's Alcina at the English National Opera. And while newspapers and magazines are more aware than ever of the PR imperative of using football and sex to attract impulsive buyers on the newsstand, the proliferation of newsprint in supplements and review sections has meant more, rather than less, coverage of cultural issues, books, science and historical features.
More books, and more titles, are being sold than ever before. Sales have risen 7 per cent this year alone; the number of titles has risen from 63,000 published during 1990 to 104,000 published during 1998. The readjustment of the book trade, following the upheavals at the beginning of the decade, has created outlets for highbrow and medium-brow books nationwide.
Only ten years ago, a book-lover had either to live in a university town, rely on the taste of a good independent bookshop or put up with the choice of the Menzies or WH Smith buyers. Now, what the trade calls a "literary novel" such as Sebastian Faulks's Birdsong can sell 700,000 copies, volume sales once associated only with popular best-sellers such as the novels of Jackie Collins or Wilbur Smith. There is also a growing appetite for books that provide information and knowledge or cover great historic events such as Anthony Beevor's Stalingrad or Dava Sobel's two triumphs, Longitude and Galileo's Daughter, all unpredicted and unpredictable best-sellers. Who would have expected an abstruse discussion of cartography to capture the public imagination, or the letters of a dutiful nun to become Radio 4's book at bedtime? And who, say, ten years ago, would have believed that a book on the history of the codfish could have even found shelf-space in a non-specialist bookshop?
Poetry has never been more popular. According to Bookseller Publications, 2,496 titles were published during 1998, compared with just 975 in 1990. The number of science titles doubled in the same period, but to a more modest 263. There have never been more translations of classic Greek and Latin texts, and 19th-century classics from Charles Dickens are available in more and cheaper imprints than ever before.
This appetite for classic texts is fed by the costume drama from the winter television schedules. Oliver Twist comes in a challenging adaptation from Alan Bleasdale, while Andrew Davies's dramatisation of Wives and Daughters is the first screen adaptation of Elizabeth Gaskell's unfinished novel.
There is always much querulous doomsaying about Radio 4 schedules. A quick and highly unscientific comparison of the schedules during the week of writing this piece and during November 1978 can only be inconclusive. But looking at the 9am slot that began this reverie, I, for one, do not lament Baker's Dozen (Friday) - a tedious trilling of popular classics that would throw Classic FM into highbrow relief. And I would far rather listen to Jeremy Paxman starting the week than to Richard Baker (again) and Mavis Nicholson "helping to find antidotes to that Monday morning feeling". I'd even rather have Michael Buerk and his existential dilemma programme, The Choice, than the 1978 corresponding Tuesday offering of a phone-in on the legal rights and wrongs of extending your home to make a granny-flat.
Kate Kellaway, who has watched the theatre over the past ten years for the Observer and the New Statesman, sees no evidence of a falling of intellectual standards. "Quite the opposite," she says. "Directors are seeking out the most recherche and difficult texts and bringing them into the light. Writers such as Frank McGuinness and Sebastian Barry are reinventing language in a most highbrow way to popular acclaim. Think of Deborah Warner constantly extending the boundaries of theatre."
And, she adds, what about Tom Stoppard's Arcadia ("stringent intellectual calibre") and Declan Donellan's Antigone at the Old Vic, neither of which make concessions to the age's supposed channel-hopping attention span?
Doomsayers have also to explain the new appetite for translations of Greek and Latin drama and poetry, including Ted Hughes's free translation of Ovid, which skirted the best-seller lists and achieved both popular and critical acclaim - even if his revelations about his marriage in Birthday Letters attracted more publicity.
The growing popularity of what used to be minority tastes has also led to a noticeable change in society's attitude to philosophy and ideas. The British, unlike the French, have never much trusted or rated intellectuals. "Clever" was more a put-down than a compliment. Now everyone wants to be recognised as intellectual and to know - instantly - what all the great thinkers said. The lamentably bad Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World proved that there was a market for philosophical ideas simply explained. This has spawned such popular series as the Phoenix Great Philosophers, which offer pocket, 5-7,000-word digests of Democritus, Popper, Hume, Aristotle and suchlike. You no longer have to read the entire Treatise on Human Nature to decide whether you're an empiricist or a rationalist.
The appetite for intellectual apparel is also reflected in the sales of the determinedly highbrow fortnightly London Review of Books. These have risen steadily from 3,000, shortly after its launch 20 years ago, to its current 33,000. LRB makes no concessions to personalities or even topicality. Book reviews may appear months after publication. Sex and food are not banned from its pages (in the latest issue we learn that Elizabeth David's partner used to tie her naked to a ship mast and whip her). However, the context is utterly cerebral. The editor, Mary Kay Wilmer, believes that LRB's sales have been boosted rather than drained by the increasing number of book and arts supplements available in the national and weekly press. "People are more accustomed to having cultural stuff around," she says.
None of this is to ignore the lament of the Theatres Trust, which is that without proper funding theatres around the country will collapse and that the government has to see the arts as more than a useful export industry. In the one major cultural project over which the government has almost total "artistic control" - the contents of the Millennium Dome - it has opted for computer gizmos and techno whizz-bangery over high- or even middlebrow culture, a strategy that led to the resignation of its first artistic director, Stephen Bayley. The latest announcement of the kind of thing we can expect is the computer animation of human sperm racing to fertilise a female egg, set to drumming by the Senegalese father of 38 children, Doudou Ndayie Rose (ho, ho, ho). But there is no sign that this kind of cultural offering is demand-driven. On the contrary, it seems as command-driven as Stalinist social realism.
However, if we steer well clear of the Dome, we can immerse ourselves week-long in high-minded pastimes. There have never been greater opportunities to read or listen to literature of all ages translated from all languages, to attend performances of the obscure works of little-known composers, to visit expertly catalogued exhibitions of hitherto unseen art from all eras (such as the Royal Academy's current showing of Amazons of the Avant-Garde, covering early 20th-century Russian women artists).
We have not even mentioned European cinema (the survival of which seemed doubtful in the early nineties), nor the provincial theatres, which were not, as had been feared, all converted into bingo halls in the 1960s.
But the argument that really confounds all those who fear the irredeemable dumbing down of the nation is that, on the crudest of counts, bums on seats and coins in tills, the take-up of highbrow culture has never been greater.
