For 40 years, the primary scheduling tactic of public service broadcasting was guided serendipity. If the schedulers hooked you with a popular drama and reminded you that a sitcom followed 40 minutes after it ended, then you might just tolerate the documentary hammocked between. But this is a zapper-happy, multi-channel age in which viewers' loyalty cannot be assumed for even the length of a commercial break. On Sunday 19 March, Jane Root, the BBC2 controller who invented the Saturday night History Zone, abandoned the strategy of inculcating art by stealth and introduced the Art Zone, a grouping of "destination" arts programmes designed to counter the myth that the BBC doesn't make them anymore. But will zoning guarantee more viewers?
As an evening for the zone, Sunday has its pros and cons. It is a stay-at-home night fiercely fought over by ITV and BBC1. It is never going to be the time when BBC2 wins its largest audience. In Sunday's favour, from Lord Clark through to Lord Bragg, the Sabbath has been associated with arts series, probably because the British regard visits to art galleries as a form of secular church-going. Hence, Andrew Graham-Dixon's undervalued series on the Renaissance was shown on Sunday nights last year, and Howard Goodall's Big Bangs is currently on Sundays at 8pm on Channel 4.
Actually, the excellence of Goodall's programme was a problem for the BBC zone's inaugural outing. Arguing, unfashionably, that art progresses by quantum, revolutionary leaps, the show heeds its own lesson and unembarrassedly presents a weekly essay that is rude, witty and enthusiastic. Running head to head to it on BBC2 was an unfortunately languid and patronising adaptation of Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life. The book is minor, but has perfect poise towards its subject, In Search of Lost Time. Peter Bevan's dramatised documentary was arch and lumbering, featuring as its narrator Felicity Kendall at her squeakiest, and as Proust, Ralph Fiennes, unwisely attempting to extend his repertoire into comedy. Thus were one good book and one great book ruined. (Incidentally, you don't need to be Ken Russell to successfully introduce dramatisation into an arts documentary: a recent Omnibus on BBC1 dressed up an actor as Ruskin and was gripping).
Peter Maniura, the zone's temporary editor - if and when the BBC fills Kim Evans's long-vacated post of head of arts, he/she will presumably assume responsibility for it - was on surer ground with the documentary Picasso Days (9pm). A buy-in not only from French television but from another strand, Storyville, it told Pablo Picasso's life by means of the 12 "most important" days and works of his life. It was copiously illustrated by archive film and interview, but the unspoken "stations of the cross" conceit encouraged its grey, Gallic solemnity and turned the old ram into a de-eroticised saint. It was 10 per cent wonderful and 90 per cent heavy going.
After 150 minutes of Proust mocked and Picasso beatified, I felt like the schoolboy who asks his father where the Pyramids are and is told to ask his mother because she puts the things away. I knew where the arts stood on BBC2, but only in the most literal sense (between 7.30pm and 10.30pm). Yet there are goodies ahead, I am sure, including Seeing Salvation, Neil MacGregor's series on the image of Christ, and Richard Eyre's history of British theatre. And the slot's existence will no doubt, in due course, inspire the talent to fill it. In its favour, too, it provides a regular, non-insomniac home for Late Review - for many years, aside from Film 2000, the only regular arts criticism on BBC television.
Sadly, here Root has meddled. It is cut by 15 minutes and the regular reviewers have been split up to include "practitioners". "The old panel were just critics," Root told the Independent, as if critics were the last people to be in the business of criticism. On to the new op-art set, Mark Lawson, wearing a tie for the first time, introduced on his left the writer-practitioner Robert Harris (who, don't tell Root, has been on before) and, on his right, the actress-practitioner Meera Syal. Of the regular team of Tony Parsons (resigned disgusted), Allison Pearson (considering her position) and Germaine Greer (promised a few gigs), only Tom Paulin remained. For lovers of the weekly soap-opera aspect of the show, this was the equivalent of gunning down 80 per cent of the cast of Dynasty in a death or glory dash for ratings.
It wasn't that Syal was bad, exactly, it was just that, as a novice, she did not understand the grammar of the show. Asked her opinion of Tom Cruise in Magnolia, she said he looked good in underpants and added: "That's not a very aesthetic judgement is it? I'm lowering the tone on BBC2." The oldsters said much worse in their day, but would never have broken the illusion that they were holding a spontaneous, untelevised discussion. The Review's format is strong enough in its simplicity to endure, but it is infuriating that, after around a hundred late-night "pilots", we must now watch it find its feet all over again. Here's hoping the Guardian's promised arts channel will reunite the veterans for the Late Review - Unzoned.
Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the London "Evening Standard"
