I had real nerves switching to Sky Digital's channel 199 last Saturday afternoon and finding there an amateurish drawing of a curtain behind the announcement that Artsworld would begin broadcasting for the first time at 7pm. This single image captured all the formality, pomposity and naivety of a satellite company's first attempt at an arts channel.
There is, after all, a generation out there who, used to actors lolling about on stage waiting for the audience to arrive, have never seen a curtain rise over a proscenium arch. The one place the convention persists is the Royal Opera House, whose former general director, Jeremy Isaacs, is chairman of Arts-world. The ROH is not a model for anything.
The importance of Artsworld succeeding, however, is hard to overstate. We are more than two years into Chris Smith's digital future. With any number of channels dedicated to movies, sports, news, pop, shopping, God, Bollywood and porn, the absence of an arts station continued to make a mockery of the metaphor of multichannel as a vast WHSmith in which the consumer can find exactly the right periodical to cater for his or her taste, however obscure.
Meanwhile, terrestrial television serves higher brows less and less. The quality is still there, but not the quantity. The recent pre-emption by snooker of half of BBC2's Art Zone is a case in point, as is the declining frequency of opera on Channel 4 (although, by strange coincidence, there was one on Saturday). Mourn also the midnight scheduling of Young Musician of the Year and the almost complete absence of classic plays on any channel. One jolt among Artsworld's schedules is Diana Rigg in Hedda Gabler, made by ITV for prime time in the late Seventies. The embarrassment shown by BBC2's controller, Jane Root, towards cultural discussion is evident in her shunting around of Late Review, whose latest incarnation will be as a 30-minute extension to Newsnight on Fridays. It looks as if arts fans will have to buy a digital box and watch BBC4 when it launches next autumn. If Artsworld fails, BBC4 will have precious little competition, save from the Performance Channel, which is confined to cable.
When the curtain did go up, my first impression was of Sunday School piety. Tim Marlow and then Sheena McDonald - sitting in the solitary quiet of the studio for the channel's daily arts magazine, Focus - played us compilation clips and invited in first Marianne Faithfull, then the saxophonist Andy Sheppard, to do turns. I expected more of a party.
Programmes commenced with Lesley Garrett: going home (made by the chairman's production company), in which the soprano performed at her father's working men's club. It made me gloomy. What was obviously a good night out looked embarrassing and condescending at second-hand. I began to wonder if television ever does justice to the performing arts when it merely points a camera at them.
As for high culture, when it came down to it, Garrett sang only one classical aria, "O mio babbino caro", and they do not come catchier than that. She asked her audience to imagine a girl from these parts threatening to throw herself in the Don for a man. The insistence that the gap between high and pop art could be bridged became an over-asserted theme of the weekend. Faithfull, the pop singer, plugged her version of the Brecht/Weill "Seven Deadly Sins". The channel's first classical concert was by Michael Nyman, who turns riffs on Mozartian slow movements into film soundtracks. The next night, in a documentary about Antonio Pappano, the Royal Opera House's music director insisted that he, too, watched MTV. But if Artsworld was having to explain to punters that the arts are not boring, it was, surely, already attracting the wrong audience. Culture vultures should have been turning to Artsworld like the parched to Perrier.
Sunday's transmissions were more persuasive than Saturday's: a sparky conversation between Clive James and the Australian poet Les Murray ("Children are set exams and punished for reading poetry," said Murray); a visually fuzzy but vocally crisp Tosca performed by Maria Callas for Lew Grade in 1964; the Antonio Pappano documentary (which was just as well made as ITV's South Bank Show on the classical organist Gillian Weir, with which it was competing for viewers); and the Bejart Ballet for Life. I am resistant to Queen and no dance aficionado, but this celebration of lives lost to Aids was so brilliantly filmed that you felt not so much part of the audience as part of the cast.
However, to survive, Artsworld will have to be more than good; as a brand, it will have to be as tough as old boots. It will need a selling proposition as clear as Classic FM's when it promises Smooth Classics at Seven. Artsworld's flagship magazine, Focus, which I have not seen at the time of writing, will need a brief that allows it to savage as well as celebrate.
Artsworld's schedules will need to be listed in newspapers and the Radio Times. In the meantime, we must each do our patriotic bit and hand it £6 a month (incidentally, it is as much owned by the Guardian Media Group as by BSkyB). This past weekend, everything was free and unencrypted, but, for all my reservations, I felt I had got my month's subscription back already.
Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the London Evening Standard
