Television - Charlotte Raven discovers there's more to BBC4 than opera classes and classic novels
I didn't watch BBC4 for ages because, rather childishly, I resented Andrew Marr telling me that I should. The notion that the channel was a worthy cause which the middle classes had a duty to support had a negative impact on decisions about my early evening view-ing schedule. Confronted with a choice between Pop Idol and a profile of a German composer, I would generally plump for the former. If switching to BBC4 meant agreeing to join in a mobilisation to defend bourgeois values, then I preferred to stick with Simon Cowell.
The only show exempt from this prohibition was Curb Your Enthusiasm. I was amazed when I heard that BBC4 had bought it in. Larry David's neurotic sitcom would sound a bum note in many educated, arts-loving households. My Proms-going neighbours would no doubt feel put out that a channel designed to celebrate humanity's great achievements would screen a series whose characters are self-serving arseholes and which exposes civilisation as a lie.
Unwilling to give the station due credit for this bold programming, I decided it must be an aberration. Then, a few months ago, I came across something by accident that convinced me there was more to BBC4 than opera masterclasses and panel games about classic novels. Ostensibly a documentary for the Storyville series about daily life in St Petersburg, Russia From My Window (26 and 28 May) was a formally thrilling one-hour-and-twenty-minute epic with no voice-over, no sub-titles and very little audible speech. For the first few minutes I was in a frenzy of impatience, longing for the camera to move from its fixed position in a third-floor window frame so we could at least hear what the people being filmed were saying. When it became clear that this wasn't going to happen, I started concentrating, and found that the rewards for this shift of consciousness were well worth the discomfort of leaving behind my desire to have someone explain what was going on. A succession of ten-minute sequences of men digging up the road seemed poignant when I realised that their endless, pointless industry - the roads they patched up always fell apart - was a metaphor for the trials of the Russian people.
Now that's what I call a highbrow TV moment. The film, directed by Viktor Kossakovsky, was a tedious and deeply affecting visual poem that would strike 99.99 per cent of the public as a load of pretentious nonsense. For the other, barely estimable sliver of the population, it's a joy that amply justifies the cost of their licence fee. I have long thought that assessments of this kind of minority programming should find a way of measuring its impact on the people who watched it. Russia From My Window made me feel, on a rather hopeless evening, that la vita could be bella. Its snowstorms and rain-soaked lovers were worth more to me than anything contained in a thousand hours of the programmes I usually watch. Whether this counts for anything is for the BBC to decide. I'm hoping it will realise that the very fact that almost no one is watching frees it to take these kinds of risks. It would be great to think that BBC4 might one day become a genuinely highbrow station. As things stand, too many of its strands are pitched at that rare Radio 4 listener who ends his day feeling he's not had his fill of Alistair Cooke and news-based skits.
If such people exist, it is unlikely that their manner will correspond with the BBC4 controller Roly Keating's vision of "someone perched on the edge of their seat, leaning forward, engrossed in what they're watching". My own experience of his channel's recent output suggests that it works best when you're busy doing something else. I greatly enjoyed watching the programme about Margaret Thatcher and the poll tax in the Great Political Mistakes series, back in the spring, while I was calling a friend in America. We talked for nearly an hour and finished at exactly the moment when Bernard Ingham was being recalled to reiterate the point he had made in the first five minutes.
However long your attention is distracted, you never miss a thing. You can go and tile the bathroom, knowing that when you get back, Sandi Toksvig will still be squeaking in that way she does when she's trying to pretend that normal words are witticisms; Jamie the country vicar will still be worrying about offending the lieutenant colonel; and Jonathan Freedland will have got no further in his quest to corral an 85-guest round table into some semblance of sense.
Some of these formats may have worked as radio programmes. Their TV appeal isn't helped by the drab and formulaic manner of their delivery. Everything is delivered straight up, and one suspects that someone at the top has confused formal innovation with the kind of gimmickry other channels use to seduce their viewers. They think it would be tricksy, for example, to give the films in their Profile strand a style to complement the substance. Without this, the programmes are laudable but unwatchable. I very much hope this won't be the final judgement on a channel that needs to approach the challenges of its public service remit with a little more daring and flair.
Andrew Billen returns next week
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