Television - A new arts programme should get better with age, writes Andrew Billen The Culture Show (BBC2)

The BBC's chairman, Michael Grade, will not be surprised by the underwhelmed critical reaction to the first edition of The Culture Show (Thursdays, 7pm). I recall a group of arts correspondents quizzing him about his plans for an arts magazine in 1988, when he took over at Channel 4. "All I can tell you for certain," he said, "is that the first few editions will be terrible. New arts shows always are."

Without Walls eventually emerged in 1990. This had a brief stint as a magazine, comprising two or three films linked by an announcer speaking over a video of an armadillo charging around an all-white studio. Its spin-offs, The Obituary Show and J'Accuse, were more memorable, but Without Walls has now been without a place in Channel 4's schedules since 1994.

The most infamous stinker among arts magazines, however, was Mainstream, launched on BBC1 25 years ago. The first edition was hilarious, its 30 minutes crammed with almost as many items. A reporter outside the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford declared that the first night he had just watched was "stunning". Seconds later we cut to Lady Jane Wellesley quizzing Claudio Abbado about his interest in soccer. Clive James in the Observer suggested that next week she might care to ask Kevin Keegan about Scarlatti. "Or perhaps Scarlatti could interview Lady Jane about Kevin Keegan. While the details are being worked out, the show could perhaps be brought in for repairs, or, failing that, towed further out to sea and sunk by gunfire." Before the first programme even aired, its original producer, Tony Palmer, had thrown himself overboard, and he was quickly followed by the presenters Joan Bakewell and Susan Stranks. Soon afterwards, the programme was indeed scuppered.

Against this record, it should be said, other arts magazines have worked, most notably BBC2's Late Show in the 1990s and Thames TV's O1 for London. That BBC2 was going to find itself in a fix with its latest effort was evident from its very title, as jaded and exhausted as Channel 4's name for its latest cultural newcomer, The Arts Show. The second ill portent was a long thin booklet entitled What is Culture? What Does it Mean to You?, which was sent out to the press on the programme's behalf. The question was answered variously by contributors. The artist Gavin Turk, for example, offered: "Culture is the way that you cut your bread in the morning." But, one thought, if they needed to ask . . .

And so to the debut edition, which was linked with some novelty from a high street in West Bromwich. The presenter, Verity Sharp, was nominally there because West Brom is getting a new arts centre, but really because the show would do anything rather than kick off with an item from London. To make a compelling ten minutes out of an unfinished arts centre in a place you'll never visit proved to be beyond her. Then, when her report segued into a profile of the centre's architect, Will Alsop, she omitted to mention that his practice has only just emerged from insolvency. So much for the programme's commitment to "breaking news".

Stuck with Birmingham for an opening item, we craved a bit of Hollywood glamour. This came in a serviceable piece by my NS colleague Mark Kermode on the threat that computer animation poses to hand-drawn feature films. Sadly the topic is not new, and Kermode failed to mention something that was - the digital breakthroughs in the forthcoming Polar Express movie. The best item of the night, Andrew Marr's interview with David Hockney, was hindered by familiarity: Hockney, like Marr, is an almost constant presence on our television screens.

The programme, executive-edited by George Entwistle, late of Newsnight, found a mini scoop in a development in the campaign to prevent the export of the Macclesfield Psalter, but its arts news headlines segment was weak (The Producers has opened in London's West End), and the What's On section grubbed about and noticed that something was due to go on at the Cenotaph on Sunday. The programme's final two items were a light-hearted attempt to pick the winners of the Whitbread Prize and a doggedly dreamy piece on the reopening to the public of Black Mountain overlooking Belfast.

At this stage, The Culture Show suffers simultaneously from a lack of variety - every item is a film report - and the lack of a voice to mediate the variety there is. On the plus side, Sharp is a decent presenter, and her army of co-anchors, including Mariella Frostrup and Andrew Graham-Dixon, are all proven performers. Its reporters are no lightweights, either. My prediction is that, by Easter, the show will be two-thirds or half its current 60-minute length and will be presented from a studio in Manchester. Its contents will be limited to two or three items per programme, because it is a rule of thumb for TV arts programmes that, as they age, the numbers of segments in each edition reduce. (There are various reasons for this, but the main one is that the arts, if taken seriously, need time to explain themselves.) In short, The Culture Show will have got better, but we sophisticates shall still sniggeringly think of it as The Charter Review Show - a title, come to think of it, that a more confident BBC might have had fun with.

Andrew Billen is a staff writer on the Times

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