Filled with badly reported arts stories, Today has gone soft under its new editor Today Radio 4

Have you been listening to the new arts programme going out each morning on Radio 4? It's called Today, and it used to do current affairs. At 7.43am two Mondays ago, we suffered the second of a trilogy of Jim Naughtie reports on Ian McKellen's King Lear, at 8.20 an interview with BT's new speaking clock and, at 8.50, a discussion with an author who thought Sunderland more important to Alice in Wonderland than Oxford. Five minutes later, John Hegley was on discussing odes to Luton.

Nor was this agenda exceptional. Two days later, Naughtie was back at Stratford talking to McKellen again. This was followed by an item about the Rolling Stone Keith Richards snorting his father's ashes. Later, Philip Glass came on talking up the revival of his opera Satyagraha. In recent weeks, we have also had a potter round the V&A's "Surreal Things" exhibition with George Melly, a tribute to an obscure cartoonist called Jimmy Friell, an introduction to the work of the American writer James Salter (who?) and an interview with Nick Cave about his new album (Nick Cave always has a new album).

Some years ago, I ran into Ken Loach on the Charing Cross Road and we got talking. I was off to interview Alan Parker about his film Angela's Ashes, then getting stick for its downbeat take on Irish childhood. Like me, Loach had heard about the row on Today. There was, he noted, a particular way Today dealt with the arts - as if they were a break from the seriousness of politics, if not intrinsically funny.

I agreed with him then, but how much I preferred the old philistinism to Today under its new editor, Ceri Thomas. Politics is now more like a break from the high seriousness of art. Yet respecting the arts is no substitute for reporting them well. Getting in Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens to define "great literature" is not good arts reporting. Carolyn Quinn, who had no idea how to make this item work, asked Amis what the role of the author was. "You are there to enrich the life of your readers," he replied.

But nothing has surpassed the embarrassment of Naughtie's love affair with King Lear. The play's director, Trevor Nunn, was pretty luvvie-ish, but McKellen was beyond self-parody. "I've been looking for him," he said, and explained how he'd walk out of the RSC's rehearsal rooms at lunchtime in the hope of bumping into the king. He'd still not found him six weeks later. "I wait for the sunshine to come through the rehearsal room and bless me." The hunt was still on at curtain-up. "You sense the feeling of discovery in actor and director," gushed Naughtie.

The arts, in short, are still not covered very well by Today, but they are now done at extraordinary length. It adds to a general feeling that the programme has gone soft. A small indicator is that, instead of a newsreader presenting a businesslike summary of the day's papers at 7.40, the duty presenting duo now bluff and stumble through the script themselves, adding comments as if they were on 5 Live. Spirits do not lift when the discredited party-going Bishop of Southwark is allowed to do Thought for the Day (admittedly a decision made not by Thomas but by Michael Wakelin, head of BBC Religion and - wait for it - Ethics). In general, the pace has slackened. But if Today is not a fast-moving breakfast news show pulsating with politics, what is it? Under Rod Liddle, it had cheek. Under Kevin Marsh, it found rigour. What, apart from the luvvies, has Thomas brought to it? Certainly not any better coverage of sport or business.

It is still capable of brilliance. To his credit, Thomas allowed two recent inquisitions of Tony Blair by John Humphrys to run over the 8.30am headlines. And badgering Humphrys last year to go to Basra produced reports comparable to Walter Cronkite's from Vietnam for CBS in 1968.

Increasingly, however, I dread waking up and finding that the Welsh terrier is off that day. It is not that Quinn, Edward Stourton or even Sarah Montague is awful, but under Thomas they never seem to raise their game. As for Naughtie and his fuzzy, multi-claused questions, the time may be approaching for a reassignment. Today's arts correspondent, perhaps?

Andrew Billen is a staff writer for the Times

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don’t miss . . . Exposed: climate change in Britain

For this exhibition, the National Trust asked ten photographers to chart the effects of climate change in the UK. Joe Cornish's photo of this oak tree in Great Ayton, Yorkshire was taken in December.

"It was striking how there were still not only leaves on the tree, but that they were green," he says. "When I was young, you would start getting frosts in September - now, until Christmas, there are no frosts at all."

"Exposed: climate change in Britain's backyard" is until 11 May at Hoopers Gallery, London EC1. www.hoopersgallery.co.uk

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