Farewell, Melyvn Barg

Over at the Guardian, Mark Lawson laments the end of Melvyn Bragg's South Bank Show. Personally, I'm overjoyed that this preening bighead is off the screens. How I wish Radio 4 would do the decent thing and put down In Our Time, his radio show in which he pretends simultaneously to be as ignorant as us and as clever as the scientists and intellectuals he has as guests. Let's leave him alone with his endless novels about clever, misunderstood northern grammar school boys coming down to Oxbridge and becoming clever, misunderstood novelists etc. etc. etc.

That said, old Melvyn's ITV show is their last figleaf against accusations that the channel is an insulting, steaming turd of naked commercialism. This decision essentially says 'we know what you're like, viewers. You're all lazy, stupid slobs who want Jade'n'Ant'n'Dec'n'policecamerapropaganda'n'nonews'n'nothingyou'renotalreadyfamiliarwith and if that's too highbrow for you, we've got ITV4 waiting, you scum.

Or, as Lawson puts it:

Twenty five years ago, ITV scheduled a two-part special about the French modernist composer Olivier Messiaen in peak-time on Good Friday. Nowadays, there would be more chance of a second coming of Christ.

Are people more stupid, less curious, less interested in the outside world? I refuse to believe it, even of my students (joke). But they are given fewer and fewer chances to develop interests outside the dullard mainstream. Schools and universities can't, because they've got targets to meet. The WEA and their ilk are all but dead. 'High' culture is expensive, and TV executives have decided that cheap TV is 'what the people want' - so that's what we're getting. The future is Davina, stamping on your face, over and over and over and over.