The news that Mike Murphy is to retire as presenter of The Arts Show on RTE Radio 1 raises the often vexed issue of the relationship between the arts and the media. From modest beginnings, this mid-afternoon radio programme has probably become the most important single outlet for coverage of the arts in Ireland, reaching a broader audience than any other broadcast or print organ. The departure of Murphy, whose breezy professionalism and man-of-the-people persona were essential ingredients of the show's success, presents a major challenge to the programme's producers, and to RTE, where arts programming has been the subject of controversy in recent months.
Much of the coverage of the axing of Later with John Kelly, and the threat to the magazine programme Cursai Ealaine, has taken for granted that extensive media coverage of the arts is by definition a good thing. For visual artists, in particular, Cursai Ealaine was seen as the only forum on Irish television where their work could be seen and discussed. Many will argue that a public-service broadcaster has a duty to reflect, comment on and discuss culture in its many manifestations, and that RTE has failed in this regard.
Anyone watching arts coverage on television over the past few years, though, will be aware that uncertainty and short-termism have not been confined to RTE. The BBC, with far greater resources, has been casting about for a coherent strategy since the demise of The Late Show five years ago. Certainly, there have been good, one-off documentaries in the Omnibus and Arena strands, and efforts to develop new, short series like BBC2's Close-Up. But, in an era when branding, streaming and audience recognition are deemed essential to attract and hold audiences, the impression is of a diffuse, unfocused approach. Now BBC2 is reportedly developing plans for a strand of programmes, Artszone, to run for several hours on Sunday evenings (including The Late Review, shifted from its current Thursday night slot).
Channel 4 has seen a dismaying decline in output and quality since the impressive Without Walls documentary strand came to an end. In fact, the decline of Channel 4 from cutting-edge to soap, sitcom and soft-core is one of the most depressing changes in broadcasting in this part of the world in recent years. Search through the channel's schedules this week, and you won't find one arts programme of any consequence. It's hard to avoid the conclusion that Channel 4's move towards stand-alone self-financing has had an adverse effect on its original remit of providing radical alternatives to the broadcasting mainstream.
Does this mean that television arts programming is impossible outside a public service context? ITV's flagship, the veteran South Bank Show, might seem to contradict this, but that particular old warhorse has been looking creaky for years, and is more notable for the sycophancy of its profiles and the conservatism of the subjects it chooses than for any memorable programmes. The fawning, stodgy style of the South Bank Show does little to dispel the impression that its main function is as a figleaf for the ITV channels' increasingly aggressive commercialism.
In fact, the one-off arts documentary as a form (which is what the South Bank Show really is) has become depressingly predictable: "well-made" eulogies and admiring profiles abound. There is little sense of danger, of conflicting points of view, or of dissent. Long-running series offer more opportunity for a diversity of views and of content. Joe Mulholland, director of television at RTE, has stated that Cursai Ealaine is to continue, but whether that will be in its present form is another matter.
Severe budgetary cuts are being demanded, the effect of which will be to limit the programme's scope. Will it be possible to cover events around the country to the same extent? Will the programme be studio-bound and Dublin-centred? Look at Later with John Kelly which, with its pared-down budget, hardly ever ventured outside the Pale for its subjects (or indeed its panellists).
Cursai Ealaine is not to everyone's taste; this writer often finds its hippy-dippy presentational style more irritating than enlightening, but its commitment to the visual arts in particular, and its attempts to stretch the visual language of television, indicate a commendable level of ambition. In theory, television is the best equipped of all media to deal with the arts as a subject; it can actually show you the stuff, after all. But often the camera actually gets in the way of understanding. Have you ever noticed the way TV directors are never content just to show you a painting, for example? They seem to feel obliged to pan from detail to detail, rather than showing the entire work in full frame. People who make television programmes have been taught that TV is a kinetic medium: movement and sound are essential; stillness and silence are anathema (RTE's disastrous solstice programme from Newgrange took this principle to its logical but absurd conclusion).
Television takes music, visual arts, drama and literature and turns them into, well, television, subject to the grammar and syntax of the video camera and the editing suite. Television's strengths - its sense of immediacy, its conventions of realism, its privileging of personality over product - can also be weaknesses when it comes to coverage of the arts. But in recent years, many of its conventions have been adopted by other media, including print.
On the one hand, as printing and production technologies improve, newspapers and magazines become more driven by images than words. On the other, as galleries, theatres and publishers become increasingly PR-conscious, their marketing strategies become more sophisticated. With polished press releases, prepacked images and interview opportunities arriving on their desks, the temptation for editors and producers is simply to work to an agenda set for them by others.
In the print media in particular, the pressure to create more and more features pages creates a voracious appetite for copy. Far easier to meet that demand with high-sugar content celebrity interviews than with more reflective pieces (such as this one - Ed).
Equally, the increase in arts activity around the country demands that editorial decisions be made at some point about what is worth reviewing and what is not. As every professional performance is no longer reviewed on this page, what criteria are used in making a selection? Until 10 years ago, the amateur productions mounted by certain university dramatic societies were reviewed as a matter of course. They aren't anymore, and yet that change does not reflect any change in the quality of those productions.
Reviews and pre-publicity previews take up the lion's share of space devoted to the arts in newspapers, including this one. The cumulative effect is the creation of a virtual arts world, with a huge "audience" of people who haven't actually seen or experienced Tracy Emin's unmade bed or Alan Parker's rain-soaked Limerick streets, but have plenty of opinions about them.
It would be easy to be too po-faced about all this; in reality, interest and participation in cultural activities in Ireland is probably more broadly-based than ever before. The challenge for the media lies in reflecting and exploring this in new and diverse ways. To achieve that, broadcasters and publishers alike need to have clear policies on the place of arts coverage within their overall remit. Above all, they need to avoid the self-fulfilling trap of ghettoisation.
Later with John Kelly's ratings were never going to make the Neilsen Top Ten, but shifting the programme, first to a graveyard slot on Wednesday nights, and then to a completely inappropriate time on Friday evenings, ensured that the programme would shed viewers like autumn leaves, leaving it vulnerable to the chop.
The Arts Show is a classic example of how that process can operate in reverse. Many listeners protested vigorously when the show was moved from an early-evening time-slot to mid-afternoon, but the programme ended up tripling its audience figures and, just as importantly, gaining listeners who never would have dreamed of tuning in before. One hopes that this unashamedly populist programme will remain at the heart of the RTE schedules, to be complemented by other, more specialist programming on Lyric FM and in the evenings on Radio 1.
