The punctuation, was weird

The default mode of 90s TV was irony. It was incubated in music and youth television, before infecting general light entertainment. Then it attempted a putsch in arts programs:

Matthew Collings’ This Is Modern Art and the follow up Hello Culture were the main spearhead with their knowing voice overs, the refusal to pass judgment, the acceptance that high culture had come to an impasse. The scripts Collings speaks from, like the accompanying books, have no difficult concepts and use short sentences. Few words, little meaning. Collings throws in references to The Situationists or Clement Greenberg, but in a way which suggests ‘hey, don’t worry if you’ve never read them their moment has passed’. The End of History – not just something for policy wonks. In your living room, right now.

There is now a ‘Collings Shrine’ on YouTube, but watching the programs again is a little disappointing. It’s interesting to see him chat with Patrick Heron or Elizabeth Peyton (maybe the only time they’ve ever been on British TV?), and I personally don’t find him irritating as others do, but the lack of insight or challenge is striking now. 

There was another way however:

Obviously both critics wanted to avoid art-doc cliché . But Meades made the opposite choices to Collings. Collings and his producers put all the distancing techniques into the script and voice over. The look of the programs are in fact rather conventional, they just go a bit ‘grungy’ every so often. Instead, Meades plays it straight as a presenter. He really is a patrician English man barking cultural instructions at you. 

It could be Kenneth Clarke. The scripts are not gushing or trite, but they are not detached either. Instead they are polemical: you know what he likes and what he doesn’t like, for what reasons and why it matters.The irony, the distancing techniques, are instead in the camera work, the music, the extras, the props. These are used not just to take the piss, but as a way to make you look again, to look harder at what is on screen:

Collings defence was that to make serious programs about artists at the end of the 20th century had to done ironically because of all the accumulated clichés. The Meades approach ducks this by taking things that were never presented seriously by television – Birmingham, pigs, post-war church architecture - and treating them as if they were the most important subjects in the world. In fact many of his subjects are just the sought thing that were used so witlessly by 90s irony e.g. pubs and drinking, Belgium, golf etc. The programs move quickly and pack in a lot of examples, facts, opinions and jokes. Your brain is working really hard for 30 minutes. 

Ultimately, the Collings programs suffer from the problem of all TV series where a critic or academic is brought from the outside into television. So often these people just don’t actually like the medium or are afraid to take on the producers and get what they actually want. By not treating seriously something that they think of as ‘dumbed down’ from the start, they end up with something naff and full of padding. 

For the viewer the frustrating thing about Meades’ programs is: why hasn’t it had any effect on the rest of arts or history TV? How can Simon Schama still be striding across fields after this:

But then Newsnight outlived The Day Today.