Another cultural television programme ruined by gimmicks.

I really despair of the 'cultural' programmes we see on television these days. On 22 June BBC4 gave us 'The Battle for British Art', the story (presented by Andrew Graham-Dixon) of how, from Hogarth to Turner, British Art became innovative and achieved prestige comparable to continental art. This is an admirable and instructive subject; and the script was informative and original. And then they go and spoil it all with the gimmicks that afflict almost all cultural programmes on television: restless camera work, totally irrelevant images of modern street scenes, the irritating hand movements of the speaker who also hardly ever stood still, but, worst of all, a complete visual disrespect of the paintings under discussion. Sometimes the painting was filmed in situ in a gallery, though rarely did the camera dwell long enough on the image for us to savour it as we should; but very often we had Graham-Dixon in sharp focus looming in the foreground, while a slide projector cast a muddy and discoloured image onto some surface that was clearly not a decent screen. What a disgraceful decline from the calm presentation and beautiful camera work of Civilization by Kenneth Clark!