Culture shock

What have a musician, conductor, playwright, journalist and art critic in common? The answer - that they head the line-up of presenters and reporters for the BBC's new topical arts and culture programme The Culture Show - illustrates why such shows have trouble establishing themselves with viewers.

By trying to be all things to all people, they succeed only in pleasing no-one satisfactorily.

But then you might feel that a series that calls itself The Culture Show is asking for trouble. Culture is as much of a four-letter word as arts in TV terms. The box has rarely managed to get to grips with these matters, with programmes labelled as highbrow and of no interest, or indeed use, to the ordinary viewer. If producers attempt to appeal to a broad audience, they're accused of dumbing down.

The Culture Show has an air of wanting to please everybody. The makers are prepared to do anything to win over viewers. The first programme, for instance, has the BBC's political editor Andrew Marr interviewing artist David Hockney - an odd couple seemingly paired for curiosity value rather than any valid artistic reason.

The regular presenting/reporting team reflects this with a line-up comprising radio presenter and musician Verity Sharp, conductor Charles Hazlewood, playwright and ex-Casualty actor Kwame Kwai-Armah, journalist and broadcaster Mariella Frostrup and art critic Andrew Graham-Dixon. Another half-a-dozen names are listed as regulars to present features and special reports.

Each episode comes from a different city or venue around the country, presumably to show this isn't another London-based arts show.

It sounds as if the BBC is hoping it will deliver both quality and audiences as arts magazine Late Night Line-up did on BBC2 between 1964 and 1972. "Thinking man's crumpet" Joan Bakewell made her name as one of the regular presenters.

According to the advance blurb, The Culture Show will deliver "a range of views, interviews and breaking news from the worlds of high art, popular culture and everything else in between." The hour-long culture fix will cover everything from architecture to art house cinema, computer games to choreography, shock resignations to startlingly original works of art.

That seems to cover a multitude of sins and shows that the makers aren't afraid of what usually happens to arts magazines programmes - people dip in and watch the bit they're interested in, then switch over to another channel. Finding someone who's interested in all the topics featured is pretty unlikely.

That's why The South Bank Show, ITV's flagship arts show since 1978, is still going strong. Or as strong as the schedulers allow by pushing the start time back later and later on a Sunday night.

The series has become inextricably associated with its presenter, editor and all-round arts champion Melvyn Bragg as well as its theme tune.

This series concentrates on one thing at a time. Each programme is an interview with clips or a film profile. As its makers have pointed out when people try to accuse it of dumbing down in recent years, the first programme featured Paul McCartney, who's hardly what you'd call highbrow.

The South Bank Show was introduced as a successor to Aquarius, which ran on ITV for seven years from 1970 with Humphrey Burton, Russell Harty and Peter Hall as presenters at various times. That was a response to the BBC's long-running Omnibus, itself a successor to Monitor. Again, it was a case of one subject in detail in each programme.

Omnibus and Arena, another of the BBC's arts-based series, gave way in favour of the short-lived Imagine, presented by Alan Yentob and not that different to the series it replaced.

Perhaps the need for arts and culture based series is redundant. Movies have always been catered for in series like Cinema and the never-ending Film 2004 etc. Five has been running series on art and artists. Exhibitions, especially those featuring the work of Damien Hurst and Tracey Emin, often feature on TV news.

The BBC has been showing dramatised documentaries, which in past years might have been shown under the Omnibus banner, in peaktime, including a series on Leonardo Da Vinci. Earlier this week, 60 minutes of Sunday teatime viewing were devoted to controversial artist Raphael.

This is part of the bid to open up the arts to as wide an audience as possible. Series such as Rolf On Art and large-scale event programming like The Big Read are cited as other examples.

The BBC is investing £8m each year over the next two years in creating a topical arts journalism unit to generate programmes across the channels. The Culture Show is the centrepiece, running for 20 weeks a year and increasing in its second year.

Partnerships with the Tate galleries and Royal Opera House are being forged. The BBC series Art And The 60s is the first example of the Tate and the Beeb working together on an exhibition and series.

"Our portfolio of television channels, from BBC1 to BBC4, offers a richer choice of cultural programmes that will appeal to everyone, from aficionados to those less familiar with some of the arts and to younger audiences," says Franny Moyle, BBC Television's arts and cultural commissioner.

"The digital channels offer even more space for those really passionate about the arts."

* The Culture Show begins on Thursday on BBC2 at 7pm.