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the
current
Monday
Report
below!
This week's report by Bruce Hodder of Suffolk Punch
ABANDONED BY AUNTIE:
THE BBC, THE BRITISH & THE
CREATIVE UNDERGROUND
Part Two: THE BBC AND THE UNDERGROUND
(Click here to read Part One of this report)
The Beeb likes to consider itself a supporter of the arts. It's part
of its mission statement, the memory of which it clings to with
occasional spasms of sentimentality. Or at least, promotion of the
arts is implicit in its mission statement, since in those more
genteel times, the public school folk who established the
organisation understood that some experience of the arts was
necessary for a fulfilling intellectual and spiritual life. But its arts
coverage is hopelessly boring and pays no attention at all to
whatever innovations or new developments or Underground
activity that might be happening. And 99% of its arts coverage
has been shunted off to BBC 4, a digital channel that most people
have no access to.
Not that you'd really want it a lot of the time. I saw it once, at a
friend's house, and it literally put me to sleep. The night I
watched it, I was staying up, because I had nothing better to do,
to see a live show by some old Seventies hero: Richard
Thompson, or John Martin, or Peter Green--I can't remember
who. But before that there was a two hour documentary about
the lives of Tibetan farmers living on the Chinese border, full of
long lingering shots of desolate mountainscapes with Tibetan
prayer flags fluttering in the no doubt frozen winds. It was
worthy and it was beautifully photographed and it was so
lifelessly boring, sleep was your only refuge--unless you got wise
and flipped over to one of the movie channels. Who exactly did
they think would want to watch it? Middle class critics from the
serious newspapers and who else? I'm a poet AND an activist for
Tibetan Independence but it held no interest for me.
On the main channels, BBC 1 and 2, the arts coverage is almost
non-existent. What we have is one portion of NEWSWEEK every
Friday night given over to an arts review panel comprised mainly
of mainstream novelists, playwrights and poets, who discuss the
week's album and movie releases--but only albums by instantly
recognisable names like Bob Dylan, or movies that have created a
stir with the critics--as well as novels by people you just gets fed
up of hearing about, however good they are or aren't (Martin
Amis, John Updike, Philip Roth), and new shows at London art
galleries. It's so far beyond dry that dry looks drenched by
comparison.
And then there's the wonderfully named CULTURE SHOW. It's
presented these days by Lauren Laverne, who used to be the
frontwoman for a half-decent rock band (Kenickie), but it's still
about as out of touch as it's possible to get. Here it's the same
quintessential BBC arts recipe of atavistic rock bands,
mainstream novels, new films and shows at art galleries. There's
no controversy, other than the occasional familiar is-it-art? story
when someone wins an award or mounts a show involving
"controversial" art installations. And somehow the bad boys and
girls who are usually at the centre of those particular stories look
and sound as comfortable and artistically uninteresting as the
journalists who are interviewing them.
You'd never believe, watching these shows (or listening to their
equivalent on BBC radio), that there was a vital and active
Underground in poetry, music, filmmaking, or comic book
writing in this country, but there is: this "sinking island" as
Hugh Kenner called the U.K. is crawling with great poets and
musicians no one has ever heard of. They ply their trade in
complete obscurity, some dreaming of the day when they will
register in the public consciousness and some sincerely not giving
a shit. And the BBC, despite its pretensions about being the
cultural guardian of the nation, has no idea they are there.
Well, it might be just a little easier for musicians. I know a few,
and at least two of the guitar players in my circle have been on
BBC local radio. But Britain prides itself, not always accurately,
in being in the vanguard when it comes to music. We gave the
world the Beatles after all (okay, it may have been 40 years ago).
So culture pundits are always on the lookout for the latest new
thing in music, though the new thing that their researchers
discover always looks remarkably like the old thing with new
haircuts. But poets? You might as well be invisible.
It's not, on my part, for the want of trying. After I discovered
that my friend Tim Sansom had been on Radio Northampton with
his guitar, I wrote to them about BLUE FREDERICK, the
magazine I was publishing at the time, and my blog SUFFOLK
PUNCH, offering to come into the station and talk to them about
it. I was publishing some real names in the poetry world, at least
on the post-Beat side and I was sure there was a story there. This
was taking place right on the doorstep of Radio Northampton,
after all. But no. Complete silence from the BBC. A subsequent
offer to use my knowledge of poetry and my connections in the
literary world to serve as an arts correspondent met with the
same blistering indifference. Which may be a reflection of their
attitude toward my own creative abilities, but I don't think so.
Perhaps the BBC is just too big. Corporations develop a machine
mind, after all, and the arts at their best are about the individual
speaking his or her own private thoughts to the world. Or
perhaps the times themselves have become too conservative for
anyone but those in the Underground to give two shits about the
Underground. It could be that those responsible for the arts at
the BBC are finding what they're looking for, and poetry,
writing, music, film, whatever, are just entertainment to these
people, light entertainment designed to kill time and shift units.
It's probably a little of all of the above. But let's be honest about
it at least, and not pretend that "Auntie", as the BBC is known, is
reflecting with anything close to accuracy what's really
happening out there in the upstairs poetry venues and
weed-clouded music rooms and bedsits up and down the country,
because it absolutely isn't. The Underground poets and artists
and musicians are working in a support vacuum as
comprehensive as any there has been since the 1930s, when the
first evidence of real counter-culture (in the form of men like
Quentin Crisp and venues like Au Chat Noir) begins.
Maybe it's time the Underground in Britain got a little louder,
somewhat in the fashion of the ULA, and at least forced the
armies of the Establishment, in the BBC or wherever else they
might be, to admit that they don't give a toss.
Or maybe there's more than the victory of the righteously
defeated to be gained here, eh?
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Bruce Hodder can be found online at Suffolk Punch.
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