RAGBAG TIMES

As happens most weeks, I picked up the new issue of Radio Times with a sinking feeling. Emblazoned across the bottom of the cover is the legend “IS THIS THE GREATEST BRITISH FILM EVER MADE?” and above this absurd question is a shot of Robert Carlyle in a peaked cap, beginning to unbutton his shirt. Not only is The Full Monty nowhere remotely near being “the greatest British film”, it’s not even Robert Carlyle’s best film.

Turn inside and you find that this is just one of four different Radio Times covers on the same issue. Me, I’ll collect anything that there’s more than one of, but even I draw the line at buying four otherwise identical magazines for the pleasure of “the full set” of covers. That’s what RT hopes some will do though, and, while they don’t mention it this time, they’ve gently but firmly suggested that readers might “collect” the differing covers issued on past occasions.

And what are the other three candidates for GBFEM? Why of course: Four Weddings and a Funeral, Trainspotting and Zulu. Er … Zulu? Even the doyen of movie guides, Leonard Maltin, only awards this ‘masterpiece’ three stars and he’s not exactly hard to please. (He gives Monty three-and-a-half and the others three each). Zulu apart, these movies only begin to nudge the frame if you’ve seen nothing made more than fifteen years ago. So the EM part of GBFEM (EVER MADE – do keep up) is not really under consideration here, is it.

These four reasonably diverting but hardly important movies – actually, I exempt Trainspotting, which is indeed considerably more original and significant than the others – turn out to appear in a list compiled from the votes of 2,500 Radio Times readers (if indeed anyone actually reads the rag any more), these votes weighted by being cast from lists of genre candidates chosen by that dreary old middle-of-the-roader Barry Norman and RT’s staggeringly dumb film editor. Movies can only be classified by genre nowadays, otherwise we wouldn’t know what to think about them.

It’s noticeable that these initial lists spread themselves through the history of film since 1935 (nobody considers silents any more) but the voters heavily favour relatively recent fare. So, all the voted-for movies are in colour, with the single exception of Brief Encounter (which has grown in stature over the years and which was greatly helped to its position on the overall list by its category – Love & Romance – being less obviously represented by film-makers in the past thirty years). But there’s a curious anomaly here. In the Love & Romance section, Brief Encounter actually polls third behind Four Weddings and Gregory’s Girl, the latter of which doesn’t make it to the list of lists. How does that work, then?

The readers’ list is, in votes order: Monty Python’s Life of Brian; The Full Monty; Four Weddings and a Funeral; Trainspotting; Lawrence of Arabia; Shaun of the Dead; Withnail & I; Brief Encounter; Zulu; Monty Python and the Holy Grail. There’s a suspicion of an organised Monty Python write-in there, I would submit. It’s fascinating that the only true auteur represented here occurs twice: David Lean directed Lawrence and Brief Encounter. I would argue that his Great Expectations is quite the equal of these two undoubted masterpieces and that Oliver Twist and Hobson’s Choice are not far behind. In Which We Serve, This Happy Breed, Blithe Spirit, The Bridge on the River Kwai and Doctor Zhivago are all greatly superior to anything else on the RT list. Danny Boyle, director of Trainspotting, is the only other director here doing rather more than a job of work and I doubt that many could name all (or indeed any) of the directors of the other movies. In my extremely well-informed opinion, the only top ten for which Withnail & I qualifies would be top ten most overrated.

An accompanying list of seven chosen by the British Film Council suggests that the pros are not much more discriminating than the public, save that their list at least reflects some history: Goldfinger; Brief Encounter; Billy Liar; Henry V (the Olivier version); The Wicker Man; The Dam Busters; and (good grief) Withnail & I. Again though, the absence of auteurs, of artists rather than journeymen, is striking. Where in either list are Michael Powell, Carol Reed, Anthony Asquith, Robert Hamer, Alexander Mackendrick, Sidney Gilliat, Tony Richardson, Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz, Terence Fisher, Joseph Losey, Richard Lester, Ken Loach, Nicolas Roeg, Peter Greenaway, Derek Jarman, Neil Jordan, Terence Davies and Mike Leigh? Where is the most famed British director ever, the one who virtually invented the auteur figure, Sir Alfred Hitchcock? Again, only the buffs would not be hard pressed to name the directors of most of the films on the Film Council’s list. And where is the work of Britain’s most instantly recognisable studio brands: Ealing, London, Gainsborough and Hammer?

When Radio Times conducts the same exercise about British television – if it already has, which seems most likely, I have happily put it out of my mind – it will undoubtedly name Doctor Who (in its present manifestation only) as the greatest television programme of all time. Pish. Tush. And fiddledy dee.

What we have in this idiotic feature is something perfectly tailored to the present state of Radio Times: trivial, superficial, celebrity-driven, second-hand, meaningless and with no sense of history or quality. All its section editors and regular columnists subscribe to the same petit bourgeois notion of an uncritical, celebrity-led celebration of being constantly diverted, of a set of vacuous values received as a list rather than the demanding discipline of individual thought and constant reappraisal.

Some time in the 1980s, I wrote in a national newspaper about the then decline of Radio Times, though the magazine of that vintage was to its successor as Scrutiny or Encounter was to Titbits. Its editor, a man of intense demeanour in an end-of-the-pier bowtie called Nicholas Brett, invited me to lunch and brought with him an issue from before his time that featured a very young Michael Barrymore and some showgirls on the cover. He seemed to believe that this somehow proved that the magazine had not gone downmarket under his stewardship – I had rather crisply compared it to the kind of free publication you used to find at a supermarket checkout.

I demurred and still do. I am old enough to remember when Radio Times had as its mainstay features on the background to all types of programmes to be broadcast on both radio and television in the coming week. No doubt the current editor would claim the same but she’s wrong. (I heard her not long ago being interviewed on the Radio 4 programme Feedback and she clearly doesn’t entertain the idea that she could ever be wrong). What her organ actually majors in is fawning stuff about celebrities. The current issue has puffs for Griff Rhys Jones, Sanjeev Bhasker, Barbara Windsor and June Whitfield, apart from the usual columns on soap opera, pop music, sport and something mysteriously called “living”. The only coverage of a programme not hung around the star presenter or performer is of a sordid-sounding “drama documentary” about the fatal car crash of the Princess of Wales, Dodi Al Fayed and their driver. This has its own celebrity thrust, of course. There is also a think piece about the programme by the magazine’s editor of television coverage, though her pieces never betray anything as developed as thought, just knee-jerk reaction from the conventional wisdom.

Brett’s version was already well down this path to uselessness. In his day, he may have felt that there was always The Listener to provide grown-up and thoughtful background to the broadcast media for those who wanted it. Tragically, that “always” was misjudged. The Listener perished years ago.

Reluctantly, I still take Radio Times regularly because its listings are the most comprehensive and informative I can find. There is much room for improvement even in the listings: it’s maddening that BBC3, ITV2 and ITV3 each get more space than BBC4 or More 4 while Film4 is pointlessly listed twice. But the clincher is that there is so little competition. Other printed guides look like the cheapest kind of trash and you know you’ll never be able to find therein the identity of the writer of a drama episode you might be interested in or the director of a movie whose title you don’t remember. Sky Arts has just revamped its website, seemingly with the purpose of making it look much more dramatic while removing all information that might be of any use to a potential viewer. Other websites – Channel 4, the BBC – look exhaustive but never seem to answer the one thing I want to find out.

There is no chance that Radio Times will get any more useful under the present editor who is almost certainly doing exactly what the current BBC regime wants. As a follower rather than (as in the ‘60s) a leader of fashion and style and thinking, the BBC will perhaps change if the hunger for celebrity trivia and things organised into lists ever wanes. Don’t hold your breath.