Read Online This New Noise by Charlotte Higgins - Free Book Online Page A

its sister channel.
    Ask those involved in these moments of creative blooming, and they will often tell you much the same thing: ‘management’ was discreet and enabling; artists were free to experiment; commissioning was not mired in lengthy bureaucracy; the stakes were relatively low and ambition high; failure was an option. Some argue that those conditions are in much shorter supply now. The often-expressed tension between ‘creatives’ and ‘managers’ has always been there. Matheson wrote, ‘There is a constant pull between the claims of administration and creation. Under what conditions shall the creative worker serve? Ideally he needs quiet, freedom from routine, time in which to lie fallow after a big piece of work, time to go to and fro seeking inspiration. Such behaviour may seem another name for idling to the rigid administrator.’
    Sir David Attenborough’s career has spanned both creative work and administration. He was the second controller of BBC2 – which launched in 1964 – from 1965 to 1969. At the beginning, only a handful of people had the new sets capable of receiving the service, and at first it was available only in the south-east. We talked in his new library, built onto the house in Richmond where he has lived since the 1950s: a galleried, top-lit space with a grandpiano in its centre (Haydn sonatas on the stand) and set about with African sculptures and his collection of modern British studio ceramics. The walls were lined with thousands of art books, all neatly arranged by type from Aegean art to Indian sculpture. The natural history library, presumably yet more vast, was elsewhere.
    The principle behind BBC2 was that it should not be higher brow than the BBC, but distinct from it. ‘The idea that you could do it by height of brow was nonsense. I mean there are plenty of people who like string quartets and plenty of people who like football, and plenty of people who like both, and so just to put on chamber music opposite football was irrelevant,’ he said. At the same time, ‘it felt very free, creatively free, because you couldn’t use the normal statistics, because the audience was changing all the time, because the coverage [of the transmitters] was changing all the time. I mean it was a doddle of a job. I was shielded from the pressures that BBC1 was taking.’ He added, ‘Occasionally I get nice compliments for inventing Civilisation [Sir Kenneth Clark’s series on Western art]. They say, “How brave.” It wasn’t in the least brave. It was just that I thought it was a good idea. And there was nobody with a big stick saying, “Naughty, naughty, you didn’t get 3 million viewers, you only got 2.5 [million].” And that was why it was the dream job, running BBC2. A paradisiacal job.’
    Civilisation had endured as a classic series, he argued, because of its great writing, and the power of Clark as an intellect and a communicator. Attenborough despaired of some of its successors. He picked out as typical aprogramme that had been aired just before we met: Apples, Pears and Paint: How to Make a Still Life Painting. ‘It had a typical crappy kind of sense of “Oh we can’t have a mandarin point of view, so what you will do is to get 10 different people, we’ll interview them and then we’ll just sling little slices of it together.” And so there’s no thesis, there’s no continuity, there’s no central thought … it was exasperating, empty-headed. The trouble is that we live in a populist culture where we can’t accept that there’s anybody who actually knows more about things than you do.’ Broadcasting, he said, ‘should be the cream of thinkers in society who have been given by the BBC a platform on which they may speak. But the BBC doesn’t believe that now.’
    The young David Attenborough, behind the camera
    An early programme on BBC2, commissioned by Attenborough’s predecessor, Michael Peacock, was The Great War . Marking fifty years since the war began,