SCOTLAND is not fantastically well represented in the list of twenty category finalists in the BBC Young Dancer 2017 announced on Wednesday – young people whose talent will be measured and judged in a series of programmes on BBC Four and BBC Two television in March and April. 21-year-old Darren Hamilton from Glasgow, one of the five in the "street dance" category, seems to be the only native on the list, although Argyllshire dance school Ballet West in Taynuilt contributes two of the five finalists in the ballet group – Uyu Hiromoto from Japan and Oscar Ward from Nottingham. It is difficult to get worked up about the poor showing however. Although the programme also features a starry list of better known names who will either be mentoring the youngsters through the ordeal or making the decisions that will eventually produce a result at Sadler's Wells in London on April 22, you know exactly what is going to happen without taking the trouble to watch.
The format is pretty much identical to the one that showcased amateur orchestras last year (and took the Stirling Orchestra to the Royal Albert Hall) or the ubiquitous Gareth Malone's quest to find the UK's best amateur choir. Whether it is a quest for a voice, "the X-Factor" or simply "talent", competition has taken over television. Perhaps special pleading might make an exception for Strictly Come Dancing, with its unique selling point of the participation of politicians, sports-persons and others who are already well known in other spheres, but the defender of what passes for light entertainment TV these days would be clutching at straws. We continue to plough down a dispiriting single-track tunnel-vision notion of how to showcase "the popular arts" for a huge swathe of broadcasting, with the BBC – I am sorry to say – the worst offender.
Post-grad theorists in departments of film and television studies at our universities may be hard at work on this, but a casual observer could tie together a perceived contemporary distaste for old Reithian principles to "inform, educate and entertain" that defined the beginnings of the BBC and Michael Gove's more recent contention that "people in this country have had enough of experts." Experts on the television of today are themselves there to be judged as much as to do the judging, which makes you wonder why more of them don't run a mile from taking part in such programmes (although the fee presumably eases the pain). What broadcasters clearly believe their audience does not want is the feeling that decisions are being made about what they will like by unseen patrician, "unaccountable" experts. Except, of course, that old television programmes made in the days when that was exactly what happened have never been more popular, whether re-packaged or simply re-run.
Out in the real world – where television rarely looks, preferring to make its own entertainment – the boom in festivals of arts and culture continues apace. Next month's Glasgow Film Festival was launched this week and privileged folk like myself had an early look at March's Aye Write! programme. Further afield, press releases on the Fife Jazz Festival and Perth Festival of the Arts are shouting for attention on The Herald arts desk. All of these events have been created by informed people who want to share stuff they think is good with an audience they believe will also appreciate it. In the good old days (also the title of a show re-running on BBC Four, and standing-up better than I'd have guessed), that was the simple idea behind light entertainment television as well. Why is it now an untrusted one?
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