November 2.
Until I read Ian Bell's article on the inestimable Eileen McCallum, I
had no idea he was such a snob (November 2). The view down Ian's nose is
not an edifying one nor is it particularly well informed.
If I had as much space to attack him as he did to attack Scottish
Television, I would go on at length. However, here are three points to
be going on with.
With breathtaking arrogance Ian Bell calls Take The High Road ''a
tacky soap'', ''unalloyed tosh'', as he weasels behind the usual ''on
the one hand . . . on the other hand'' formula. By the end of his
article his contempt for Take The High Road is clear. But how does he
know? Has he watched much of it? I doubt it.
A journalist working on a daily morning paper is busy at 6.30pm on
Mondays and Fridays. I do watch a great deal of Take The High Road and
it is a first-class piece of television.
But more important than my views or Ian Bell's is the fact that Take
The High Road regularly gains a 60%-70% share of the available audience
in Scotland. That makes the show a national institution valued and
enjoyed by millions.
Take The High Road enables a great deal of live theatre in Scotland
because it employs more than 35 actors each week, 26 crafts people, and
12 writers, all of whose skills nourish theatre and other arts. Not the
other way round.
Bell's bourgeois distinction between high art (the theatre, the arts,
etc.) and low art (television in this case) is both bogus and, well,
bourgeois.
The concept was re-invented in the Italian Renaissance by the writers
of etiquette handbooks designed to cater for the emergent middle
classes. They required to be told what sort of art was suitable for
gentlefolk and what was for the plebs. And thus the concept of high and
low art was reborn.
That pernicious and false distinction has riddled and addled our
attitude to all the arts, producing the sort of distortions in Ian
Bell's article.
The wonderful Eileen McCallum does all sorts of things; recitals,
plays, and Take The High Road. Why does one of them have to be counted
better than the other? Different, sure, and demanding a range of skills,
certainly, but live theatre better as a genre than Take The High Road?
That is a function of prejudice rather than judgment.
The sad thing is that Ian Bell, a gifted writer, wastes the
opportunity of praising another gifted person in the shape of Eileen
McCallum by mounting such an out-of-context attack on Scottish
Television.
Last Friday night Eileen McCallum and I both spoke at a do on Loch
Lomondside to celebrate the 1000th Take The High Road. The sense of
togetherness, of community was almost tangible -- not only with each
other but also with the huge constituency of viewers who watch a
distinguished piece of television which entertains, educates, and
informs.
Alistair Moffat,
Director of Programmes,
Scottish Television,
Cowcaddens,
Glasgow.
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