Essential media about the arts

Well, that really was very curious. I’ve just sat with around one hundred others in one of smaller screens at Clapham Picturehouse watching a live Sky Arts HD broadcast from a party at the National Gallery’s Leonardo da Vinci exhibition. Perhaps the first thing to say about Leonardo Live is that it was in truth only half-live, since I would guess (it was a bit dark for a stop-watch) at least fifty per cent of the 73 minutes was composed of pre-recorded packages. Yet even the live elements felt more than a touch over-produced as the show made its breathless, relentless way around the galleries. Which is not to say that it wasn’t a treat to see the paintings VERY BIG in HD – when, that is, the camera kept still for long enough. Co-host Tim Marlow was his usual polished, expert self (with only one intriguing and engaging lapse) and some of the guests insisted on making interesting and provocative points in their allotted brief span (Fiona Shaw – what a star!). So I appreciated the visuals and learned quite a bit about Leonardo, but I never really got beyond how, well, curious it was to be watching this curate’s egg of a television programme – in which, you’d have to say, nothing actually happened – on a cinema screen in Clapham.

I should say before we go any further that Illuminations has worked productively with Sky Arts in the past – and we hope to do so again – and we’ve discussed media projects with both the National Gallery and Picturehouse Cinemas, who were showing Leonardo Live across Britain. So you should read on aware that what follows might be ecstatic praise or embittered ravings prompted by those relationships…

Now, I think I learned a truth about arts television nearly twenty years ago when I produced for Illuminations a two-hour live broadcast from Kassel in Germany. The occasion was the opening of the contemporary arts exhibition Documenta IX, and the truth I learned is – that nothing happens at an opening. Which Leonardo Live demonstrated once again. Tim walked around the exhibition and cued up video packages, and Mariella Frostrup sat on a sofa, talked to various guests and, um, cued up video packages. In the exhibition we hardly got a sense that there were others there (apart from the buzz of noise) and the sofas were tucked away in a corner so that, again, there was little sense of being there – or anywhere outside a studio – apart, once more, for the off-screen buzz.

I don’t underestimate how hard it is to pull off projects like this, live or not. Truly, I don’t – and it was fascinating to see what independent producers Leopard and PhilGrabskyFilms, Sky Arts, Picturehouse and the National Gallery had come up with. But leaving aside the marketing yield (posters all over the underground, press claims for various ‘firsts’ and so forth), you had to wonder quite what all this live-ness was for. For what the videos underlined was how much more precise – with your ideas, with your shots, with your effect – you can be in pre-recorded material than you can when you’re live.

The show opened with a welcome from Tim and Mariella huddling under an umbrella in Trafalgar Square, ‘We’re live at the National Gallery…’ Except that they weren’t, because we immediately cut inside (in far less time than it would have taken them to walk) to a live shot of Mariella without her top-coat. And this confusion between live and ones-we-prepared-earlier ran disconcertingly through the show, so that we had a Steadicam pre-record of Tim walking us through the empty, silent galleries (though not the Sunbury Room upstairs, where the replica Last Supper hangs) followed hard by Tim in the same location with (a few) milling party-goers.

Live in the exhibition we met, among others, Deborah Bull, Paul Daniels, Bishop Stephen Cottrell and Fiona Shaw. Onto the sofa came Michael Craig-Martin, Nitin Sawhney and Professor Evelyn Welch (who was very good). Each, it seemed, had been granted a minute of frame before we were on to the next, and some shone (Fiona Shaw, notably) while others floundered  - and I’m afraid that includes Director of the National Gallery, Dr Nicholas Penny. (Did I hear at one point Mariella say, Sir Nicholas…?) Biographer Charles Nicholl drew the short straw as the final guest of the evening, and really had no chance to contribute much beyond a greeting.

While we were with the guests, the cameras attempted to show us details of the paintings, but this was clunky from the galleries and disconcertingly abrupt when we were with the sofas. Our chance to luxuriate in the works (paintings almost exclusively, drawings hardly at all) came in the packages, as at times we really looked at them, often with Tim’s thoughtful and informed commentary. But then we might as well have been watching a standard doc – except that of course for that we wouldn’t be in the Clapham Picturehouse.

And what did I gain from paying my £6 (members’ rate) for this in Clapham, rather than sitting at home seeing it on Sky Arts (the best part of £50 per month, although I get added football)? A really big screen is a plus, of course, and the broadcast quality of image and sound was excellent. But attending an opening is a very different social occasion from sitting in the opera and theatre. At an opening you talk with friends, meet new people, have the artworks as a focus but do much else besides. At the Met or the National Theatre (two performance locations from which live culture comes to Clapham) you experience with others what’s on stage in a way that can translate to the cinema. Not so here, I think – there was little sense of doing something together just at that moment with the people around me.

The essence of ‘live’, of course, is unpredictability – and only at one moment did the plan go slightly awry. For one of the live links from the galleries, perhaps because the autocue went down, Tim had to rely on a hand-held script – and to read this he needed his glasses. This was I think the first moment, in the many years that I’ve been watching and enjoying him on screen, that I’ve seen him don them in shot. This scrambled response, underlined by his slight sense of panic as he tried to impart what was written on the card, broke through the television show’s smooth surface. With a jolt, you realised it was, indeed, live – and that anything could happen in the next half-hour. Except, of course, that it didn’t.

Action and accidents define live television. With precious little of the former, I was grateful for just one of the latter – and I liked Leonardo Live, and Tim Marlow, all the more just because of it. Anyone else see the broadcast?

Update: Through the day, I’ve been puzzling over quite why the breathlessness of the programme felt misjudged. The rapid wrap-ups of interviews, the trails for what was to come, even the ping-ponging back-and-forth between Tim and Mariella seemed uncomfortable and even occasionally a touch desperate on the cinema screen.

My sense is that this is at least partly because of the difference in address between television and cinema. First off, we’re rarely spoken to directly from a film projection. We watch movies from the ‘outside’ as it were, with the action unfolding with no recognition of our presence. Being implicated by being spoken to in a cinema is unfamiliar, alien even.

When what cinema distributors call ‘alternative content’ (operas, plays, comedy, discussions) does address us, it tends to adopt a calmer, less pleading tone than the do-stay-with-us-at-all-costs voice of so much television. There is a tacit understanding that we have paid for our seat, measured out our time, and unless the offer from the screen gets really bad, we’ll probably stick with it. As a consequence hosts on the Metropolitan Opera Live in HD can appear more relaxed – and the broadcasts can even include long interval breaks simply showing scenes changes or shots of the auditorium.

Leonardo Live, however, was conceived for both cinema and television, and its hybrid status seems to have pushed the presentation style towards the smaller of the screens – with the consequence that the rhythms, including the shot lengths and even the ways in which the paintings were shown, from a seat in the second row of a Picturehouse too often felt awry.