Back on 9 April, I contributed opening remarks to a screening of items from the BBC series Monitor. My intro here is the penultimate holiday reprise.
Tonight at BFI Southbank [remember, this was April] I'm introducing a programme of items with visual artists from the arts magazine series Monitor. On show from the series presented and edited by Huw Wheldon are fragments on film with Jacob Epstein and Henry Moore, Duchamp, Magritte and Max Ernst, plus an eccentric, evocative encounter from 1965 between Andy Warhol and Susan Sontag at the former's New York studio the Factory. 'I've got the BBC with me,' the critic says airily as she arrives in the goods lift. More than forty years on these traces suggest so much, and not least how television would engage with the arts across the coming decades.
Monitor went on air in early 1958, at a moment when the BBC was reeling from the successful commercial challenge of the new ITV network. Strikingly few arts documentaries had been made before this, although John Read's important films with modern British artists, starting with Henry Moore in 1951, had an established yet very occasional place in the schedule. But television had seen nothing resembling an arts magazine series.
There was the current affairs magazine show Panorama (1953- ), made by the corporation's Talks department under the formidable Grace Wyndham Goldie. Monitor was conceived on this model as what the then Controller of Television Programmes Kenneth Adam described in an internal memo as 'a highly sophisticated type of magazine without necessarily appealing only to Third Programme types'.
What were initially 45-minute programmes, shown on alternate Sunday evenings, began on February 2 1958 when Radio Times, carefully avoiding calling Monitor an arts programme, described it as 'presenting to viewers a variety of interesting topics that might loosely be called non-political and non-sociological... it will cover such subjects as the theatre, films, books, painting, sculpture, music, architecture and entertainment generally.' As indeed it did, with a mix of short films and often imaginative use of the studio, across the next seven years.
Its success was entwined with the appeal of Huw Wheldon, the first presenter and series editor -- although he wasn't the first choice for the latter role; he only got the job when the producer Catherine Dove decided to go off to India instead. But everyone involved with the series speaks of his clear editorial judgement, his sometimes puppyish enthusiasm enthusiasm and his support for emerging talent -- among the filmmakers who worked on the series were John Schlesinger, David Jones and of course, most famously, Ken Russell.
Our specific programme aim was this, [Wheldon later wrote] to say something true, within the limits of our perception, about art and artists; and at the same time, sacrificing neither to the other, to make good television with all that implies.
In tonight's programme of Monitor items about visual artists there are examples of the series' two main forms: studio interviews and short films. Even leaving aside the splendours of Ken Russell's work, the films were often highly imaginative and evocative, often shot on 35mm and invariably edited by the series' film editor Allan Tyrer who -- like a number of other Monitor alumni would go on to work on Kenneth Clark's Civilisation a decade later.
A short film, screened in March 1960 after the death the previous summer of sculptor Jacob Epstein. demonstrates the power of the the filmed essay -- this shows astonishing portrait heads from around the world and across the ages from Epstein's personal collection. Snatches of an audio interview with the artist are included and some shots of him at work and of his own creations, but this is essentially a visual argument about sculpture, enhanced -- like so many Monitor items -- by an exceptional use of music.
A notable encounter from 1962 between artist Richard Hamilton and his cultural hero Marcel Duchamp was clearly shot by two cameras, but only the images of Duchamp have survived. These precious traces include him reflecting on his introduction of the ready-made into art: 'It was really trying to kill the artist as a god -- I'm against the reverence towards the artist that the world has.'
Another encounter has the British critic Roland Penrose interviewing Max Ernst; their studio exchange is accompanied by a handful of contextual shots of the latter's 1961 retrospective at the Tate Gallery. (Penrose later made a BBC film with another major painter associated with the Surrealists, Joan Miró, which we distribute in the Art Lives series.)
By 1962 Monitor was a key strand in demonstrating to the Pilkington Committee on the future of broadcasting that, to quote the committee's report 'the BBC know good broadcasting [and] by and large they are providing it.' The corporation was rewarded with a second channel, which was to become BBC2, and Wheldon was promoted up the BBC hierarchy. In the autumn on 1964 the editorship of Monitor was handed to Jonathan Miller, fresh from the Broadway success of Beyond the Fringe.
The series became more ideas-led and Miller distanced himself from his distinguished predecessor, as he explained later
[Wheldon] had very much an ad hominen view of the arts, and it was a series of great heroes or trophies. Whereas I think I was more interested in what went into the arts, what their social context was and so forth.
The Monitor of 1964-65 also embraced what the critic T C Worsley sneeringly called 'jeans-and-sneaker-culture'. It's hard to see this latter point embodied in the delightful and thoughtful film essay Magritte: The Middle Class Magician which uses imaginative film techniques to deconstruct key works. But there are plenty of contemporary trousers and footwear apparent in another item from the same edition -- the encounter at the Factory of Susan Sontag and Andy Warhol.
This brief report is seemingly inconsequential and thoroughly innocent, and yet because of what was to happen, it's also extraordinarily iconic. If you come tonight, watch out for the stalwart Monitor director Nancy Thomas glimpsed in the lift and for Andy's fascination with how quiet the BBC's camera is. But I'm uncertain whether it's this specific item that the BBC Director General Hugh Carleton Greene later recalled as
ludicrous... which embarassing though it was at the time has become in reptrospect almost a lovable symbol of the silly and pretentious.
Perhaps unsurprisingly Miller's Monitor lasted for just a single season.
The most substantial item in tonight's line-up comes from five years before and from mainstream Monitor territory: Wheldon visiting Henry Moore in his house and studio at Perry Green. They chat about Aztec sculpture and about Cezanne -- Moore keeps the extraordinary oil sketch Trois Baigneuses by the artist hanging on the wall of studio shed. They reflect on the sculptor's recent works and they touch on Moore's fascination with the female form.
My subject is the female figure. Why, I don't know, and I don't think I want to know... I think I have a very romantic idea of women.
Moore's brand of low-key Romantic modernism was congenial to the BBC in these years, as was his bluff, no-nonsense artist persona. Which means that there's an exceptional record of his life and work in the BBC archives. I very much hope we can liberate some more of it next year alongside Tate Britain's major Moore show.
Watching these items, with their mix of the truly significant (imagine, an interview with Marcel Duchamp!) and the occasionally clumsy (in one of the tracking shots in the Moore film, you can glimpse a figure, I think Wheldon himself, attempting to duck out of sight as the camera swings past), it can be hard to recall that all of this is foundational. So much of what came later -- ITV's own attempt at a 'swinging Monitor', Tempo (1961-68), Late Night Line-Up (1964-72), The South Bank Show (1978- ), The Late Show (1989-95), The Culture Show (2004- ) -- is in embryo here. All of us who continue to work in arts media are in a very real sense the progeny of the programme that was Monitor.