The Beeb's lost edge

Instead, we're being palmed off with the same dumb bumf that's already overexposed elsewhere.

I know that it's uncomfortable attacking the Beeb from any kind of culturally progressive point of view when the organisation comes under such relentless fire from nasty corporates - the demon Murdoch etc - and regressive politicians with a vested interest in toppling or controlling it.

But, to be honest, it's becoming too bloody annoying to ignore.

With a format that apes Top Gear, the perkily revamped Culture Show exemplifies this phenomenon, seeming to float within a narrow liberal comfort zone, steering clear of anything that might challenge our preconceptions or provoke real thought.

Where have the iconoclasts and revolutionaries gone?

An interview with the writers of Peep Show sits next to a performance by trendy Brazilian pop band CSS, who'll be on every other music show within a month, while even film critic Mark Kermode's all too brief interview with Nicholas Roeg and interesting dissection of Don't Look Now has to be offset with - and time sacrificed for - an utterly pointless pocket review of Prince Caspian.

A recent edition of Newsnight Review had two of Britain's finest plain-spoken wordsmiths, songwriter Jarvis Cocker and poet Ian Macmillan, wasting their breath on theatre and music that was so clunky, so bereft of linguistic richness, that both were left struggling for anything of positive value to say.

For me, the real problem isn't the presenters or even the off-kilter approaches that they take, it's the stuff that they choose to cover.

Consistently, these programmes focus on whatever has been aggressively marketed to them by heavyweight PR firms or multinational distribution companies. It's all about the budget, as you can tell simply by seeing the same product marketed everywhere else too.

The villains aren't the PRs themselves, they're just doing their job and fighting to get their clients precious airtime. The villains are the editors, bookers and producers who can't be bothered to go find their own virgin subject matter and instead lazily suck up whatever they're told is this month's must-have.

This is why Later With Jools Holland has graduated from being the best music show on telly to being instantly turn-offable. Or why most radio coverage from Hay-on-Wye Literature Festival was so teeth-gnashingly formulaic. Or why Glastonbury Festival's TV broadcast, despite being spread across five channels, avoided any cabaret, comedy, theatre, folk arts or experimental music in favour of the same 10 bands as last year.

One solution would be to roll out the strand known as BBC Introducing across all the arts.

This is a light at the end of the tunnel, a genuine guff-free attempt to nurture new talent by linking the edgiest bits of Radio 1 - the bits that replaced John Peel - with BBC local radio counterparts who have their ears to the ground to bring in bands who are really "undiscovered," rather than just labelled as such.

In the same way, the entire BBC could and should be out there, finding diverse artists, playwrights and novelists.

What we don't need is another 100 opinions on the same mess of pies. Equally, what we don't need is the execs throwing their hands up in the air and calling it quits in the face of YouTube and too many idiot cable stations.

We need the Beeb's experience and expertise out there, truffling out culture and showing us where to access it, like a publicly funded creativity scout, nosing out the very best of what we haven't already had thrown in our face by a commercial marketing budget.

That way, there'll still be some independent arts left in this country come the revolution.