I’ve only just caught up with Jay Rayner’s  piece about critics and bloggers in The Observer last Sunday and it seems a fair summary of the situation.

Critics can write, and know what they’re talking about, concludes one of Jay’s witnesses, whereas bloggers mostly only fill one side of that equation.  

You begin to wonder, though, when you open the Sunday Telegraph and find our old friend Tim Walker claiming — oh no, not this again — that new plays are under threat from musicals (not true; they’re just outnumbered by them, as usual, in the West End) and that The Female of the Species writer, director and leading actress last collaborated in 1984 (wrong: it was in 2002).  

Walker’s blunders and lack of knowledge and experience have led him proudly to assume some sort of martyred status, as though he’d acquired a reputation for silliness by being a fearless truth-teller in cahoots with no-one.

As all of us know when starting out as critics, we see ourselves as the new crusaders, the one who will clear the Augean stables of dung, corruption and soft yea-saying. Even my jovial successor on the Mail, Quentin Letts, still sees himself, after four years in the job, as an anointed scourge of a theatre world crawling with Lefties, Arts Council spongers and compliant critics.

The great critics like Shaw and Tynan certainly attacked the status quo with an independent flourish, but did so a) from a position of cast-iron authority and deep-dyed knowledge of the art form; and b) from a liberal progressive stand-point, not one of animosity towards anything new, challenging or even offensive.

One of Walker’s recent bleats about the conformity of a Leftist agenda in the theatre was to ask why the National had never presented a play by Ronald Harwood or the pro-Thatcher play about the Falklands War written years ago by Ian Curteis.

This is like complaining that the Royal Opera House isn’t doing enough Ivor Novello or the Royal Court anything by Jeffery Archer.
(As it happens, I’d love to see the ENO do Ivor Novello, and I think they should, but that’s an argument for another day.)

The development of a critic revelling in his status of not really being a critic — or standing out from the crowd, as Walker touchingly deludes himself — is a recent one, and if it gathers momentum, then serious critics might well find themselves swamped by bloggers.   

Or out of a job. So our critics had better be invincibly good. And even if they are, they might still be vulnerable. I am surprised to learn that The Times has decided to part company with Sam Marlowe, who has lately assumed most of the deputy critic workload behind Benedict Nightingale and ahead of Jeremy Kingston.

Sam has been a real find on The Times, a wonderful advocate of new work, with a lively, fresh sensitivity towards the sort of stuff Tim Walker can’t be doing with, and a true critic’s quirky ability to find sermons in stones, books in the running brooks of such artistic stinkers as Lord of the Rings and Michael Frayn’s Afterlife. She’s also great company and beautiful to behold, which you can’t say of many of her critical brethren. 

And as Jay Rayner points out, four Fleet Street newspapers — the Mail, the Mail on Sunday, the Standard and (most astonishingly) the Daily Telegraph — have now ditched over-night reviews of last night’s television programmes. 

This is seriously bad news, as a good television critic engages with the nation’s viewing and defines trends, articulates the good, the bad and the ugly and indeed sets a tone for conversations on the way to work.

Where will it all end? Not just in a miasma of bitchy blogging, I hope. Some time, somewhere, the newspaper editors need to stand up and be counted on this subject. Critics of the world unite: you have nothing to lose but your complimentary tickets!

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 20th, 2008 at 3:07 pm and is filed under Michael Coveney. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.