Dancing on a television grave

Mark Thompson, the director general of the BBC, was quoted the other day as saying there were far more programmes on the arts these days than ever before, though you’d hardly have noticed.

A new series of Alan Yentob’s Imagine started on BBC1 last night and was well down to the usual standard of soft soap, piety and dull interrogation in a predictably roseate look at a bunch of untrained seniors putting together a dance show for Sadler’s Wells.

The most interesting thing here was that one of the “dancers” was an extremely well known actress, Eve Pearce, just turned eighty, and suffering from peripheral neuropathy, which means she can’t feel her feet, poor thing.

Why anyone would want to pay good money to go and see their show of game shuffling about was never a question on Yentob’s clipboard. Instead, the choreographer Richard Alston made the rather dodgy point that because Fonteyn and Nureyev both danced well past their sell-by dates, they became curiously more affecting because of their ageing process.

But they were Fonteyn and Nureyev, for heaven’s sake, and global super stars. While I would be happy to see a proper actress like Eve defying the odds in that sort of way, there seems little point in watching, or trying to make some sort of critical case for, a bunch of amateurs in a fatuously genteel music and movement class.

I feel the same way about Young at Heart, the insufferable choir of senior citizens who sing songs by Radiohead and the Beach Boys and have become darlings of the festival circuit, slated indeed for the Manchester Biennial next month.

There’s only one thing to say about these oldster love-ins: jolly well done and aren’t they sweet. Now go home and have a nice cup of Horlicks and an early night.

Instead of which Yentob schmoozed them in his unavoidably patronising way and went along with the choreographer Chris Tudor’s view that the “experience” of the dancers in trying to put into mime what they felt during the war was deeply affecting and moving. No it wasn’t. It was rubbish.

The best thing in the programme was the sight of Tudor, a former dancer himself, lying rigid on the floor with a back problem. Yentob stayed upright throughout, but he’s got something worse: a backside problem, as in disappearing up his own.

Talking of fundamental issues, similar thoughts had occurred at the Gate earlier in the evening when Dylan Tighe unveiled his ghastly Medea/Medea and managed to cram in every stale old cliche of the avant garde from Grotowski to Thomas Ostermeier.

What people like Tighe never wise up to is that these signifcant, innovative directors always start with a cast of people who can really act. The performer is always at the centre of their work. This was trimmings without the meat, and laughably bad.

Tighe — who’s obviously bright and may even be talented — droned on himself on the soundtrack and then had the gall to appear for a curtain call (po-faced and unyielding, naturally) with his actors, one of whom was the sadly under-used Harold Pinter lookalike Raad Rawi as King Creon.

Tighe’s an Irishman and he looks like a stunted Jarvis Cocker. If only he had Cocker’s sense of theatrical humour and hadn’t spent so much time poring over theoretical nonsense on the Goldsmiths College graduate performance course.

Still, I toasted him in Guinness at The Cow in Westbourne Park Road after the show, while sharing a pint of prawns with a friend who had introduced me to this wonderful pub restaurant.

We had emerged shaking with boredom at the Gate to find a table of drinks staring us in the face. This is quite common now in fringe theatres, for the first night audience to be indiscriminately entertained by the host management.

In this case it might have served as part recompense for the show — it usually does at the Hampstead Theatre, where you can hardly move for critics and hangers-on with their faces in the trough while searching desperately for the exit.

I’m glad I discovered The Cow instead. And I was still home in good time to see what the not so brave new dawn of BBC arts programmes was bringing us. Maybe I shouldn’t have bothered.