The BBC must work harder at widening its audience, says Ofcom, but dumbing down its output won’t fix that
I remember the first time I fell in love with the BBC. I was 15 and had just returned home from a house party. It was a November Friday night. On my walk back home, tightly hugging my coat to shield myself against the biting cold, my mind was a whirl of tense emotions – does that girl fancy me or not? Did I annoy that guy? – but when I got back and switched the telly on I suddenly felt at peace; all my worries had gone. This was because I got back in time to watch The Review Show on BBC2.
The Review Show was an arts strand that ran under different titles from 1994 to 2014. In the version I watched it was hosted by Kirsty Wark and Martha Kearney and featured three guests each week to talk about the latest film, book, television, theatre and exhibition. I loved it because it was so intimate and low key, a small studio and four adults civilly talking about what they watched or read. Yet it opened up a vast world of culture and learning to me from my home in suburban London. It was my little secret treasure room, a place I could go to to escape from my quotidian life into a glamorous world of erudition. It was also fun. Some of the discussions, especially those featuring Germaine Greer, John Carey and Ekow Eshun, had an exhilarating bite and energy.
