The Tate ought to be more modest for the record of the Turner Prize

The Tate ought to be more modest, for the record of the Turner Prize is not one of achievement.
Underachievement characterises the work of all four artists in this year’s exhibition. Since Button has been the administrator of the Turner Prize for the last five years, she is not an impartial historian Her book is a publicity puff. Meanwhile, the Tate and its satellite nouveau-riche organisation, the Patrons of New Art, continue to revel in the media attention. Their latest venture is a book by Virginia Button (Tate Gallery Publishing Ltd, pounds 16.95), announced as ”the first major book on the award”. This is also the view of every single artist I have talked to about the Turner Prize over the years Large sections of the public seem to agree. I think all this publicity is crazy and not of real service to the cause of art.

They simply don’t look like prize-winners, though one of them will become famous, and pounds 20,000 richer, when Chris Smith announces her the winner at the usual lavish dinner on 2 December. That event will be televised, and all through November carefully managed ”discussions” about the Prize will take place in Belfast, Glasgow, Manchester, Southampton, St Ives and Sunderland (details from C4’s internet site, www.channel4 ). None of the exhibitors appears to have made a special effort for her appearance at the Tate. The show looks more generous than in recent years, though on inspection it’s somewhat thin. Each of the individual displays is of about the standard that one finds in commercial galleries in London throughout the year. The Tate Gallery has given a fair amount of space to the four shortlisted contenders for the Turner Prize, who are Christine Borland, Angela Bulloch, Cornelia Parker and Gillian Wearing Each of them has, in effect, a one-woman exhibition.

And that is as it should be, if the broadcasting is to uphold Reith’s dictum of remaining always “on the upper side of public taste.”And, meanwhile, in my sleep, it is C4’s Widmerpool – portrayed by an actor at the height of his powers – who prowls down the years, conjuring the passage from childhood to death.. It is hard to see Jean Templar agreeing to that, let alone Pamela Flitton.No, today, as far as I can tell, it is bestockinged heterosexual monogamists who might have difficulty holding down a career in broadcasting. “What’s that?” she asked him, adding, “It sounds silly, but I had no idea.” Reith himself hounded a woman musician off the air because she was divorced, and the formidable “Women’s Staff Administrator” used to lurk in the Art Deco lobby at clocking-on time, scrutinising the legs of female employees for stockinglessness, and sending offenders home to get dressed properly. Lord Reith’s secretary at one point recollects being told by her boss that a handsome announcer had been sacked because he was a homosexual. But what was extraordinary in the first part of Auntie: the Inside Story of the BBC (BBC1, Tues), was that the naive and puritanical world of the early Beeb could have coexisted with the serial adultery and indulgence of the real models for A Dance to the Music of Time. Nor is TV drama “inferior” to the theatre, nor does it adapt the classics “at its peril”, nor does TV sport turn people away from football matches, nor is everything better seen on the large screen There is, of course, crap TV. But the only comparative sense in which television is “inferior” to the other arts and recreations is – I often think – in some of the people who are employed to write about it.

And having read all this stuff, you may be inclined to agree.So this week’s 75th anniversary of the first BBC broadcast (albeit on radio) is a real cause for celebration. Unless, of course, we’re talking about the resources thrown by rich tabloids at getting the goods on a bonking Tory. And – finally – there is not a newspaper in this country that could withstand the intervention of a militant fact-checker with the confidence that the BBC could.The price to be paid for all this virtue is that newspaper journalism is often funnier, more entertaining and more provocative than its televisual counterpart But it certainly is not any better. It cannot attribute an entire programme to anonymous and invisible “sources”: virtually everything has to be shown.