When the Observer film critic Philip French died two years ago, many tributes were paid to the qualities that made him an outstanding reviewer: his breadth of reference, incisive opinions and talent (or weakness) for terrible puns. Less remarked on was his contribution to the BBC’s review coverage of the arts: from the 1960s till his early retirement in 1990, he worked on the weekly radio arts programme The Critics and its successor, Critics’ Forum. The highbrow tone of participants was parodied by Peter Sellers. But the programme’s simple premise – that when three or four people are gathered together in the name of criticism, something informative and entertaining can ensue – guaranteed its longevity.
Since 1998 Radio 4’s Saturday Review has ably filled the void left by Critics’ Forum, with Tom Sutcliffe acting as chair and a format that’s very much the same: 45 minutes of discussion recorded “as live”, in which a book, play, film, exhibition and broadcast are reviewed. The programme has a loyal following, so when Gwyneth Williams, the Radio 4 controller, announced that the programme would be axed from this autumn, listeners were shocked. Even more surprising was her volte-face last week. After a budgetary rethink and an online petition to save it, Saturday Review has been reprieved.
It’s great to see the U-turn (if only the same could happen with Brexit). Still, the near miss is revealing about the current devaluation of reviewing. When Vladimir and Estragon abuse each other in Waiting for Godot, the ultimate, unanswerable insult (topping “vermin”, “moron”, “sewer rat” and “cretin”) is “crritic”. It seems many in the media feel the same way.
On television the BBC4 monthly Review Show (a diluted version of the weekly BBC2 Newsnight Review) disappeared three years ago. On the radio, for arts programmes such as Front Row, Night Waves and Open Book, reviewing (as opposed to features and interviews) is a relatively small part of the brief. Newspapers are also cutting back; the New York Observer laid off its theatre and film reviewers earlier this year; the Independent on Sunday sacked all its arts critics in 2013. On other arts pages grades are awarded as if to exam candidates, and symbols take precedence over words: five stars/one star, standing ovation/turkey, thumbs up/thumbs down. Not much room for nuance there.
It hasn’t always been this way. In the 19th century lengthy reviews flourished to such a degree that Thomas Carlyle predicted “by and by it will be found that all literature has become one boundless self-devouring review”. It didn’t quite happen but many of the modernists – Pound, Eliot, Woolf, Lawrence – are as celebrated for their critical essays as for their poems or novels. By the mid 20th century, the Age of Criticism reached its peak. On my shelves, I’ve cheap Penguin editions from the 1960s of William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity, FR Leavis’s The Great Tradition, CK Stead’s The New Poetic, John Gross’s The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters and EM Forster’s Aspects of the Novel. It’s hard to imagine a mainstream paperback publisher launching such a series today. Or a newspaper film reviewer publishing a study of three literary critics – as French did in 1980, with his book about Leavis, Edmund Wilson and Lionel Trilling. Such titles are now the province of academic presses. Where they do allow criticism on to their lists, commercial publishers prefer something quirkier – Geoff Dyer on Lawrence in Out of Sheer Rage, Rebecca Mead’s The Road to Middlemarch.
It has been argued that the trouble began when French literary theory invaded our shores, with Barthes, Foucault, Derrida, Althusser, Kristeva and Cixous taking root, and the language of criticism becoming rarefied. But an understanding of literary theory needn’t preclude close reading, any more than being a university professor need preclude writing book reviews (John Carey and Terry Eagleton do it most weeks). Journalists and scholars work in different ways but both can make good critics. Serious writers have even presented book programmes on television; Hermione Lee, Ian Hamilton, Ludovic Kennedy and Melvyn Bragg all did it well.
Film and theatre companies have been known to ban disobliging critics, and wounded authors to doorstep them. But at best the role of the critic is nurturing rather than negative. It’s exciting to come across new or little-known talents and to speak on their behalf – as Ian Sansom did in these pages last year when he championed Mike McCormack’s small-press novel Solar Bones, which went on to win the Goldsmiths prize and has now been longlisted for the Man Booker. What punters value in a reviewer is wit, feeling, intelligence, provocation, enjoyment – the same qualities we look for in an artist or director. Parasitic it may be, but a good review can be an art form in itself.
Even hatchet jobs serve a purpose; some parties deserve to be spoiled, some names to be brought down a peg. The young are best equipped for the task; they have fresh ideas, haven’t mellowed, don’t know enough people to be compromised. Editors and producers once wooed such talents; there is nothing more enjoyable than a savage review. But to sustain a career as a reviewer was always a slog – as Gissing and Orwell testified – and it’s all but impossible today. No newspaper would pay what Anthony Burgess and Bernard Levin used to earn in the 1980s.
Thanks to blogs, websites, Facebook and Twitter, anyone can now have their say, in public, about what they’ve seen and read. It’s what we do with friends in any case, and – except when comment descends to personal abuse – a healthy example of online democratisation. But it’s not an argument against professional reviewers. They are there for their expertise – not as backscratchers, freeloaders, gatekeepers or (as Leavis would have it) corrupt metropolitan hacks, but to start a conversation. As long as they put the work in – prepare, think, pay attention and stay to the end rather than following the Sydney Smith rule (“I never read a book before reviewing it; it prejudices a man so”) – they deserve some credit.
The BBC deserves credit, too, for its change of heart over Saturday Review. Critics may be intemperate or just plain wrong. But without them all there would be is PR. They are the first line against excitable press releases, smarmy interviews and corporate hyperbole. After that it’s up to us.
• Blake Morrison’s novel The Executor will be published next spring.
