The future relationship of the arts and broadcasting was the theme of VLV’s 2004 Summer Conference, ‘Arts and Broadcasting – Renaissance or Retreat?’ which took place at the British Academy in London, on Wednesday, 7 July 2004.
With broadcaster Roger Graeff in the chair, key speakers included Jan Younghusband, Channel 4’s Commissioning Editor for Arts, Alan Yentob, the BBC's Director of Drama, Entertainment and Children's, Roger Wright, Controller, BBC Radio 3, and Kim Peat, Controller of Daytime, Arts & Religion, Channel 5.
Speakers painted an optimistic picture of arts broadcasting, and claimed that it was indeed undergoing a renaissance. But the audience at the Conference sometimes painted a diferent picture, pointing to the marginalisation of arts progammes to the outer reaches of the television schedules and to the small budgets for arts programmes.
Roger Wright, Controller of Radio 3, although noting that BBC Radio's commitment to music, drama and arts discussion was not in doubt, was less certain of the future. A lot, he pointed out, depended on the future of the BBC's licence fee. He also put in a plea that in an age of sound bites and computer games, attention spans were falling. Younger audiences, he thought, needed to be educated into how to listen to longer works of music or in how to watch more involved television programmes.
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