When Michael Kustow joined Channel 4 in 1981, he was greeted by Jeremy Isaacs with the words: "Are you sure you're being avant-garde enough, Michael?" Which television executive would say such a thing today?
Later this month, some of the leading figures in British television and the arts over the past 30 years will gather at Channel 4 to remember Kustow, who died last August. Peter Brook, Arnold Wesker, Richard Eyre, Liz Forgan and Jeremy Isaacs will all pay tribute. Kustow was a hugely influential figure in British theatre and the arts. He worked at the RSC and the National under Peter Hall in the '60s, was director of the ICA and, during his eight years at Channel 4, commissioned some of the most exciting arts programmes ever seen on British television. I knew Kustow well: he commissioned Voices, which I worked on through the mid-1980s, and he was warm and one of life's great enthusiasts.
Kustow commissioned directors like Peter Brook, Peter Hall and Peter Greenaway, writers and artists like Tony Harrison, Tom Phillips and Marina Warner, filmed work by leading composers like Michael Tippett, Harrison Birtwistle and Michael Nyman, and films by many of the outstanding TV documentary-makers of the last 50 years.
His impact was not just felt at Channel 4. It forced the BBC to raise its game and executives like Alan Yentob and Michael Jackson made BBC Music and Arts more exciting than it had been for years.
Documentary strands like Arena and Bookmark and BBC2's The Late Show produced serious television about arts and ideas. On ITV, Melvyn Bragg's The South Bank Show continued to create a treasure-house of interviews with the leading cultural figures of our time.
It is right to celebrate Kustow's achievement but it is also important to mourn his loss and that of his legacy. Who today would commission Peter Brook to direct The Mahabharata, an Indian epic, Peter Hall to direct The Oresteia, adapted by the poet Tony Harrison, or Peter Greenaway to collaborate with Tom Phillips in creating a TV Dante? Who on network television would show an opera based on the neurological case-studies of Oliver Sacks or discussions with figures like George Steiner, Bruno Bettelheim and Joseph Brodsky? No one.
There is much talk of a new golden age in television today. When people say this, what they mean are US sitcoms and dramas like Breaking Bad, The Sopranos and The Wire, or European detective dramas like The Killing and The Bridge. They do not mean British television and they certainly do not mean British arts television.
Of course, there are honourable exceptions. However, in general the story is one of decline. The arts have been relegated to the margins. The flagship series, Bookmark, Omnibus, The Late Show, are no more. The South Bank Show is no longer on ITV. The more esoteric arts - programmes about classical music, opera and contemporary dance – fight for space in schedules.
More importantly, there has been a failure of nerve and loss of ambition. We see European detectives, but few programmes about European artists. Kustow televised productions by the Russian theatre director, Yuri Lyubimov and the German choreographer, Pina Bausch. European figures like the poet, Joseph Brodsky, the Italian critic, Umberto Eco, and the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz were interviewed. That is almost inconceivable now.
TV has dumbed down and programmes are increasingly presented by celebrities, talking about middlebrow subjects.
A few years ago, Michael Kustow, who was born and brought up around Golders Green, wrote: "Today, television is suffering a national nervous breakdown. Not only has trust in the medium been eroded, but the industry has lost its self-confidence." He understood that, with digital TV, competition for audiences would drive down content. Michael Kustow's career was all about enthusiasm and innovation.
In his memoir, In Search of Jerusalem, he wrote that he was "an animator: one who breathes spirit, anima, breath, into things." British television could do with his passion and daring today.
