Front Row, on Radio 4, is reliable, it is competent, it is always there, just after the news and the Archers. But would Front Row work on TV? Instead of giving the regular radio presenters – Kirsty Lang, Samira Ahmed and John Wilson – jobs on the telly, new anchors for the small-screen version were announced. As indignation raged among the show’s tiny potential audience, Coren gave an interview on the radio version of Front Row to Wilson (a brilliantly self-consuming BBC ploy that could have been dreamed up by W1A’s press officer Tracey Pritchard). But not for the first time, I am forced to wonder: what is it about the arts that BBC TV fears so much?

Source: The Guardian September 24, 2017 17:03 UTC