Bright Lights, Brilliant Minds: A Tale of Three Cities, BBC Four

Eight seconds in and my toes were already curling. Perhaps it was the authority with which the voiceover delivered some juicy clunkers. “If you wanted to be an artist in 1908, Vienna is where you’d come to make your name,” it intoned. Wow, who’d bother with Paris, eh? Picasso, you idiot, messing about with Cubism in a Montmartre hovel when you could have been sticking gold leaf on your decorative canvases, à la Klimt. 

Or perhaps it was James Fox’s predilection for banal generalities – cut-and-paste pronouncements that could be applied anywhere, any time. The “insights” never really got beyond the usual mish-mash of clichés. “In this city, art and politics, dreams and nightmares, creation and destruction, were locked in a fatal embrace,” he said, clasping hands together in a vice. Ach, you can read stuff like that off the back of a cornflakes packet, or at least its pocket guide equivalent.

If only Adolf hadn’t been so attached to picturesque scenes of a genteel bygone era

I presume the voiceover voice was eventually supplied by Fox, the presenter of this three-part series whose first episode took us to Vienna in the year 1908 (next week Paris 1928, then New York 1951, each an apparently seminal year), but in the available preview it belonged to a unnamed minion from the production team, with the photogenic Fox only doing the bits to camera. Since he hadn’t yet had time to dub his own voice I did naturally wonder whether Fox had even read the script he was credited with writing. Best to disown it, James. 

This was BBC Four in talking down mode, which doesn’t bode well for the shape of things to come for a channel championed for its intelligent arts broadcasting. But the programme wasn’t without interest, since it gave walk-on parts to a host of indeed brilliant characters who’d painted, written, built or composed their way into the 20^th-century canon (before some dropped out of it again): Klimt, Schiele, Kokoschka, Freud, Loos, Schoenberg – as well as the now very little-known Austrian writer Else Jerusalem, whose literary novel The Red House, set in a Vienna brothel, became a bestseller that year.

Hitler, the failed art student, had a bit-part too. If only Adolf hadn’t been so attached to picturesque scenes of a genteel bygone era of Vienna’s mythical past, if only he’d got on with the modernist programme whose currency was the angry, alienated soul, than we might have been spared the slaughter of the Second World War, and the death camps – but, on second thoughts, I really don’t think counterfactual histories are Fox’s strongpoint. As the direct precursor to that latter barbarity, perhaps we might credit the First World War with a bit more weight. And, of course, in 1908, anti-Semitism was rife. Europe was rank with it. Vienna was rank with it (though, of course, many of its groundbreaking artists and thinkers were Jewish). Its undercurrent was ugly and arguably ready to explode in the wake of a ruinous peace.

Fox touched upon this, of course, but the suggestion of a few bad pennies seemed a bit infantile to me, at least as it was implied here. Maybe I’m being a little unfair, but Fox has a particular style that grates: exaggerating some things with a hyperbolic flourish; downplaying everything else that doesn’t have an immediate televisual object as its focus. What’s more, and here’s the nub of it: he never has anything interesting to say. "Wow" and "Boo" just doesn't cut it.

We're probably all aware of the current fashion for delivering cultural histories through the lens of one apparently epoch-making year, but what a tired conceit this has already become. It was the year Klimt painted The Kiss; it was the year Schoenberg wrote his Second String Quartet. It was the year…and it was the year. But as we saw, Fox had to be a bit flexible with his year: Schiele, though precocious, was only 18 in 1908, and as for Freud, his most important work, The Interpretation of Dreams, was published almost a decade earlier, his Oedipul ideas already taking shape. Fox gave us the story of Little Hans and his Oedipul equine phobia instead.

Really, there are far more interesting ways to approach a history of ideas. Plundering a single year and inevitably doing a bad shoehorn job isn't one of them.

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