I thought of all this again when it was announced last month that The South Bank Show would be ending after 31 years. Melvyn Bragg appeared on the front pages of the broadsheets and there were condolences in the comment pages, but overall there was little fuss. Most people, I imagine, were surprised it was still on air, so hidden away had it become in the twilight zone of the TV schedules. This was reflected in the ratings, which averaged apparently one million a show — although it seems a fair number were achieving considerably fewer viewers than this. 

For the whole of my ten years in arts television — which included long stints in ITV's Arts Department — it operated under the Sword of Damocles. There was the sense that we were at the tail-end of something or other. The axing of The South Bank Show is another nail in the coffin. It was through sheer force of character that Bragg had managed for years to convince ITV that it should cover the arts, as, contrary to what many assumed, no official remit actually existed. To this extent, he was a genuine Reithian with a mission, possibly the last of his kind. When it came to getting programmes commissioned, the fact that Bragg was the only man who needed convincing also made life much easier and simpler for producers. Unfortunately, perhaps, all of this — plus the fact that nobody could really be allowed to be groomed to be the "next Melvyn" — meant also that the show became his own personal fiefdom, which, with his departure, simply could not conceivably continue.

Arts programmes on the BBC have never been so identified with one man, although there has been, with Alan Yentob and Imagine, an attempt to give an otherwise rather shapeless strand a distinct identity. (There was much talk at the time of needing a "name" to front this new series. The fact that somebody largely unknown outside the Groucho Club was considered a celebrity tells you much about the growing gulf between "court" and country.) 

Arts programming in general is at the sharpest end of the cultural changes that have occurred over the past couple of decades. But it is not simply the proliferation of channels such as my friend's that has left it diminished. It has been caught in a pincer movement between the economic choice-merchants of the Right and the cultural relativists of the Left. Why try to get people interested in Shostakovich when Dizzee Rascal is every bit as valid? It is a brave TV executive who would demur, and in the course of a decade I never came across one. To his credit, Bragg always made a virtue of mixing the best of popular culture with what used to be called the "highbrow", of speaking of Paul McCartney in the same breath as Herbert von Karajan.