Matt's Old Masters C4, 8.00pm
Arena: Dylan Thomas
- From Grave to Cradle
BBC2, 7.30pm (Sat).
In order for Matt's Old Masters to work, you have to believe that Matthew Collings is witty. This is a stretch. No-one, you suspect, will ever find Mr Collings as archly ironic, as playfully droll, as Mr Collings does.
He has a habit, call it the Channel 4 tic, of behaving
as though anyone who matters is in on the joke. If you don't get it - if you don't see why a programme about ''old art'' should be a post-modern game - the fault is probably yours.
In fact, Collings was getting his excuses in first. He was engaged on a deeply old-fashioned and worthy art history piece. But he wanted us to know that he knew that we knew about all that self-referential art theory he was slipping in to give the thing a contemporary sheen. No-one down at the ICA was going to diss him for adoring something as quaint as painting.
Still, it was Titian, wasn't it? You can't go wrong with Titian if you remember to keep your eyes open. Throw in Venice and you have a programme that saturates the screen with colour and images known, inadequately, as ravishing. Once Collings had stopped messing about with his critical position, Titian took care of the rest.
Why doesn't anyone paint like that any more? Collings pointed out that the necessary ''system of skills and beliefs'' just doesn't exist these days. At a time when no-one had heard of museums, a tiny renaissance elite had a ''shared symbolic world'' that is largely meaningless within the modern ''tourist experience of art''. Titian's religious paintings and the light of Venice were part of an organic whole. We, said our guide, can only experience ''lots of random loveliness''.
At times, his own documentary seemed almost to prove the point. Yet, when Collings hit his stride, literally, he became a persuasive guide. One long, uninterrupted walking shot involving an apparently extempore monologue on Titian's milieu alone was worth the price of admission. Collings does know his stuff. You just wish he didn't have to labour the fact.
Knowing your stuff isn't always enough, of course. In Saturday's Arena Nigel Williams marked the 50th anniversary of the death of Dylan Thomas with an elegant portrait that brought the appalling little sot to
life but almost disappeared up its own pretensions. Williams had decided on a ''backwards journey'' through the poet's career, from his death in
New York to his birth in Wales, and nothing, life's natural dynamics not least, was going to impede this cumbersome conceit.
As things turned out, the actual content of the piece was some compensation for its structure. In some circles, the news that Thomas was not invariably a lying little sponger counts as a sensation. His obsessive devotion to
his craft remains, meanwhile, an awesome thing. Three
days spent hammering
out on a single line of poetry? As Williams waspishly observed: ''Was this three days well spent?''
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