TELEVISION / Art for the heart's sake: Yesterday Richard Eyre, the director, spoke candidly about the BBC's crisis of faith at The Odd Couple, the Arts Council's Brighton conference on the arts and television. This is an edited version

One of the more enduring and unpleasant legacies of the Thatcher Years is the coinage of the phrase 'the chattering classes' to describe anyone who talks about broadcasting, or art, or politics, and who is not fortunate enough to work for a right- wing newspaper, or sit on the board of a merchant bank or the benches of the House of Commons. They 'make statements' while we 'chatter'; they 'assert' while we 'witter'; they are serious while we are frivolous. I'm an unrepentant chatterer and am proud to have been asked to speak at what is, in effect, a sort of pentecostal rally for the chattering classes.

I only read Michael Grade's Edinburgh Festival speech in synopsis, but I was very affected by his phrase that 'the BBC exists to keep us all honest'. It was an expression which belonged not to the language of sociology, semiotics, or economics, but to the language of the heart, and coming from a man who had clearly had some misgivings about accepting a substantial sweetener to continue running a public service broadcasting company, it had a singular poignancy. It was like a rather wistful compliment that might be paid by a philandering husband to his long-suffering wife. It dramatised for me the fact that the debate about the BBC and the struggle for its preservation is not about the abolition of bureaucracy, or even about the pressure of market forces, it is about an emotional and cultural heartland.

Commercial TV exists to make money. This is not incompatible with making good programmes, but the first obligation is to the shareholders, the second is to the advertisers, and the third is to the audience. The BBC is - and forgive me for stating the obvious - a public broadcasting service independent of government control, which has, however risible and antique this may sound now, a duty to serve the public. The notion of 'duty' has in the past given the Corporation a self-importance that has sanctified the growth of an overweening bureaucracy, allowing it a status somewhere between the Church and the Post Office. But the existence of an inert and supine bureaucracy, and the need for it to be reformed, shouldn't be used as an excuse to abandon a philosophy that asserts that the public is best served by making the best programmes.

The commitment to 'quality' - however loaded and subjective an aspiration - was the fuel which drove the BBC throughout what is now regarded as its golden age. It infected The Morecambe and Wise Show every bit as much as Play for Today. A few years ago I was filming Tumbledown on a cold hill in Wales, at night, in the pouring rain, and talking to a prop man; 'I like working here,' he said, 'You get to make good programmes.' 'Here?', I said, 'Here? In Wales? In the Black Hills?' 'No no,' he said, 'I mean at the BBC.' 'Here' was a territory of the mind and it's one that has been systematically eroded over the past few years by the reductive logic of market economics.

Market forces have been invoked by the government, like the Code of Moses, to justify the deconstruction of obstructive anomalies like the public utilities, the Health Service, and the BBC. The fiasco of the attempt to delete the coal industry is a perfect example of the myopia of a government which seems determined to prove that there is no such thing as society by eliminating all evidence of its existence.

The BBC have tried to stay one jump ahead of government: they have espoused producer choice - a policy of chaos couched in confusion; they have urged producers to seek co-production to the extent that a programme that does not manage to raise co-production money is regarded as suspect and vulnerable; they have taken on a quota of 'independent' programmes, often to the damage of their internal resources and morale. The consequence of all this loss of nerve in the management is a loss of vision; no one knows what the objective is, so instead of programmes being made because people think they are good and may therefore attract an audience, programmes are conceived by market researchers to fit the shape of the required ratings.

There are, apparently, three strategies on offer for the BBC. The first is, apparently, known as the 'Himalayan' strategy and it describes the intention to occupy the cultural high ground by becoming - and I don't know whether to be flattered or appalled - the National Theatre of the Airwaves, and to give, and I quote, 'religion a prominent place in the schedule'. The second strategy may well be called 'The Vale of Evesham', or 'The Sunlit Uplands' dedicated to a middle-brow pastoralism - classic serials, and nature programmes; and the third strategy, 'The Sewage Farm', would, I suppose, be dedicated to game shows, sport, sitcoms, and Esther Rantzen.

In my view, if the BBC continue to take the licence fee, there is only one strategy possible. It has a dual responsibility: to address a mass audience and to address a minority audience: I believe it should continue to discharge both responsibilities. It is all too easy to legislate for other people's problems, and since I haven't hesitated to do so up till now, I will suggest a strategy: the BBC should cut Breakfast TV and local radio, stop trying to mimic the competition from ITV, stop follies such as a 24-hour news channel; stop engineers determining how programmes are made, and stop politicians determining where they are made. The cultural obligation of the BBC is to continue to display a commitment to the forms that they have invented: the serious documentary, the television and radio serial, the television play and film, radio drama and to the mix of high and low culture which characterises BBC 2.

It must seem several centuries ago that I posed the question: what can art do for broadcasting?, or to put the same question differently: can a TV programme be a work of art? In the past it would have been possible to point to a continuously growing body of work which had a confidence in itself, and in its relationship to its audience, and a degree of 'excellence' that marked it out as 'art'. If such programmes are more rare nowadays it is not only the fault of the TV institutions, or even of the programme makers themselves, but of a wholesale social revolution. There's been a flight from the idea of a regimented culture where we sit down in front of the TV at a particular time, or turn up at a theatre, or put ourselves passively in the hands of the artist. Making good television used to be much easier. Expectations were low, and there was an amiable chaos which made for a warm relationship between the presenter, as it were, and the public. There was an energy drawn from knowing that if you were on television, you were addressing the nation as a whole. There was a homogenous culture, largely imposed from above; you could say you knew where you were then. If Huw Wheldon, or even Melvyn Bragg, told you it was good art, then it was, and it was good for you.

There's been something of a revolution against prescriptive culture, and while you may lament some of the territory that has been annexed for art, you can't ignore the fact that it has been occupied. I am entertained by programmes about the design of the tail fin of the Ford Cortina as much as programmes about the brushwork of Rembrandt, and I really don't see any harm in thinking that all forms of individual self-expression, and aspirations to excellence, are forms of art.

Of course you have to make critical distinctions between art that is well-achieved in its own terms and art that is not, but I would make a further distinction - and it's one that will probably mark me out as an unreconstructed fogy: I believe art should possess a moral dimension. If you ask me what I think of Blade Runner I would say: I admire it, I enjoy it, I love the fact that it's as stuffed with cultural references as the Museum of Modern Art, but if you ask me if it's art, then I would have to say no. It lacks an implicit moral sense; it is nihilistic and mechanistic and therefore - to me - inhumane in a way that Bergman's films, for all their bleakness, are not. I know it can be argued art didn't help the victims of the death camps whose executioners played Schubert, but you will never be able to make an argument for art, any more than for religion, on the basis of its social usefulness, or its ability to do you good, or feed anyone, or bring about world peace.

We've been led by the politics of the 20th century to the conviction that the arts should be for everyone. We'd like art and popular entertainment to be the same thing, but in practice they're not. We wish it to be true, but wishing doesn't make it happen - any more than it does in politics, in economics, or in social matters. However, there is an overlap, and the greatest opportunity for the convergence - at least in this country - is in broadcasting. There are many obstacles, but the greatest enemy to better broadcasting is ourselves. Television will only be good if those who are making it have a respect for it, and have a determination to make it work in it's own terms, not as a surrogate for any other form of art or journalism, but as itself: confident, imaginative and, in the words of Michael Checkland, distinctive.

Which brings me to the explicit agenda of this conference: what is the relationship of the arts to broadcasting? To the Arts Council, broadcasting appears to offer a paradigm: it offers access to all, and so it is hardly surprising that they are so keen to urge what they call their 'clients' - in the language of the caring professions - to transfer their work to television. It's a cruel parody of their view, but I can't help thinking that, like the judge in the Chatterley case, they think that there are the 'arts' - which we enjoy - and there is 'television' - which the servants watch - so they see it as the obligation of television to serve the arts. I believe that the only obligation of television is to provide good programmes, and to show, in spite of the difficulty for the programme maker to legislate for the conditions in which their programmes are viewed, that the medium is no less resistant to art than a piece of canvas or an empty stage.

Subsidised theatre, opera and ballet companies are, quite rightly, under pressure to justify their subsidies by increasing the availability of their productions, but to advocate that they should do this by getting their work on television is to entirely miss the point of the unique nature of a live performance. If you merely put a camera in front of a stage performance, you destroy the conceit on which it stands. Those who run opera houses have to pretend it works on television, and that it spreads the experience. It doesn't; what does work, indisputably, are opera recitals and arias sung out of context. The Three Tenors Concert, and Pavarotti in the Park won huge audiences, sold a vast number of records, and may even have persuaded some people to visit an opera house. These concerts will have achieved far more in that sense than a thousand relays from opera houses shot on four cameras with lighting that makes everything look like a Staff Panto in the Works Canteen. If you try to show a live opera performance on television to an audience which has a hugely sophisticated expectation of visual images, you mustn't be surprised if they think it's like It's a Knockout, but without the excitement.

Only by re-creating live theatre for TV, only by reconceiving it, can it be translated - which means carried across - from one medium to another. When we translate theatre performances to TV, we measure our standards by the best of TV drama and feature films; in opera, by films such as Bergman's Magic Flute, and Losey's Don Giovanni.

I can't believe it is beyond the wit of British television to devise a decent programme which discusses books, let alone a programme which discusses films in a way that is not either sneering, sycophantic, or just plain silly. On the occasions - such as the recent interviews with Billy Wilder by Volker Schlondorff - where films are discussed and analysed, it seems as if television was invented for this very purpose.

For the arts programmes that do exist, such as The Late Show and The South Bank Show, the problem is how to steer a course through the dangers of canonisation of the artist, earnest evangelism, gratuitous iconoclasm and a decent critical distance. Given this, it's hardly surprising that a recent Channel 4 arts programme dealt with whether Shakespeare was gay and Brigitte Bardot was sexy in the same edition. A friend of mine was asked if he would appear on Wogan. 'Why me?' he said. 'Oh,' responded the guileless researcher, 'We've run out of famous people.' This is self-evidently a problem for The South Bank Show, but is endemic to arts programmes that insist on viewing the arts largely through the prism of personalities. In the end, after you have exhausted the conventional examination of the personalities of a finite number of living celebrities, you are left, as with the 'posh' Sundays, only with their sex lives as objects of exploration. We await further developments with interest.

It's hard not to be affected by a feeling of millennial despair: so much seems to be wrong, and so little seems to get better. It's hard not to think that we all have to make a choice between bread and circuses, between the hardness of fact and the luxury of fiction. It's no wonder in this context that we're being offered the possibility of a 24- hour news service; it can be justified on the grounds of being serious, respectable, quantifiable, essentially unfrivolous.

Art can't be justified, except by what it is - either you get it or you don't. But without it, as a society, we would lack a soul and we would lack a voice. Throughout the Gulf war, we had a diet of unremitting news broadcasts; I searched in vain for a voice which questioned the wisdom and conduct of the war; its morality and its philosophy remained unexamined, drowned in the wash of 'expert' voices discussing the efficacy of SCUD missiles, Challenger tanks, F-111s, and desert strategy. Only when I saw a photograph of a dead Iraqi soldier in his armoured car, charred into a grinning skeletal death mask, and heard Tony Harrison read his poem about him, did I find a voice that echoed the outrage, confusion and despair that I felt about the whole event. This is what art does and journalism doesn't; balance is the enemy of art, and it is the essential premise of news broadcasting, and that is precisely why it is so difficult for those who run television companies to allow the artists to flourish - and precisely why it is so important that they do.

Richard Eyre is Artistic Director at the National Theatre.

(Photograph omitted)