The Media Column: 'Let's start the week with a Continental-style debate'

I would never have believed it could happen, but, over the past couple of months of listening to Start the Week on Radio 4 each Monday morning, I've started to grow nostalgic for Melvyn Bragg.

The "great man of English letters" is still about, of course, presenting a television version of his English-language series and compering a Thursday radio show called, with characteristic modesty, Melvyn Bragg: In Our Time. Its chief fascination is to see how early he can bring in the Greeks ("Now, before we go on to the effect of the internet on copyright law, perhaps we could see what Plato had to say about this") and how early he gets in a huff because he's been upstaged by one of the guests.

Still, Bragg has one special quality. He is a natural pedagogue. Whatever his faults, he does love to act as master of ceremonies on a wide range of subjects, not least science. On his Start the Week, one heard Dawkins, Jones et al argue about genetics long before the newspapers had taken them up. His successor, Jeremy Paxman, was the opposite of Bragg. Paxman liked to corner his guests and beat them into submission.

Paxman was a disaster. Andy Marr is not like Paxman. Far from it. Marr is a natural enthusiast, a Tigger who likes nothing better than to bound across the stage or the studio to tell you all that he knows. Unfortunately, his enthusiasm sometimes sidetracks argument. Also, instead of new worlds being opened up on Start the Week, we are too often back to the good old diet of politicos talking about policy, journalists talking about themselves and novelists describing their fiction.

Take yesterday morning. Simon Schama (is there a programme he doesn't appear on these days?), a museum curator, a so-called "investigative" reporter (aren't all reporters per se investigative?) and a historian of sex. It could have been Night Waves, Front Row, Newsnight Review or even Newsnight.

Does it matter? Not in the sense that it is just another journalist griping about a presenter. But in the case of Marr and Start the Week, I do think it is important. The BBC has always been the conversation place for Middle England. Brain of Britain, In Town Tonight and now Start the Week are part of a long tradition of civilised debate over a wide range of issues. Now the BBC seems to have decided to retreat from broad-based "intellectual" conversation and homogenise all its discussion programmes into one bland pudding of the old-fashioned liberal arts.

Arts discussion on TV has been brought down to a single slot late on Friday night; and both Newsnight Review and Radio 4's Front Row on weekday evenings follow a very sixth-form (and very English) formula in which critics are encouraged to look clever in judgement rather than interesting in argument.

Mark Lawson has become the be-all of arts programmes, ubiquitous, narrow in focus, exclusive in approach. It's simply not good enough to say, as the Greg Dyke contingency is wont, that intellectual debate at the Continental level has no equivalent here. Never has a nation had so many articulate artists, scientists and philosophers bursting with things to say. And with English as the common language, you can now call on virtually the whole world to come here and join the debate.

No, what we have here is a betrayal by the BBC – criminal neglect, if you consider the travesty that is BBC 4. The world is there to be explored. The people are there to describe and dispute it. The audience is more than willing to heed it. The missing bit is the broadcasting service to deliver it.

a.hamilton@independent.co.uk

David Aaronovitch is on holiday