[interestednovice]

Personally, I’ve always found the arts content on the various Sunday morning programmes something of a turn-off. 

I find it a bit of an odd mix to include it in a programme mainly concerned with politics. Watching a pretentious actor talking in depth about their latest stage production seems rather irrelevant and unconnected to everything else in the show.

It’s like including a cookery section on Match Of The Day.

I think it goes back to trying to create a Sunday magazine show (rather like a Sunday paper’s various sections) instead of a show that is politics in it’s entirety.

I don’t feel that a purely hard-debating politics programme can find a decent audience on a Sunday morning. If the programme is basically Hardtalk but with an added panel, casual viewers won’t be interested. If you water down the content to be “accessible” to people who don’t really follow politics, it becomes too anodyne and simplistic for the politics-keen viewer that the programme ought to naturally attract. So you have to tread a fine line to allow a wide audience but also not alienate the “core audience” of the political nut, to put it bluntly.

This difficult balance is why there have historically been other sections to this sort of programme, which also doubles as a sort-of news programme and even look ahead at the week.

This is essentially what I was alluding to in my earlier comments that the show wasn’t really working because it simultaneously tries to be purely politics but also attract a casual viewer - so it’s something that seems simplistic to a politically-minded viewer but also too argumentative to a casual viewer. A bit of a “reset” with other programme segments helps make the overall programme tone more cordial even if you do sometimes have hard interviews throughout the slot.