When the subject reached London it was for people who had no Latin or Greek Women often You know inferior types

When the subject reached London, it was for people who had no Latin or Greek Women, often You know, inferior types. (For a programme which at one point affirmed that far more women than men studied the subject, it was interesting that the only woman Carey could get to talk was Hermione Lee. Still, it was nice for once not to have to listen to that most ubiquitous of meeja dons, Lisa Jardine. And what heroic restraint on her part not to demand a microphone.)It wasn't until this century that I A Richards, and then F R Leavis, turned English into a subject that, in Carey's paraphrase, "refined your sensibility and gave you a sense of values to live by .. essential for cultural and moral health". Although earlier in the day you could have heard Imogen Stubbs, in Sentimental Journey (R4), talk about her days studying English at Oxford and submitting an essay on Beckett which used tin foil, audio, and colourings-in instead of the more traditional words Her tutor rejected it and suspected drug abuse.

I salute that tutor.It was a shame that the programme did not touch on the wonderfully unedifying tendency of English dons in particular to try to rubbish each other at every possible opportunity. (See Howard Jacobson's very funny first novel, Coming From Behind, for chapter and verse on this.) And yet, the future of the subject is bright, or bright-ish. "Because both imagination and language are fundamental human resources," said one professor, slipping into the language of the personnel department for a moment, "it remains a very important subject, and it's not going to go away."One of the best introductions to a work of literature is that by Christopher Ricks, in the little Penguin Syrens edition of Samuel Beckett's First Love. It opens with these words: "First, read First Love." There was something of such hortatory brevity in Piers Lane's programme about Beethoven's "Hammerklavier" sonata. The Piano (R3) began with five minutes' talk on the origins of the piece and how it came to be named. The title has nothing to do with the way it begins by bashing out the opening B-flat chords - although Beethoven reduced the sturdiest pianos virtually to matchwood just by playing them, and when he said the piece was for "50 years from now", you feel he was not only referring to how avant-garde he knew he was, but that it would take that long to produce a piano that could take that kind of punishment. Hammerklavier is simply the German for "pianoforte", and the German is what his anti-Napoleonic nationalism demanded.Anyway, this preamble went on for a little bit, and then Lane simply said, "Here is Beethoven's `Hammerklavier' sonata"; and there it was, all three-quarters of an hour of it, played superbly by Nikolai Demidenko.

There was a little post-amble, as it were, while your ears were still ringing, in which we were promised a programme on the French school of piano-playing, or what the French pianist Jean-Phillippe Collard called "the diggy-diggy-dee" school I hope next week's programme is done with as little fuss.. Spy cameras are so ubiquitous that they're the basis of a whole new genre of cheap television - very cheap television The favourite form, of course, is crime programming. And what crime on video suggests is that that type of criminal is pretty idiotic and inclined to hysteria. But somehow those muddy, jerky images of hopeless - and therefore quite frightening - people doing chaotic things are so banal, cheap and sad that it was just a matter of time before a clever, smart advertiser used them for something fashiony. Not Levi's again! But you can't get away from it: they come up with some very diverting imagery. A few weeks ago it was Flat Eric updating their Sta-Prest sub-brand.

Now it's a CCTV robbery for Dockers, another sub- brand of chinos and khakis. So we're in a supermarket and the hand-held is swinging about in a wildly unsteady amateur video way. Brief slanted shots of the aisles - it looks Low-Rent rather than Tesco or Waitrose - then a man with a balaclava and a gun. Round the corner come two super- handsome young men, one black, one white. The terrorist forces them to their knees - lots of shots of neat pants on fit frames.