Remember when artists, while sitting down to sequence their new album, would front-load it with the better tracks or the singles? It got ridiculous at times, and could occasionally unbalance a record, but the reasoning was sound.

And this was in the days when people would sit down and take in a record as a whole. Why, when the album-as-album idea is struggling, do so many of them let their record limp through the opening tracks?

Take the new Gorillaz one, Plastic Beach. Once you hit track 4, the gems come in a nearly unbroken string; but how many will get to track 4? I think some of the sniffy reviews it’s received have something to do with this.

Mind you, nothing else on it can match "On Melancholy Hill"; mind you, nothing much can. It's in the "This Is A Low" league.

Now, the Drive-By Truckers, there’s a band that knows how to kick a record off—Christ, their new one's good. (With the traditional flat patch two-thirds through, of course.)

I did think about posting this as a reply to a recent blog entry (sorry, forgotten the author) arguing Mad Men’s superiority to The Wire. Unsurprisingly, those words put through the search engine bring up so many posts that I couldn’t find it. Anyway, for me at least, that judgement will have to wait until Matthew Weiner has been given the chance to let his whole story play out. So, apologies if there’s a protocol breach. Anyway, my point (if a quarter-formed idea can be so-called) is wider than that.

There’s another entry around here at the moment, initially about the BBC, and which has a few too many too-long posts by me; to say the least, it’s pessimistic about television’s future.
And that is stunning. Because I think posterity will look back on our era and call it a Golden Age. But ages like that can disappear damn quickly. English verse drama effectively began around 1580: Marlowe, Kyd, Shakespeare, Jonson, the tail end of Beaumont and Fletcher, a few others. By about 1620 it was gone. And with the possible exception of Restoration comedy, that was pretty much it for English theatre.

Everyone’s list is different. Mine has Sopranos, Deadwood, Mad Men, the usual cable suspects. Networks would be represented by the Sorkin-era West Wing and House. There are others, of course. That’s the point. We’re arguing about whether Hamlet is superior to Lear. (If that’s too much for your canonical antennae to bear, then whether American Pastoral is better than Humboldt’s Gift or A Hard Day’s Night better than Blonde on Blonde.)

I think some great films have been made in the same period, but I don’t think any of them match up to Deadwood. Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead and Roth’s Human Stain would probably get my vote as the best novels of the last ten years—but not only do I think The Wire is a greater work of art than either, I think that may be the judgement of posterity.

But is it coming to an end? Just as television has finally worked out how to use the visual storytelling medium to do the things that film can’t, and to do them brilliantly, the means to do it could be disappearing. Something sad about that. Or am I being too pessimistic?

I’ve spent too much time in the past week reading comment boxes below 6Music stories across the Web. Two things have struck me: one a small point about perceptions, the other larger about the BBC’s future.

1) There are supporters of 6 who will suggest ditching Radio 3: after all, aren’t they catered for by Classic FM? This is the mindset you’re more accustomed to seeing from some classical devotees, for whom ‘pop’ is one great amorphous mass, indistinguishable. I’d thought this group was shrinking, at least partly for demographic reasons. But maybe the numbers are simply being added to the other side of the cultural canyon. Can most listeners to pop music no longer tell the difference between the outputs of Radio 3 and Classic FM? (As a side issue, many comments suggest that these people can’t tell the difference between BBC3 and BBC4.)

2) Leave aside for a moment the merits—or otherwise—of 6. The programmes that seem to crop up most often in defences are the likes of Maconie’s Freakzone. Despite the fact that it runs against the grain of my Larkin-influenced view of art, this is about as clear-cut an example of Reithian principles in action as it is possible to imagine in the area of pop—even if Reith himself would have hated every minute of it. But there is no big audience out there for it, even if it is the fanciful notion of avant-gardists everywhere that, y’know, if only people got to hear this stuff, they’d really love it. And radio is, relatively, cheap. The BBC is established on a contradiction of sorts, and one that for the last fifty years they managed to make work. But a poll tax/licence fee that is demanded from everyone coupled with a mandate to provide certain types of programming will, I feel, be the downfall of it soon.

I’d like a BBC. Probably, we all would. So we have to think about what we give it, and what we want from it, a little harder than we are at the moment.