‘I’m going to have no space soon,” said David Hockney, 86, to Melvyn Bragg, 83. Space, for artists, tends to mean the place where they show their work. But that wasn’t the sort of space Hockney was referring to. “I’m going to die,” he clarified.
The South Bank Show (Sky Arts) has run out of space, at least as an entity fronted by Bragg. Perhaps it will regenerate with a new cultural pontiff at the helm, but this seems inconceivable: The South Bank Show is Bragg; Bragg is the South Bank Show.
Or was. After 45 years and more than 800 episodes, television’s longest-running arts documentary strand bowed out with a two-part chat with Britain’s best-known and most beloved painter. The later conversation, filmed at the artist’s home in Normandy, was shown first, on Sunday. Monday’s very final episode, made when Hockney was a mere 85, was shot in London, where the artist recalled coming south to study as a young man.
It wasn’t your usual sort of South Bank Show. A straight one-on-one with no cutaways or editorial voiceover, this was two well-matched old men chewing the fat gently, perhaps a little repetitively. “All I need is the hand, the eye and the heart,” said Hockney, about three times.
Perhaps not much new was learned but it was enchanting to hear the artist enthuse one more time about Picasso, or the snow in Yorkshire, or the light in Los Angeles, which before he saw it for himself he knew from the sharp shadows in Laurel and Hardy. “I haven’t done that many paintings of swimming pools,” he volunteered. “Maybe 20?” He might have been Lowry grumbling that he doesn’t just paint stick people.
