Culture Shock: Arts on TV? Give me ‘Footballers’ Wives’ any time

I used to have a vague addiction to the ITV series Footballers' Wives. Full of tongue-in-cheek excess, the show centred around the fictional club Earls Park FC. One of the best things about the programme was that it never showed any football being played. It's not that I don't like the beautiful game (in its place and in small doses), but, like horse racing, it's next to impossible to fictionalise. The drama is inherent in the unfolding of a match or race, and the facts of the event tend to beat fiction hands down. Knowing that everything you're seeing has been preordained for the purposes of the story arc destroys the point.

Similarly, postmatch analysis seems to work best when it’s less about what happened in the game and more about the characters doing the talking, the dynamics between them. The same can be said of art. Arts programming on TV is stuck, and, in a country where no one in charge – of the country or of putting things on telly – would dream of doing anything less than expressing a total commitment to the arts, we still don’t quite seem to know how to go about it.

One problem is that art breaks boundaries but TV doesn’t seem to want to. All arts programming ends up following one of four formats: the chat show, the interview, the hagiography or the docudrama.

The View, on RTÉ, proved that the chat show/talking heads format doesn't really work. Most guests arrived with prepared statements, so discussion never developed, and it frequently felt like eavesdropping on the kind of dinner party you were glad not to be at. If you want self-serving soundbites of opinion these days, just turn to Twitter. It also fell into the traps of assuming, first, that if viewers like one art form they'll like them all and, second, that the invited guests would be equally expert on all genres.

This type of arts programming, on radio as well as television, also suffers from our particularly Irish inability to be truly critical. Maybe it's because we're from a small country, maybe we feel safer in collegiate mediocrity, but sometimes listening to the reviewers answering the key question – so would you recommend it? – feels like economists parsing the pronouncements of Mario Draghi on interest-rate rises. Why don't they just say, "No. Please don't waste your time"?

I was never very good on The View. I remember on one occasion saying I'd felt a play, Medea, was imbalanced, the casting not quite right. The other guests turned on me. It was amazing, they said. Brilliant. Afterwards, when the cameras had stopped filming, I asked them if they really thought that. "Oh, no, we agree with you. It's just they're all such nice people, and they worked so hard."

More recently, another trope has come into play: the reality show. I quite liked Sky's Portrait Artist of the Year. It seemed to come closest, despite the constraints of time and competition, to getting under the skin of how art is actually made, where it comes from in the mind of the artist.

Sometimes, though, you get a really sorry mash-up. Earlier this year Channel 4 achieved the seemingly impossible and made a truly awful programme with Grayson Perry in it. The House That Grayson Built followed the Turner Prize-winning artist as he designed and oversaw the building of a house for Alain de Botton's Living Architecture project.

The programme's makers evidently had Grand Designs and a smattering of Britain's Got Talent on their minds. Irrelevant jeopardy was injected – would it be finished on time? Would the ceramic tiles break? – and my pet hate, "the journey", reared its ugly head, as a group of women, all called Julie, were invited to cycle to the house and in the process learned more about themselves and, in some instances, cried.

There are higher points. TG4's Imeall is one, and Lyric FM's bursts of Culture File have their moments of glory. But what is RTÉ, and even maybe, one day, TV3, to do? Art is all about the imagination, so it's time to find an imaginative way to present it. Yes, if you find an extraordinary presenter the format takes care of itself, but those people are rare, and it takes a rare culture to let them rise and flourish.

Another thing is to work out what you actually want arts programming to do. Is it for documentary, to review, to communicate what’s on, garner ratings, or just pay lip service to the cultural remit? (Note to broadcasters: it can’t do all of these at once.)

If, however, it is to communicate the energy, brilliance and passion of what’s out there, to take an approach not mired in reverence, yet treat art as a story to be told, perhaps even by breaking the mould, then we could be on to something.

Good art creeps up on you, can take you by surprise, works its magic on the mind, sometimes days after you originally saw it. Imagine an arts programme that could do the same.