Great Artists in Their Own Words, BBC Four, review The clothes and voices of famous people from the past are always fascinating on archive footage, quite apart from anything they say. Last month BBC Parliament showed the whole coverage of the election results in 1979, and there was Robin Day, in thick-rimmed specs, bow tie and frown, interviewing Lady Falkender (Harold Wilson's confidante) in the studio while smoking a cigar. So what we saw and heard from LS Lowry, Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp or Man Ray in the first episode of Great Artists in Their Own Words (BBC Four), from the period 1907-39, was tremendous. It just wasn't enough. We got less than a minute's speech from Duchamp, the man who scandalised the New York art scene with his Fountain (1917), the celebrated urinal that he had signed "R Mutt." And who should be interviewing him here? Only dear old Joan Bakewell - in her thirties, with a short skirt and Nana Mouskouri hair. Duchamp, aged 81, sucked on a cigar and explained that, when he said art was dead, he meant that "instead of being singularised it would be universalised in anyone's life." He was dead himself before the year was out. To fill us in on the artists" greatness, batteries of talking heads sounded off: Grayson Perry, Hilary Spurling, Marina Warner (complaining about Max Ernst's exploitation of women), even Desmond Morris, author of The Naked Ape and surrealist painter. It began to feel like one of those compilations of the 100 best TV ads. What did the great artists manage to say? From Pablo Picasso we heard exactly no words, from Henri Matisse scarcely more: "Without hard work talent is not enough." It sounded like a variation on Thomas Edison's formula for success.Lowry, who hated speaking on camera, said: "I don't understand it at all... You keep on wondering what it all means." The surrealist painter Leonora Carrington said: "I don't feel that I know anything." René Magritte said: "I believe the world is a mystery, and that mystery cannot be spoken of in words." No doubt if they could have put it in words, they would not have tried so hard with painting. That left the celebrity aspect to explore. "Duchamp took me around and I met everybody," Philadelphia-born Man Ray recalled of Twenties Paris. Fifty years on, he sat in beret, thick-rimmed specs and plaid shirt, puffing a cigar too. Paris must have been fun, his 1972 interviewer said: "It was very tense, very bitter, and there was no humour in it." As for Dalí, who had "sold out," the talking heads said, he was well matched by the cynical Malcolm Muggeridge. Mugg, instead of asking him about art, inquired about maintaining his stiff, sickle-shaped moustaches. But even the secret of his Hungarian wax treatment was edited out. The full 10-minute interview, I discovered afterwards, was available all the time on the BBC iPlayer.