It's a well-established principle of domestic life that if you complain too often that something hasn't been done, you'll be invited to do it yourself.
Sir Richard Eyre - who, as a BBC governor, has frequently called for an extension to arts programming - now finds himself fronting Changing Stages: a six-part series about 20th-century theatre. As a tactic for disarming critics, it's rather like inviting the culture secretary to present the new BBC News At Ten.
Changing Stages is a courageous project because, to many viewers, it will look like a pair of dodos huddling together in the scheduling zoo. Theatre and the serious documentary have much in common. Both are cherished by a small, ageing audience but activate the impatience of young commissars who question their ability to survive into the third millennium. Like a barrister defending a terrorist who dabbled in serial killing at weekends, Eyre is making two difficult cases simultaneously.
The point was recently made that - because of the car accident suffered by Robert Hughes, and the age and arthritis of Norman Mailer - BBC2's cultural presenters have been sedentary. Eyre reverses the trend. His walking shots often quicken to a run and he begins one programme galloping a horse along an Atlantic beach. The first arts presenter who might have need of a stunt double.
And Changing Stages successfully overcomes two serious disadvantages. The first is theatre's unfashionability as a subject. In this respect, the series reveals first-night nerves. A theatre audience is captive - social politeness makes even the bored return after the interval. But TV watchers are free spirits. Lose a viewer in the first part of a documentary sextet and they'll be doing something else for the next five Sundays. Understanding this - and that the series is a co-production aimed at even twitchier-fingered Americans - Eyre and director Roger Parsons try, as Greek theatre did, to settle the audience down with a jaunt before the serious themes.
Though Shakespeare is the subject of the first programme, the first speakers aren't academics or biographers, but Ian McKellen and Judi Dench, America-friendly actors. The first director to be heard is Baz Luhrmann, whose cinematic Romeo and Juliet solved the problem which torments this opening episode - how to make Shakespeare sexy for a modern audience. Apart from Luhrmann's bravura tangent, the other extract featured in the opening sequence is from Shakespeare in Love.
There are fears at this point that the dollar input has forced the series to present Shakespeare as a Hollywood screenwriter rather than a Stratford actor-manager. But Eyre's intelligence and insight as a director are gradually allowed centre screen. The programme becomes an exercise in genuine popular scholarship, explaining how production styles of Shakespeare in Britain during the last century were first influenced by, and then fought against, codes of social behaviour. Newsreel of Eden quoting Shakespeare during Suez and John Patten being applauded by a Tory conference for promising that every child will learn the Bard illustrates the fight over the national playwright's meaning.
Changing Stages also faces the problem that, while painting and architecture perfectly suit the arts documentary - eye and camera see buildings and pictures in much the same way - the camera makes theatre look phoney. The size of voice and gesture required to catch the eyes and ears of an audience in tip-up seats is too big for people sitting on sofas looking at glass.
The series begins by making this point about the perishability of theatrical images with a televisual image which will still look good in 20 years. Winter whiteness fills the screen as Eyre, Russian-hatted in a frozen field, tells the legend that Michelangelo's greatest work was a snow sculpture for the Medicis. All theatre is a statue built from a blizzard, beauty of a few hours. The BBC's previous theatrical documentary epic - Ronald Harwood's All The World's A Stage - commissioned performances of key pieces, but Eyre's illustrations come from movie versions of Shakespeare, Miller and O'Neill.
Relying on second-hand pictures of its subject, the series is sometimes over-strenuous in its original images. The fact that Laurence Olivier lived in Brighton prompts an elaborate comparison between his performance style and the resort. But the historical anecdotes are well-chosen - Lilian Baylis cooking bacon in her stage box during performances - and Eyre's directorial connections bring in almost every famous name ever seen on a theatre poster: Gielgud, Miller, Bennett, Hall, Brook, Nunn.
Compressing a century's theatre into only slightly more time than a single performance of Hamlet takes to stage inevitably brings the curtain down in front of the enthusiasms of some viewers. Impressive as the third programme is on O'Neill, Miller, Williams and the mid-century Broadway musical, you feel the lack of Mamet and Sondheim.
Whether or not all theatre is snow sculpture, a lot of discussion about it can be slush. Richard Eyre, though, is a man who loves theatre but is never a luvvie; in the camp without being camp. Making the case for theatre and the arts documentary series, he gets both his notorious clients off.
Changing Stages is on BBC2, tomorrow at 7.30 p.m.
Sir Richard Eyre will give a lecture in association with The Irish Times on 20thcentury British drama on November 28th. Details to be confirmed.