BBC Music Live 24 occurred over the last bank holiday weekend; 24 hours of live musical performances nationwide, starting with the Young Musician of the Year finals, marked at its halfway point with a successful attempt at breaking the world record for the largest number of musicians performing at any one time and finishing with a nationwide version of Lou Reed's pretty, but somehow short of excellent song, Perfect Day. The idea behind this event was good: live music is often restricted only to specialist radio stations, the occasional television broadcast and possibly Jools Holland, even though his somewhat pallid demeanour is reminiscent of an undertaker's assistant and some of his guests, long-since dead clients.

But what we saw on the whole was hardly representative of the wealth of this nation's musical talent, unless, of course, you wish only to look through the eyes of a pre-pubescent boy-band groupie, whose love and understanding of music seems based around a hormonal attraction to manufactured and unmusical talent.

What of serious art music? Where did it go, or was I too busy watching the cricket on the other side? Granted, those of us who have a passion for something other than pop, folk or jazz were placated with a sliced-up version of Figaro, a glitzy performance of operatic arias and about ten minutes' worth of Carl Orff's Carmina Burana.

Figaro was expertly handled, with remarkable performances from both singers and orchestra alike. However, it appears that the BBC's agenda, to discuss the relevance of opera in today's society, took on a slightly more sinister role. Poor Simon Callow floundered against a tide of criticism from a rather unkempt and evidently uneducated Irishman. I never quite managed to get his name, but his 'not-for-the-people' bias and unintelligence was reminiscent of the archetypal playground bully. One would expect the producer of this show to be at least sympathetic to the cause of art music but alas, this was not to be the case. Rude interruptions from our Irish friend were the name of the game and little was done to redress the balance.

Sung outside Salisbury Cathedral, Carmina Burana had an accompanying and a lighting show that also included white-clad figures who descended the west face whilst carrying red torches. I presume that they were a part of the show, but then again the cathedral is getting old and perhaps there is a technical reason why the Building Inspection department from Salisbury City Council need to look for cracks at night. The performance wasn't up to much, but at least the abseiling gargoyles provided a talking-point whilst we waited for the BBC to get back to what must have been their primary agenda, an almost excessively sycophantic cow-towing to the country's youth culture - after all, they are the license-payers of the future.

So, we had a weekend when, overall, serious music-making was misleadingly represented and pop music, elevated to new heights that would dwarf Salisbury Cathedral, its abseilers and Carl Orff's ego. We have to ask ourselves if all the hype over a weekend of live music was justified. Were the BBC patronising its licence-paying audience by telling us what we should be listening to and presenting this in a mediocre package of zany presenters trying above all to minimise the many gruelling hours of work that musicians have to subject themselves to just to play a single bar properly? What a gas music making must be; forget the actual skills and dedication since, with a lack of talent and a bit of luck, you can become transported to superstardom by a few fat men carrying even fatter cigars.

Rather than celebrating this country's amazingly varied musical talent, let us instead subject ourselves to mediocrity in a worthless series of events that are symptomatic of the same dumbing-down that the Millennium Dome represents. Dear BBC, serious art music is dying in favour of badly-produced and inexpertly-played rubbish that cocks a snoot at many of your viewers' intelligence. Perhaps we should have the antithesis of your Music Live 24 signature tune and call it It's a perfectly awful day. For me it was.

What about the other channel, do things look rosier? Well things seem to be just as bleak, as we saw in the also highly publicised The Brit Classical Awards. They had one feature in common with the BBC, the almost sycophantic fawning over young musicians, in particular darling little Charlotte Church, a would-be singer. Now she might get your granny crying into her hanky since looks are perfect and she seems to be a genuinely nice kid, but as any self-respecting musician will tell you, she needs to learn to sing. Even less desirable was the stamping, pouting Vanessa Mae, who, along with myriad others, went through what Private Eye rightly described as 'ghastly kiddie-kitsch routines' (Eye 1003/13). How does the choice for the Young British Artist category feature Church or the Best Female Artist, Church (again) or for that matter, Lesley Garrett, when the country's conservatories and opera houses are filled with more talented (though evidently less-marketable) artists? Is it not an insult to the integrity of thousands of hard-working musicians that all the Best Ensemble category could come up with was Paul McCartney and the film scores for Braveheart or the most recent Star Wars?

For me, Vanessa Mae, who would be better placed in a walk-on part in S Club 7, provided the worse part of the evening's entertainment when she scraped her way through a thoroughly awful rendition of the storm from Vivaldi's The Four Seasons. If this wasn't bad enough, went on to murder Tartini's The Devil's Trill, with so many ornaments omitted that it might have faired better under the title The Devils. At least then, we would have an idea what to expect. And things got worse. 'Up-and-coming' diva, Filippa Giordano's caterwauling must have been the comedy routine, at least going by the visible mirth shown on the faces of some of the English Chamber Orchestra.

Unsurprisingly, shortlists for this event were drawn up by a few record producers, which were later ratified by The Academy, an anonymous bunch of lackeys who were chosen for their so-called musical skills by err… the same record producers who provided the shortlist. So, it seems that rather than celebrating the best that classical artists have to offer, we were drawn into a sinister attempt at promoting a few mediocre artists who needed a little more publicity. As one Radio 3 commentator put it, 'If this is the cream of British talent, I'd rather have skimmed milk.'

John Woodford