To say that Trash TV - which describes an arc from wacky

To say that Trash TV - which describes an arc from wacky breakfast TV shows, via third-rate game shows to the peak of Saturday-night viewing - is the very bedrock of modern television may sound strange, but it is no mere post-modern posture. Trash TV is good because it does not know it is bad. Only for a moment, of course, but then that's the nature of Trash. Trash TV is essential ephemeral, valueless TV without any redeeming features and with only one intention: entertainment. When Marcus Plantin, director of the ITV Network Centre, accused BBC1 of being too commercial only a few days after the demise of The Word was announced, proponents of Trash TV began thinking about the purpose of the medium. Only when composer, conductor and players breathe as one will the phrasing seem imperceptible, will the commas and barlines in the score disappear. Bernstein and the Vienna Philharmonic take 11 minutes 13 seconds over the movement. But while you're listening to them, that's how it goes, and that's how long it takes.n Mahler's Eighth opens the Proms: Friday 8pm Royal Albert Hall, London SW7 (0171-589 8212) and live on BBC2 and Radio 3.

In the first place, the title "Adagietto" bears no relation to the actual tempo markings, Langsam (very slowly) and its equivalent molto adagio. In the second, music does not live by tempo alone, and surely the question we should be asking is not whether so-and-so at nine minutes is closer to Mahler's intentions than so-and- so at nearly 14 minutes, but how the music feels, how it goes. It is his belief that the tradition of performance has, in recent times, grown progressively more portentous: Mahler and his disciples took about eight minutes over the movement, compared to the average of 12 minutes that many leading conductors now take Interesting observation But it isn't that simple. The one-time financier and Mahler enthusiast, Gilbert Kaplan, recently initiated a campaign to rescue the Fifth Symphony's well-beloved Adagietto from its lingering Death in Venice associations.

And if ever a single movement exemplified Mahler's view that "the symphony must be like the world, it must embrace everything", this is it. Patience is all: this music must find its own time and space. The conductor who cannot rejoice in its quixotic changes of tempo, mood, and character, who is half-hearted, even apologetic, about its dramatic contrasts, attempting to square them with more conventional precedents, is not in concord with its inner life.And therein lies the heart of the matter. It's the very apotheosis of the Mahlerian Landler, his one truly affirmative scherzo. The Mahlerian pause is writ large, larger, largest here: there are moments when all nature seems to stop and listen, horns - open and muted - echoing and re-echoing across the mountain passes.

The big Scherzo of his Fifth Symphony was, he predicted, "in for a peck of troubles!": conductors, he believed, would take it too fast, shorten its reach, undermine its spatial effects. And to those who advocate restraint - and to the well-known conductor who continues to insist that "Mahler needs no one to do his crying for him" - I say: an objective view of Mahler is no view at all.Mahler himself foresaw many of these problems. If you have the courage to do exactly as Mahler prescribes, to risk life and limb, bearing down with weight at precisely the point he asks and not before, the effect is devastating. And that's just one isolated instance.It's amazing how many distinguished Mahler interpreters (past and present) ride roughshod over his directives, minimising or even eliminating altogether the effect of his more outlandish musical syntax.