The Terminal Decline of Radio 3, by Jon Elsby

In the far off days when I was a boy, the Third Programme (as Radio 3 was then called) formed a vital part of my cultural education – primarily in music, but also in literature. I remember hearing actors of the calibre of Ralph Richardson, Trevor Howard, David Buck, Sybil Thorndike, Athene Seyler, Janet Suzman, and Peggy Ashcroft in plays such as Strindberg’s The Father and Miss Julie, Ibsen’s When We Dead Awaken, Kesselring’s Arsenic and Old Lace, and Chekhov’s The Seagull. My introduction to the music of Janáček (Taras Bulba), the songs of Peter Warlock (The Curlew), the operas of Mozart, Verdi, and Wagner, Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde in the classic Decca recording conducted by Bruno Walter with Kathleen Ferrier and Julius Patzak as the soloists, and much else besides, came through the Third Programme.

During the summer, on medium wave, the Third Programme broadcast the Test Match cricket commentaries, which were then in the hands of such masters of language as John Arlott and Brian Johnston. Those commentaries, too, were an education – in the use of the spoken word, certainly, but also in the moral value of good sportsmanship and, more generally, good manners. As a lover of cricket as well as music, I didn’t begrudge the time devoted to the test match commentaries. It would have been churlish to do so.

I have only good memories of the Third Programme in those days. Its presenters were cultured and civilized; they spoke the English language perfectly, of course – that was taken for granted – but also took the trouble to pronounce foreign words and names correctly. They obtruded themselves on the listener’s notice as little as possible, confining themselves to introducing each new piece with a few well-chosen words about the composer or the circumstances of its composition. And then, they let the music speak for itself. They never indulged in autobiography: they were too modest, they had too keen a sense of propriety, too much self-restraint, and too little ego for that. Elitist? Yes, they were elitist; but there was never any hint of condescension or of speaking de haut en bas in their manner. We humans are inescapably hierarchical beings. All our societies, our institutions and organizations great and small, are hierarchical, and necessarily so. The only result of abolishing one elite, or one hierarchy, will be to create another. And, personally, I prefer an elite that is well educated, mannerly, courteous, self-effacing, has a clear sense of noblesse oblige, and can tell the difference between right and wrong, virtue and vice. And I prefer a hierarchy in which such people rise to the top.

The decline of Radio 3 – and indeed of the BBC in general – has been noticed and commented upon by journalists, usually of a conservative persuasion. But few of them are old enough to know what the Third Programme was like, or to understand the nostalgia that people of my generation (I am sixty-nine) feel for it. Nor do they understand how long the BBC has been in a process of gradual decline, which, now that the corporation has been handed over lock, stock, and barrel, to a collection of yobs, spivs, bean counters and barrow-boys, is accelerating alarmingly.

Presenters who emulate the informal, chatty style of popular disc-jockeys are not what one expects – or wants – to find on Radio 3. Nor does one want to hear the exchange of inanities that passes for an interview these days – vacuous questions eliciting equally vacuous answers. In a recent article in the Spectator, Damian Thompson mourned the rescheduling of Record Review, with its ‘‘Building A Library’’ feature in which a respected music critic or academic offered ‘‘a magisterial evaluation of rival recordings of a particular work’’. For me, however, ‘‘Building A Library’’ – something I had listened to regularly for decades and always looked forward to – was ruined long ago, when someone decided to change the format from a monologue by a guest reviewer, interspersed with excerpts from the recordings under review, into a conversation between the presenter, Andrew McGregor, and the reviewer. The result was predictable: no critical analysis, twice as much talk, and half as much music, all underscored by McGregor’s excitable manner and breathless verbosity.

The hyperbolic vocabulary adopted by Radio 3 presenters is also annoying. When everything is said to be ‘‘fantastic’’ or ‘‘amazing’’ or ‘‘brilliant,’’ those words become unusable by anyone who thinks about what s/he is saying. It is neither necessary nor desirable for the educated to adopt the vulgar habit of always talking in superlatives. Crudity of expression is a sign of crudity of thought.

In the days when Radio 3 was the Third Programme, I could turn on the radio at any time and expect to hear something worth listening to. Now, if I turn the radio on, and it’s tuned to Radio 3, I may hear world music, modern jazz, progressive rock, some totally unlistenable avant-garde product of IRCAM,¹ an obscure piece by a deservedly forgotten mediocrity, or an idiotically babbling disc-jockey. But what I probably will not hear is any music I care to listen to. As my musical tastes range from Monteverdi to Britten, taking in most of the great music composed in between, that is quite an indictment.

Radio 3 is fast becoming a dumping ground for anything that doesn’t obviously belong somewhere else. And even for a few things that do obviously belong somewhere else – e.g. Friday Night is Music Night, formerly broadcast on Radio 2. The result is that my radio, which, for most of my life, has been permanently tuned to the Third Programme / Radio 3, is now mostly disused. I listen increasingly to music on CDs, where I can avoid the endless waffle from moronic DJs, and focus on the music itself – the way I used to when Radio 3 was the Third Programme and it was run by grown-ups.

According to its first Director-General, Lord Reith, the BBC’s mission was ‘‘to inform, educate, and entertain’’. The order in which those priorities were listed was not accidental. But is there a single BBC executive today who truly believes in those Reithian values and tries to promote them? Or are they all just focused on the viewing / listening statistics, the bottom line on the accounts sheet, justifying their obscene salaries, and keeping up with the latest trends?

Reith’s Wikipedia entry states that “Reith, an intensely moralistic executive, was in full charge. His goal was to broadcast, ‘All that is best in every department of human knowledge, endeavour and achievement. … The preservation of a high moral tone is obviously of paramount importance’.” But his modern successors appear to have rejected Reith’s values entirely. They have turned the BBC into a bastion of liberalism which, effectively, operates as the media arm of the LGBTQ+ and BAME rights movements. In line with their impeccably egalitarian liberal principles, Radio 3’s elitism was in their cross hairs from the start. They have steadily eroded it until no more than a vestige of its original intellectual excellence and its steadfast commitment to the preservation and transmission of cultural knowledge remains. All that people like me can do for Radio 3 is write its obituary and mourn its passing.

Needless to say, if this article were published, it would be dismissed as a diatribe by a ‘grumpy old man’ who needs to ‘get with the programme’: a thoughtless, self-serving response which saves the respondent the trouble of actually attending to anything that has been said and seriously considering whether or not it is objectively warranted. I return to the point I made at the start of this article. The Third Programme was an important part of my cultural education. In a sense, the Third Programme and books made up for the university education I never had. Does anyone believe that Radio 3, as it is today, could fulfil the same function?

¹ IRCAM = Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique / Musique: a Paris-based institution created by Pierre Boulez with the aim of promoting his own works and those of other contemporary avant-garde composers. The last word on the products of IRCAM was pronounced by the late Roger Scruton, who, in his Music As An Art (2018), wrote that ‘The test of a work of music is how it sounds, not how it is theorized.’ Exactly.

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Jon Elsby is a specialist in opera, on which subject he has written a wide-ranging survey of operatic tenors, Heroes and Lovers, published by CentreHouse Press in paperback in 2019, and now available on most ebook platforms.