I’m just spending my lunchtime flicking through FT Creative Business (you need a subscription to read it!), and there are a few thoughtful articles.
* An interview with Radio 3 controller Roger Wright. Sadly this is a bit on the defensive since the usual mentions of not enough classical music on the station and too much world and jazz are made. Can’t we get over this? And the “friends” of Radio 3 get another mention. There’s loads of classical music on the station – they really shouldn’t be so restrictive in their outlook on serious music.
[NB The Radio 3 website’s been given a new look in time for the Proms]
There’s also a large piece on Channel 4’s forthcoming Hall of Fame – another big Endemol production with requisite premium rate voting, E4 spinoff, CD, book, DVD and kitchen sink. The author (Carlos Grande) refers to mentions C4’s remit in the 2003 Communications Act:
3) The public service remit for Channel 4 is the provision of a broad range of high quality and diverse programming which, in particular-
(a) demonstrates innovation, experiment and creativity in the form and content of programmes;
(b) appeals to the tastes and interests of a culturally diverse society;
(c) makes a significant contribution to meeting the need for the licensed public service channels to include programmes of an educational nature and other programmes of educative value; and
(d) exhibits a distinctive character.
Is this really Channel 4 at the moment? It’s certainly distinctive, although not necessarily in a good way. The first series of Big Brother could be argued to have been innovative and experimental. By series 5 it’s not. Culturally diverse? An over-reliance on Friends morning, tea-time and night is not exactly multi-cultural is it? And Hollyoaks isn’t set in, say, Bradford is it? I suspect that C4 will be able to produce figures to show that these programmes appeal to a wide culturally diverse audience. Is that enough? How about educational? We’ll exclude schools programming as that’s catered for elsewhere in the bill. There’s a good degree of history programming, if a tad populist sometimes (is there anything else about the Nazis we don’t yet know?). But let’s mention some of the highlights of C4’s recent science, as listed by their Head of Science and Education, Simon Andreae in last week’s Broadcast:
The Autopsy, The Man Who Ate His Lover, The Boy Who Gave Birth To His Twin, Human Face Transplant, The Truth About Killing, Human Mutants, Fat Girls and Feeders, Jump London, Body Talk, Sars: Killer Bug, My Foetus, Rogue Gynaecologists and Dying To Be Apart.
I didn’t leave any programmes out of this list to make my point incidentally, a list which was part of a paean to a producer at C4 called Nick Curwin.
I think that list really says it all doesn’t it? It’ll nearly all count as science hours.
Odds and Ends
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3 responses to “Odds and Ends”
As a co-founder of Friends of Radio 3, may I make a few comments?
1. For the FT article you mention we weren’t contacted, so the Controller of R3 presented his side of the story while ours was distorted. This is what often happens.
2. You say there’s loads of classical music on R3 already, but the amount of non classical music has been gradually increased and the Controller won’t say how much more he’s going to introduce – so we’re suspicious. The BBC’s ‘popular’ music stations have just doubled to four with the two new digital stations.
3. You say we are ‘restrictive’. Do you know how wide a chronological and geographical span so-called classical music has? R3 is the only station in the country that covers serious classical music and it has to do it properly – because that’s its business – with all eras, all countries, all genres adequately covered.
4. As far as world music is concerned, if all the pop, rock, hiphop, rap, reggae &c was replaced by serious coverage of Indian, Chinese, Japanese classical music we wouldn’t complain.
5. We see R3 as an arts station (as it always has been), not just a music station: we want more (World) class(ic) drama and poetry of the kind that R4 doesn’t ever broadcast; talks about serious subjects that don’t use presenters to help us over the difficult bits; no trivial chat, trails, prize quizzes or ‘interactivity’. The entire weekly amount of speech/arts programming is now less than that of ‘Late Junction’ alone.
6. To reduce this to “they want more classical music” is inaccurate.
I’m not necessarily surprised that you weren’t contacted by the writer of the FT article – this was an interview with the station’s controller. But then I’m not surprised, either, that your organisation got a mention. It seems that most articles in the broadsheet press mention you, and given that the starting point for any journalist about to conduct an interview is likely to be a trawl of recent articles that have been published, the whole thing spirals in on itself to an extent. I’ll concede that your organisation has excellent PR skills to keep your campaign front of mind.
I suppose that the quantity of classical music or otherwise on the station is fundamental to what the station is. But should it evolve? And to what extent? There’s unquestionably a demand for world music. This weekend is the WOMAD festival, something that’s gone from strength to strength. And obviously Radio 3 has started its own World Music Awards. Where should this music go if not Radio 3? I certainly have problems with Radio 2 moving seemingly ever younger, at the same time as the population ages (I think there’s a real risk that an older audience that likes popular music is going to be disenfranchised by BBC Radio, but that’s another story), but Radios 1 and 2 are populist stations aiming at a mass market.
I only use the word restrictive in the sense that we’re talking about serious music. And the majority of Radio 3’s music is restrictive in the sense that it’s Western European in origin. It certainly serves this music exceptionally well, and there’s probably not a similar service on the planet that does so. But why shouldn’t there be room for other music? There simply isn’t outlet available for much of it. And I don’t believe that Late Junction panders to just popular categories of music. It introduced me, for example, to the music of Tan Dan, who’s forthcoming Prom I’m very much looking forward to. And only this week we had recorded peformances by the BBC Singers from the Spitalfields Festival.
It would worry me if the BBC were to have to put forward percentages, say, of their output that fell into each category of music.
Maybe reducing the entire aims of Friends of Radio 3 to simply wanting more classical music is simplistic and wrong. However, it does seem to be a stated aim of the Friends, that Radio 3 should offer less time to non-classical works during the weekends and evenings. I’m not quite certain when this music should be played. During the working week? Overnights? Breakfast? The bottom line remains that invariably when Friends of Radio 3 are mentioned, it’s usually alongside attacks on controllers giving over too much time to non-classical music. You don’t hear attacks on diminishing quantities of drama, lack of serious talks.
Late Junction regularly follows on from either live or recorded full performances of classical works earlier in the evening, and serious speech programmes. World Routes is in the middle of Saturday afternoons after a full morning and lunchtime, again of classical works. Only Sunday evening is probably thoroughly deprived of classical music.
I think that there probably is a fair point to made in that much world music played is contemporary rather than historic. But if some of it is popular music from around the world then is that so bad? There’s still no other outlet for it. I think that it’s fair to say that the majority of music is taken from recently released CDs and in the world music category that probably means more recent works as well as recordings. This is much less the case with new classical recordings. We’ve also been brought up with Western classical music which means even nearly everybody can recognise a few bars of Beethoven or Mozart. Broadly speaking we’re much more ignorant of works from beyond this sphere, and that makes it lot harder to explore much beyond contemporary from those places and cultures.
I too hanker after serious speech, although I believe that Radio 4 offers plenty; but we should never stop striving for making it better. And Radio 3 is the only outlet for full length drama we have left, aside from an occasional 90 minute play on Radio 4.
Are trails annoying? Often, yes, although the majority of people listen to much less of a station’s output than stalwarts. Quizzes can be annoying, but some enjoy them. Spurious interactivity is a bugbear of mine too, and serves very little purpose in most cases aside from enriching various telecoms companies.
As an aside I see that you also want to reduce the quantity of jazz on Saturday afternoons on Radio 3. Although I’m not an especially devoted jazz fan, I do appreciate that those who are have very limited quantities of this music available to them. Late night on a Friday, and two and a half hours on a Saturday afternoon on Radio 3, and a couple more hours on Radio 2 on Mondays. Jazz fans really are hard done by.
But I don’t think that any controller is ever going to concede to offering some kind of promise of performance (as happens in commercial radio) spelling out exact proportions of the station’s constituent parts. You have a vocal campaign and you’re entitled to it. But I personally believe that the additions of people like Andy Kershaw, and shows like Late Junction, have made the station more accessible, and that’s not the same as meaning that it’s being degraded in some manner.
In my day job I work for a commercial radio station and analyse listener figures. I must admit that I’m very curious about Radio 3’s audience figures at various times of the day and the makeup of that audience. I might well try to follow this up and see track some of the changes over time.
Adam
It’s strange the impression people get from reading press reports. PR skills? Hmmm. One press circular in over a year. After some early coverage, all the broadsheets know about us and nowadays they contact us (or not), rather than the other way around. What they do with the information depends very much on where their sympathies lie.
I would just say that if the press are going to mention us they should either ask us about our views or get them right in the first place. Reproducing them as represented by the opposition is hardly fair.
Historically, of course, Radio 3 was a station for the arts and (almost exclusively) classical music. As well as classic drama there were discoveries like Beckett, Stoppard, Pinter. Fifteen years ago, under Drummond, there was 1 hr 15 mins weekly of jazz (R2 was the jazz station – and still attracts the biggest audiences) and maybe a couple of hours of ‘ethnomusicology’ – meaning traditional music, mainly folk-style. Then Kenyon came, upped the jazz to about five hours and chucked out the world. And Roger Wright has introduced over 12 extra hours of varied non-classical (Broadway, light orchestral, film music, cabaret as well as world), almost all in the evenings and weekends: when are classical listeners supposed to listen if they’re at work during the day? The majority of *our* programmes aren’t even available On Demand either – while ALL the non classical ones are.
You speak of evolution (so does R3 management!). But so much of the material, spoken arts and music is (unique to R3) of the past. If the only way to “evolve” is to just cut down on historical works/cultural heritage to make room for even more contemporary (often ephemeral) music, that doesn’t seem like a good deal to us. R3 has different ways to evolve. It’s the biggest commissioner of new music in the world. It commissions new writing. It sponsors new young concert and chamber artists. This is how it’s ‘contemporary’.
You say that classical music is restrictive because based on Western musical traditions, and the next moment you’re speaking of Tan Dun. The music has evolved. He’s considered firmly within the ‘classical’ camp, along with people like Toru Takemitsu. They were already being played on R3 before Late Junction came along.
We’ve discussed Late Junction many times and reckon it’s an idea that could work if it didn’t play pop (wide sense of the word) and World beat. And there’s no reason why it should be on four nights a week. Classical listeners don’t *expect* to listen to the classical concert every night – maybe only two or three times a week. We know there are people who listen to Late Junction on R3 and record John Peel on R1. Seems like an embarrassment of riches.
Oh, dear – nothing to do with our PR skills, but while I was writing this a new article appeared in the Sunday Times Radio Waves column: a writer on jazz and world saying just what we’re saying – that the scheduling is wrong and that a lot of the non classical music is just not of high quality.