Autumn shake-up in Radios 2 and 3 scheduling

This time round in the autumn shake-up of the schedules it’s Radios 2 and 3 who are on the frontline of change. They have had to face ‘tough decisions’ and to address ‘the financial challenges due to the licence-fee freeze’. Radio 3 has lost most of its ‘live’ Saturday-night transmissions from the Metropolitan Opera in New York, on the grounds that they cost too much to set up. It’s also given the chop to one of my favourite weekend programmes, World Routes, because of the ‘high costs’ of sending its presenter Dr Lucy Duran to far-flung places round the globe in search of unusual music. But this was never travel for the sake of it. Duran is an ethnomusicologist as much as a musician, and she woke us up to what music can sound like in the deserts of the Sahara as well as the frozen wastes of Greenland, making new connections through sound.

You might argue that after 13 years there were not many places left for Duran to visit. But we’ve also lost her programme’s spin-off, the World Routes Academy, which gave young instrumentalists the chance to be taught by masters of traditional music, promoting and preserving what might otherwise be lost. Radio 3’s mission was not just to send Duran out to unearth an unusual sound world, but also to ensure the music she heard and recorded would survive the creeping tentacles of globalised pop. These are the hidden benefits of public-service broadcasting — the willingness to give airtime to programmes that will only ever have a niche audience but that have an impact far greater than their minority status might suggest.

Make no mistake. We only have such programmes because of the licence fee. As a way of funding the BBC’s output, on-screen, on-air and now also on-digital (as the Corporation is so fond of telling us), the TV licence might seem like a relic of the prewar era; appropriate only in an age when taking Ovaltine to bed was the nation’s guilty secret.