Amid the fear and drear of cuts, and yet more cuts, Radio 3 has offered its fans an adrenaline boost by suddenly announcing a huge increase in the number of ‘live’ performances on the station.
Amid the fear and drear of cuts, and yet more cuts, Radio 3 has offered its fans an adrenaline boost by suddenly announcing a huge increase in the number of ‘live’ performances on the station. ‘It’s not about cost,’ says Roger Wright, the controller, ‘it’s about the distinctiveness of the Radio 3 brand.’ By the middle of May, he promises, Performance on 3 will be truly live every weekday evening, and not just a specially recorded concert, broadcast a few nights, or weeks later. Instead of performing to just a couple of thousand in the Barbican, say, or the Usher Hall in Edinburgh, orchestras, wind bands, quartets and soloists will have an audience of a couple of million listeners who’ll be eavesdropping free of charge on some of the best music happenings around the country.
What a brilliant ruse. Intimations of rising costs can be countered by the fact that it costs little more to broadcast live than it does to ‘specially record’. Accusations of metropolitan bias, of not serving the broader public, of being too elitist can be offset by showing that the concerts will be broadcast from venues all over the UK (from Kirkwall to St Ives) and from just-beginning artists as well as the big names. Anyone with a radio set will be able to eavesdrop for free on those occasional moments when the music takes off and black notes upon a page are turned by artistic self-expression into something beyond words, beyond description.
Back in 1946, when the Third Programme was relaunched after the war, its mission was to do something every evening ‘that is culturally satisfying and significant’. By this the BBC’s director-general, Sir William Haley, KCMG, meant ‘live performance’. It’s the core function of the BBC to promote such artistry and make it available to those who can’t afford seats in the concert hall or opera house, or who can’t have access to them. Just four years ago, there were big cutbacks in the amount of ‘live’ music on Radio 3, sacrificed to the demands of new technology and smooth programming. Now it’s back, thanks to the very same technological developments, which have created the fear that the station will be threatened if it loses its distinctiveness as the most democratic, most varied, most cost-effective broadcaster of live music. Hoorah.
Only on The Archers, you might think, would a village pleb swoon at the mere sight of a member of the royal family as she deigned to visit Grey Gables, the country hotel on the periphery of Ambridge. But when Lynda Snell wept with ecstasy as HRH The Duchess of Cornwall gave her a smile and a gracious wave of the hand as her charabanc swept her home to Highgrove, Lynda was not acting as daft as all that. It happens all the time, in real life. There’s something about royalty which turns even the steely-hearted into jelly. It’s been going on for centuries, an atavistic urge to worship, a desire to see something divine in what is essentially flesh and blood. If we didn’t have Camilla and Charles, then there would always be David and Sam. So beware the republicans — who perhaps ensured that not one of the Archer family witnessed the visit to soapland, or bent their knee to the Duchess. She may not have much of a future in Hollywood, but she’s jolly safe in Ambridge — and even in Holyrood.
That kind of reverence, when invested in politicians, explains why presidents such as Mubarak remain in power for so long. But it should never be underestimated how easily, how quickly that willingness to accept subjugation, to give reverence can slip away. Last Thursday night Radio 4 gave us a special programme on the events in Egypt, put together by Magdi Abdelhadi, the BBC’s Arab affairs analyst.Tahrir Square (produced by Tim Mansel) took us through the 18 days from that first demonstration on 25 January to the extraordinary events of Saturday, 12 February when the demonstrators turned from activists into housewives, scrubbing, washing down and cleaning up the square after Mubarak’s resignation.
No one thought at the beginning that enough people would demonstrate, that it was possible to outdo and outwit the police. But that first crowd started with 50 and within 45 minutes had grown to several thousand. Abdelhadi spoke with a political scientist, based in Cairo, who could not himself explain how this had happened. ‘It’s impossible to know why this revolution succeeded when so many have failed,’ he told us. ‘It’s futile to ask, and it doesn’t matter. What matters is that at last the people did decide to take action.’
A young surgeon who was in Tahrir Square throughout the demonstration is elated by what the activists achieved, but still cautious. ‘The revolution was easier,’ he admits, compared with the hectic business of working out what comes next. He wants the burnt-out shell of Mubarak’s NDP party headquarters on the banks of the Nile to be kept as it is, at least for a while, as a reminder to the government that it needs always to respect the will of the people.
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