Musical chairs

It’s such a relief to come back from a trip to America, to switch on the first available radio and fall into Francine Stock talking about Nicholas Ray on The Film Programme. Americans have lost the radio habit. You won’t find sets in any, let alone every, room in the house. No one I know there listens to radio except in the car, where all you can find are music stations devoted to just one type of music, country, Cajun or classical, or the terrifying fire-and-brimstone lectures of the evangelist broadcasters. In the run-up to the presidential election, they’ll be joined by a flurry of far-right ear-bashers, dedicated to rustling up support for the Tea Party among the freeway cruisers. No nightly sequence of live concerts. No programmes like Analysis or In Touch. No chance to skip from a Vivaldi mass to a Venezuelan joropo while tuned to just one station.

But this is no time to be complacent about radio’s survival in the UK. It faded out in America because no one bothered to gild its competitive edge against the superficial attractions of TV. As the BBC worries about where its funding will come from in future years, and what will need to be cut as revenues decline, radio output will need to be protected with cast-iron guarantees. So much could be lost so easily. Radio has always been primarily a speech network, in spite of its commitment to music, yet original drama productions have almost disappeared from the World Service in the past couple of years. On Radio 4 the number of commissioned short stories is about to be reduced as the new autumn schedule arrives on air.

Without the licence fee, BBC Radio could not survive in the way it has done since 1922, when a ten-shilling note granted you the right to listen to the Palm Court Orchestra, the Proms or commentary from Twickenham on the rugby cup final.