Kate Chisholm

Radio 3 needs to stay relevant, and world music is just the ticket

Plus: Searching for Swazi soul; sleeping where Hitler slept; Germaine Greer meets a rare bird

Germaine Greer (Photo: David Levenson/Getty)

When my colleague Charles Moore first began accusing Radio 3 of becoming ‘babyish’, and talking down to us as if we’re too ignorant to understand anything complicated, I had to agree. The constant twittering between items, the gimmicky brainteasers and Classical Top Ten are irritating. Those emails and texts from clever-clogs listeners determined to show off what they know, or have performed themselves, or seen on stage are as annoying and pointless as Christmas round-robin letters. But these are all merely sideshows, not the main performance. The real test for the station is whether our musical palates are still being tested, educated, stretched. What we really need to care about is whether it’s still possible to hear on 3 something so amazing, so unusual, so different that we stop what we’re doing and stand still, thinking, ‘Wow! What was that?’

To argue against the transformation of 3 into a station fit for 2014 is like taking on the mantle of Canute and trying to hold back the tide. We’re no longer in the 1950s. Cormac Rigby and Patricia Hughes are long gone. Their measured diction and restrained delivery would now sound so old-fashioned and a bit slow off the mark. Do we really want to go back to a station that played the odd bit of Schoenberg and Martinu but would have baulked at the range of music we heard on Friday night on World on 3?

The programme (produced by Roger Short) was not just ‘live’ from the Celtic Connections festival in Glasgow, with the expert and engaging Mary Ann Kennedy (herself an award-winning performer of traditional music) as presenter. It also launched a six-month season that will take us on a musical journey to all the countries in the Commonwealth, finishing the tour just in time for the opening of the Games at the end of July.

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