Soon after the launch of Classic FM in 1992, the then controller of Radio 3, Nicholas Kenyon, asserted that his high-minded station was not in any competition with its commercial rival and certainly not lurching into ‘some ghastly descent into populism’, even as he hired Classic FM’s presenters and fiddled with the programming to create ‘access points’ for novice listeners.
Classical music once had a higher calling than to be this subdued
That argument is now over, the pretence dropped. The current controller of Radio 3, Sam Jackson – appointed last year – was previously the actual boss of Classic FM, as well as Smooth and Gold. Earlier this year, he radically rejigged Radio 3’s schedules, shifting Record Review, introducing Jools Holland, bringing over Friday Night is Music Night from Radio 2 and so forth, upsetting many listeners.
But the results are in. Radio 3’s audience is up 11.2 per cent to 2.04 million, while Classic FM’s is down to 4.42 million – still more than double Radio 3’s, but a fall of 19.5 per cent from its high point of 5.48 million in 2020. And Jackson has just created an offshoot channel, Radio 3 Unwind, launched on 4 November. For now, it’s effectively a streaming service available through BBC Sounds and smart speakers, but he hopes it will soon become a digital channel in its own right.
Unwind is an artful name. It implies that the listener is already wound up, tense and stressed, in need, above all, of calming down. Classical music here is frankly conceived of as a tranquilliser, a paregoric, a soporific, a narcotic, even an outright anaesthetic.
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