Whatever lay behind Radio 3’s decision four years ago to reduce the number of live concert broadcasts to a mere handful, it cannot have been the recent phenomenal success of ‘live’ relays from the Met in New York to local cinemas.
Whatever lay behind Radio 3’s decision four years ago to reduce the number of live concert broadcasts to a mere handful, it cannot have been the recent phenomenal success of ‘live’ relays from the Met in New York to local cinemas. Even the service of Nine Lessons and Carols from King’s has been a hit in this format. The director of the Met says that 6 million people are expected to see his company in action this year via a cinema hook-up.
In the light of this success, it is unsurprising perhaps that the BBC’s decision has just been reversed, to a chorus of approval from around the professional circuit. Sir Mark Elder’s comment was typical: ‘We are all pleased and excited about the decision. There is nothing like the audience having the chance to experience the excitement of a live performance.’ Radio 3’s Roger Wright went further: ‘Live is the essence of music-making.’
You don’t say. But then what does ‘live’ really mean? It is one thing with a video link, but when can a radio relay be described as being live, when the listener can see nothing and is not in the hall with the performers? It has to be an exercise in virtual reality: but how virtual? It is assumed that the excitement is greater for the listener if it is known that the broadcast is happening right now. It is not so exciting if it happened yesterday; and it certainly isn’t as exciting if it is played from a disc, since discs offer no unscripted surprises. And that is the point: there is excitement when human error or human creativity has not been predicted. Even a relay of an hour ago will not do, since the mistakes on it will no longer be exciting. Mistakes have a thrill life of about two seconds.
The question is how does Radio 3 convince its public that what they are hearing is happening right now? It is significantly easier to do so if the announcer of the concert is there in person. The original decision to move the nightly Performance on 3 slot back to 7 p.m., leading to an increase in the number of prerecorded events, had much to do with the cost of having the announcer present. The moment it was decided that the links could just as well be made by an anchor in Broadcasting House, the liveness of the event was fatally compromised, and the slippage of exactly when the recording was made — from now, to earlier today, to yesterday — was hard to halt. But it was the live announcer who was the extra cost for the BBC; setting up for the recording costs the same either way.
Announcers are slightly tricky customers. With them the live element is very real, especially for the producer. I have watched on countless occasions as the last minutes before the red light goes on are eaten up with chiselling the announcer’s much-annotated script, instead of concentrating on the minutiae of broadcasting the sound itself. Suddenly, everyone present has to become a mini-expert on the topic in hand, since research materials can be hard to come by in concert halls; and at times like this the announcer can become quite demanding. And this potential tension was in addition to the spontaneous on-stage interviews the conductor was often asked to give. For me, these could threaten my concentration during the music that preceded them, as I wondered what I was going to say, and whether I would be too out of breath to say it. When costs were being examined in those pre-crunch days, I suspect the nuisance factor of the announcer seemed like a good saving all round.
Of course, the decision was a bad one, inevitably seeming like a downgrading; and it is one of those little ironies that it was taken at a time when budgets weren’t under any particular pressure, and reversed just as the Corporation is looking to cut costs all round. A cynic would say that perhaps the live announcer didn’t cost that much really; but I am not one of those, even if my first thought on reading that in future 70 per cent of Radio 3’s relays would be live, and that 80 per cent of the live relays would come from the Proms, was a way of telling us that some of the Proms would no longer be broadcast live.
The use of the word ‘live’ is central to the success of those cinema relays; and one senses that Radio 3 would like to have the buzz of that word back again. If this means anything at all it is that the daring of the performers should be felt by the listeners, which surely can happen only when the broadcast is made as realistic as possible: by the noises made by the people who are actually there, alongside the sense that the sound has not been doctored or touched up by someone who has already heard it. And I fear that on-stage interviews with the performers are about to proliferate.
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