The third way

By the time you read this, the new Radio Three schedule will be up and running — more jazz, more words, fewer ‘live’ broadcasts (as opposed to live recordings) and Choral Evensong switched from Wednesdays, where it has been for decades, to Sundays. There was a terrible hoo-ha at the time these changes were announced back in the autumn, from the listening press as well as from the station’s cohort of Friends. ‘A bullet through the heart of Radio Three,’ warned the Daily Telegraph. But where’s the victim? If you look through what’s on offer in the coming week, there’s Janacek’s fabulous, wrenching opera Jenufa, live from New York, two recorded concerts from the Queen Elizabeth Hall in Performance on 3, and some truly old-fashioned ‘word’ programmes that could have come straight out of the Third Programme, including an essay on the elusive poet W.H. Auden, the centenary of whose birth is celebrated this month.

It’s true that there is a danger that with fewer live broadcasts we will eventually end up with none, which would weaken the station’s integrity. I’ll never forget the scene in Ken Russell’s black-and-white film of the last years of Delius’s life when on a summer’s evening somewhere in rural France in 1934 the cantankerous blind composer, his wife and his amanuensis Eric Fenby (as recreated by Max Adrian, Maureen Pryor and Christopher Gable) gather round the wireless to listen to a live performance by Sir Thomas Beecham and the London Philharmonic of Songs of Sunset. It’s almost unbearably moving to watch as Delius, close to death, leans towards the set, hearing his own ethereal composition brought to life. Whether or not it actually happened like that seems immaterial; it’s the idea of such interaction that’s so poignant, the human inflection given to our increasingly technological existence.