Who needs drugs when you have Radio 3?

I’m willing to bet it’s only on the BBC’s Radio 3 that you’ll find yourself listening to a programme quite like Words and Music (Sunday evenings). You might want to disagree. Surely, it’s just a few bits of music stuck together with some poems and other readings on a random theme dreamt up by the production team? How easy must that be to pull off? Seventy-five minutes (or sometimes even longer) of dirt-cheap radio, quick to make, very few overheads, involving just a few hours per programme of research (nowadays so easy on Google) and a dead-simple edit job splicing everything together. But name another station anywhere that could make it work week-by-week with quite the same style, panache and sheer brio of the team at Radio 3.

It’s not just the selection of items that matters; although that in itself is mighty impressive, taking us in seconds from Chaucer to Austen, Forster and Jerome K. Jerome via the Blind Boys of Alabama and Percy Whitlock’s ‘Spade and Bucket Polka’. No, what makes it such a pleasure to listen to, such an immediate and effective escape into another world, is that nothing is allowed to get in the way of either the music or the spoken words. There’s no announcer telling you what you are next going to hear, no explanation of why this music is here, that poem there, no justification for it, no intrusive dialogue. It’s completely unadorned. Given to us straight. Just exactly what it says on the label.

You could let yourself get sidetracked into playing the game of what was that? Who’s singing? Who said that? Can you remember what that piece of music is? But really you should just sit yourself down comfortably, shut your eyes and let the programme take you away into another sphere, swept along by the stream of thoughts, ideas and melodies, effortlessly interwoven into a seamless whole.