Bbc

It’s just not what you expect to hear on Radio 3 but I happened upon Music Matters on Saturday morning and after playing us a clip from the opening chorus of St Matthew Passion Tom Service pronounced, ‘Bach is a tasteless and chaotic composer.’ I felt as if my ears had been syringed. Service was actually repeating what one of his guests, the Bach scholar John Butt, had just asserted, as if to verify his intention. Was he really saying that the composer formerly thought of as the epitome of balanced reflection and ‘motivic organisation’ would have sounded ‘incompetent’ to his audiences in 1727? Butt insisted, on the Passion, ‘It’s

There’s been a lot of fanfare and trailers about BBC Radio’s new ‘online first’ facility. We can now get hold of programmes and listen to them before they go out on air, or download the series and listen to the whole lot in one go. Nothing so strange about that, given the powers of digital, its accessibility and flexibility. But the Radio 4 website is also offering new online-only content, which will never be broadcast in the traditional way. Best Queue is a drama series told in very short (just over four minutes) episodes. Angie and her family are waiting in a massively long queue that promises a large cash

Girl is back for half-term so I’ve been able to watch nothing but crap on TV this week. Some of you will say, ‘Oh come on! You pay the bills, so you get to control the remote.’ But that’s not how things work when you’ve got a teenage girl at home. Especially not one whose ankle you have been responsible for breaking. So crap, I’m afraid, is what I’m going to have to review. Not, it must be said, that the crap has all been crap. House of DVF (E! Online), for example. I’ve mentioned it before and the reason I’m mentioning it again is the matchless insights it offers

The opening caption for The Last Kingdom (BBC2, Thursday) read ‘Kingdom of Northumbria, North of England, 866 AD’. In fact, though, an equally accurate piece of scene-setting might have been ‘Britain, Saturday teatime, the 1970s’. The series, based on the novels by Bernard Cornwell, has been described in advance as the BBC’s answer to Game of Thrones — and, as various thesps in furs and long beards began to attack each other with swords, it wasn’t hard to see why. Yet, apart perhaps from the level of the violence, the programme’s real roots seem to belong to less sophisticated (and less expensive) shows than that: the kind set firmly in

Imagine what Brennig Davies must have felt like just before 11 o’clock last Tuesday evening. The 15-year-old was about to hear Ian McKellen reading his prizewinning short story nationwide on Radio 1. The voice of Gandalf broadcasting words that have emerged from your own head must have been a spooky moment for Davies, whose story ‘Skinning’ had just won the BBC’s Young Writers’ Award (organised with the Book Trust). This new venture (attached to the BBC National Short Story Award, which was also announced last week, the winner being Jonathan Buckley) in some way makes up for the fact that there is now virtually no programming for children on the

Close to the Edge (BBC4, Tuesday) feels very much like an idea conceived during a particularly good night in the BBC bar. Why not take the ‘scripted reality’ methods of such youth hits as The Only Way Is Essex and apply them to a group of over-65s living in Bournemouth? So it is that the chosen oldies are given one main characteristic each, and required to act out events from their own lives — events that might or might not have happened if the cameras weren’t there. Or as Tuesday’s opening caption rather optimistically put it, ‘Some of the scenes have been constructed purely for your enjoyment.’ Which scenes these

I really hadn’t meant to write a postscript to last week’s column on my dark Supertramp past. But then along came a TV programme which reminded me: I WAS cool once. It happened after Oxford when I became, almost simultaneously, both an acid-house freak and an indie kid. And BBC4’s three-part special — Music For Misfits: The Story of Indie (Friday) — captured quite brilliantly what it was like to live in that golden era of floppy fringes, black Levis, obscure music, psychotropic substances and DM boots. Watching it, I knew just how it must have been for combat veterans watching The World at War in 1973. Same distance in