Radio
Classics and celebs
Michael Vestey
Aa collector and connoisseur of unin- tentional humour I am thrilled with my lat- est discovery. Classic FM had the brilliant idea of opening its new series Across the Threshold with David Mellor (Sunday) with the Wimbledon footballer Vinnie Jones. Although sensing what the Americans call collectibles, even I could not have foreseen the rich seam to be mined as this two-hour programme progressed.
The format is that Mellor invites guests into his study to introduce them to his love of classical music and, nobly, to educate them to enjoy it. I don't know if Mellor or the producer Will Sussman thought of Jones as the inaugural guest but it was sheer bliss. Not being interested in football I knew little about Jones except that he has a reputation as being one of the sport's great bone-crushers, or, as Mellor put it more delicately, 'football's hard-man'.
Of course, Mellor should know. Football and classical music are his greatest pas- sions, apart from politics, and when he's broadcasting on these subjects, he's proba- bly the most natural broadcaster I've ever heard. There must be moments when he has a script of some sort, but he expresses his enthusiasms with a fluency that many full-time broadcasters lack. I think he has an almost Irish gift of the gab. And this is a gift because I know some first-rate broad- casters who are lost without a script to read, or at least to point them in the right direction.
Mellor asked Jones to name any classical music he liked. 'If you asked me to name two pieces of classical music, I would strug- gle, yeah,' he replied. But he had been `First the good news — your brain-scan was negative.' moved at a funeral when someone sang a song called Ave Maria. His football oppo- nents will be relieved to hear that he burst into tears as he heard Schubert sung for the first time. On the whole, Jones was more benevolent in front of this referee, Mellor, than he usually is on the field and he found himself deferring to the ref quite a lot. Sussman was no doubt present in Mellor's study as a linesman but sensibly did not wave his flag too much.
His verdict on one piece by Cesar Frank was, 'Listening to that, it's a bit like goin' to confession, all the bad stuffs comin' aht of yer ...' Or, `When your dahn, it'll get yer aht of it or put the rope round yer neck.' I thought this was a rather perceptive remark. After the first movement of Rodri- go's guitar Concerto d'Aranjuez Mellor asked Jones if he could imagine himself lis- tening to that. 'Yeah, I found myself tap- ping away to it.' However, there was a sticky moment when Mellor played Julian Bream's rendition of the Suite Espagnola by Albeniz: 'It's a wind-up, init? Is it a wind- up? The nearest thing that would get to my car is probably the front wheel.'
`Really?' says Mellor nervously. 'That's not for you?' That is 'ard,' replies Jones. So that was Albeniz brought down outside the penalty area and stretchered off the field but no red card from Mellor. Play on, he waved. Bizet's duet from The Pearl Fish- ers was 'very nice, it's classy', but there was a bit of a body-check over the meaning of it, you don't know what they're on abaht'. Mellor decided it was time 'he met up with Beethoven'. So, with the rousing finale of the 7th Symphony, Mellor asked, Did that impact on you?"Well, that was Wimbledon 7-Manchester United nil . I think towards the end Jones's thoughts were turning to his toecaps.
I must say Classic FM does this kind of programme very well. In fact, celebrity guests talking about music seem to domi- nate its schedules now. It is truly good music for those who don't know much about it and in an undemanding form. But there's no need for Radio Three to slip down this route, which it has already start- ed to do. Of course, it has a long way to go before it can invite close comparisons but what bothers me is that the BBC feels the need to compete at all. It doesn't face the commercial pressures to do so. I think there is a finite audience for Radio Three, people who are knowledgeable about music, experts of one sort or another, and the BBC should accept this. They're often sneered at for being an elite but they're not. They're uncomfortable about being talked down to, that's all, and they expect to listen on equal terms.
It might even be possible that Classic FM is doing Radio Three a favour, that listen- ers might tire of the advertisements and the chattiness and guests like Vinnie Jones, and feel more adventurous in giving Radio Three a try. The problem, I fear, lies in the psyche of the man at the top, John Birt. If I were a psychiatrist, I would say that Birt, despite having risen to the upper reaches of the Establishment to become the BBC's director general, a job that, with the excep- tion of Alasdair Milne, automatically car- ries a knighthood and sometimes a peerage, is burdened by a class hatred of the sort of people, AB1s, who form the tra- ditional bulk of audiences for Radios Three and Four.
And at the BBC these days, any network controller is merely his master's voice.
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