VICTIM OF THE RATINGS GAME

Tony Scotland, an announcer with Radio Three

for 20 years, argues that a great cultural asset is being wrecked by misplaced populism

IT USED to be assumed by those who made and presented programmes on Radio Three that the listener was a grown- up. So there wasn't any need to state the obvious — Scarlatti's cataloguer was sim- ply K., an appoggiatura was just that, the third movement of a sonata was expected to be a minuet or a scherzo, Lodz was properly pronounced Woodge, Eszterhaza meant Haydn as Spoleto meant Menotti, and Lieder and Latin tags were tossed off echt.

To may listeners — to me, for example, before I worked on Radio Three myself — these things were by no means obvious. But the assumption that they were — that this sophisticated world was open and available — was so flattering that one lis- tened and learned, and looked up later, perhaps, what the context occasionally failed to explain. The scholarship was lightly worn, the tone was authoritative but never intimidating, and the announc- ers spoke directly to us, as friends, in civilised and articulate English.

This 'open sesame' to the arts was a form of cultural democracy, because it was truly and proudly accessible to all. But its ene- mies — those who didn't listen to it, or who had failed to rise to its challenge when they did — called it precious, exclusive, elitist.

And when, in the ferment of Babbittry stirred up by Mr Major's ideal of a classless Britain, the BBC fell, or was manoeuvred, into anti-elitist hands, the hands of calcula- tor-tapping zealots blindly committed to cost-effectiveness, it was inevitable that Radio Three, which is hugely expensive to run, should be one of their first targets.

But it needn't have been inevitable that Radio Three should surrender without a fight. Or that it should surrender at all. Just because the foul snails of the market phi- losophy have left their spume and filth on the fairest of the rest of our national flow- ers (sorry, Ruskin), there's no reason why 'Well, that's most of the weather, now here's a short Samurai.' Radio Three should sacrifice its own petals. Indeed, there's every reason why it shouldn't.

Public service broadcasting exists to pro- vide quality programmes, regardlesi of the numbers listening. It doesn't have to heed market forces: that's the point of it. If only a small minority want it, that's not an invalidation — it's a justification. After all, the majority are now well served by com- mercial broadcasting interests.

The BBC seems to have caved in to the cynical credo that the people should have what the mass of the people want, whether it's good for them or not. This not only deprives the minority, but it also creates a situation in which the uneducated gradual- ly become ineducable through lack of opportunity and example.

'We've got to concentrate on our core role,' the reformers say, 'target the market, introduce access points, establish centres of excellence and increase the ratings.' Numbers is the name of the game: quanti- ty at the expense of quality.

At Radio Three under its present con- troller, Nicholas Kenyon, this crude philos- ophy has meant lots of new business managers and editors and freelance pre- senters (some of them with little or no pre- vious broadcasting experience, and often at greater cost than the redundant staff they replaced). It's meant chucking drama over the fence to Radio Four, slashing at the other speech programmes, and re- organising the schedules to accommodate sequences of gush and light music. Things called 'programmes' are no longer politi- cally correct, nor are good English and subtlety and intellectual standards. Quality is passé: ratings rule supreme in this brave new world of `neo-plebeianism'.

Of course, Radio Three must change — but not at the expense of its fundamental principles. Properly run, it would evolve and develop organically. Properly run, it could — and should — be tweaked here and there to refine its tuning. The changes `If you'd have me, Jennifer, I'm sure I could learn to love whales.' forced on Radio Three in the past year have shown all the consideration and sensitivity of the rape of the Sabine women.

Gone are many of the most popular cor- nerstones of the Radio Three schedules: Morning Concert, Music Weekly, Soundings and the quietly compelling Michael Oliver, Chris de Souza's irresistible Tuning Up, Third Ear (sometimes brilliant, always interesting), the daftly named (because usually entirely enjoyable) Mainly for Plea- sure, and Poet of the Month. Gone are half the lunchtime concerts live from the stu- dios in Birmingham and London, and all the live lunchtime concerts from the spec- tacularly converted St George's, Brandon Hill, Bristol — indeed, the entire BBC music establishment in the South and West of England has been dismantled so that it can be run more efficiently from a new 'centre of excellence' in Birm- ingham.

And with the axed programmes have gone most of the announcers who, for so many listeners, embodied the spirit and soul of Radio Three. Only four now remain on the regular payroll. Instead, we now have 'drive-time' shows, 'strands', 'sequences' and 'formulas', dividing the day into chunks of musical wallpaper, introduced by presenters who may have done music at Sussex and Durham but are utterly devoid of charm.

On top of that, half the drama output has been abolished, because the new, sta- tion-identity-conscious regime sees Radio Three as a music channel. And those drama producers who haven't been driven to redundancy and re-employment as free- lances — because such is the reality of the BBC's 'streamlining' policy — must watch their spending so rigorously that, as a prowling accountant advised one desper- ate producer recently, `if you can't stick to your budget, you'd better cut out one of the characters'. (The producer in question was already economising by rehearsing in his office, because of the expense of hiring studios, and, indeed, their scarcity, in the newly market-orientated Broadcasting House, where studios, no less than music scores and pronunciation advice, come only at a price.)

In such an atmosphere it's small wonder that the pleasures of Radio Three's past — the series of Poulenc songs produced by Elaine Padmore and Graham Johnson, the survey of Iberian organs produced by William Robson, the Schubert song that sent us to bed at Closedown every night of the Schubert bicentenary year, the great liturgical reconstructions conceived by Hugh Keyte and Chris Sayers — have receded into history, to be remembered with nostalgia.

Gone, too, are the talks about music — genuine, produced talks by speakers with voices and personalities as well as knowl- edge (John Amis on Mme Schumann, for example — blessedly repeated the other day). Where are the features in which Anthony Howard examined the Wilson years and Michael Charlton analysed the collapse of European communism, and Michael Magee and Mary Goldring

explored some of the other great issues of the 20th century? Where are science, phi- losophy, poetry — crucibles of wisdom like Words? Or the interval readings that filled the unexpected gaps with humour, sensitiv- ity and surprise?

All are gone, the old familiar voices. And with them the wit, the charm, the intellec- tual thrust, the subtlety, the confidence that made Radio Three so delightfully unpredictable, stimulating and indisputably great. This is not only a betrayal of the lis- teners, it's also a betrayal of the staff. There is today as much talent, commitment and goodwill in the engine- room of BBC programme-making as ever there was in the past — perhaps even more. But the leadership has gone from the bridge. In the past, the captains of Broadcasting House encouraged their production complement to creativity. Today's market managers are deliberately squandering the Corpora- tion's artistic reserves on routine boiler- stoking.

Mr Kenyon can't have intended to wreak such havoc. His aim, he explained when he assumed control, was no more revolution- ary than to attempt to increase the listener- ship by introducing two new light-music-and-chat shows, morning and evening, and a Sunday morning record pro- gramme along the lines of Your Hundred Best Tunes, which would provide 'access points' through which newcomers might be drawn to the rest of Radio Three. Natural-

ly, he was unable to resist tinkering with Presentation — the frontline for the fire of all incoming controllers — and, because, cleverly, he acted swiftly and without con- sultation, he was able to achieve what his two most recent predecessors had attempt- ed but failed: the annihilation of the net- work's distinctive voice. (As the owner of a voice which was itself banned from the air by a previous controller of, Radio Three, Mr Kenyon must have derived a specially piquant satisfaction from this long overdue act of attrition.)

The future, it seems, promises more of the same: more sequences of wallpaper music, more experts patronising, more chat, more vocal wringing of hands, and, after the Proms, a new-look On Air to wake us up in the mornings: precisely the same dreary formula of light music and trails and telephone chats with sleepy arts administrators and catty music critics, and warnings of delays on the M4, with Bosnia and more rain — presented, every weekday morning for a year, by the same soft, smiling voice of Andrew McGregor.

Radio Three is hell-bent on the pursuit of its own perception of popular appeal, and, despite Mr Kenyon's protestations, Classic FM — which I happen to advise — is the role model. It's irrelevant that Radio Three will never learn how to be Classic FM. Irrelevant that it shouldn't even have to: in a market full of alternative radio options, including the one which has so successfully introduced classical music to a mass audience, Radio Three ought to be able to justify the expenditure of public funds on the maintenance of quality broadcasting (which needn't cost any more than broadcasting of the On Air kind). Nor does it matter that the station has lost some of its most loyal and distinguished listeners in the attempt: they're all over 65 anyway, the controller once said, with breath-taking arrogance and inconse- quence. What does matter to the puppet- masters on the third floor of Broadcasting House is that Radio Three should change its image, slough off its 'elitist' skin and Slip into something simple, accessible, 'Classless' . To survive on these terms is to die.

If Radio Three equals quality and quali- ty equals elitism, then elitism isn't a vice at all and Radio Three is a virtue. In today's world it's a virtue that's rarer, more pre- cious, more necessary than ever before. The caretakers of Radio Three — for that's what they actually are — have an obligation to preserve it not only for the enlightenment of future generations of lis- teners, but also as an example to those in government who are too smug and small- minded to reverse the tide of barbarism drowning the nation's moral sensibility. Radio Three is the flagship of that sensi- bility. If she sinks, the rest of our cultural fleet, already starved of vital supplies, will go down with her.