[Swprograms] Telegraph Article on BBC Radio 3 (Listeners Must Want To Listen!)

[Chet C <chetcope2@xxxxxxxxx>]

 

Interesting article in today's Telegraph (U.K.) regarding the writers listening habits (BBC Radios 3, 4, 5 & 7 10 hours a day; Radio 2 & BBCWS an hour a day each)

 

Ostensibly the article's point is whatever way you deliver (podcasts, shortwave) if you don't have good content...no one will care.  Listeners must want to listen

 

The good content she found this week:

She mentions a new Radio 3 series on Spain:  "God History & Reason," as well as 3's monthly Lebrecht Live (I'm a fan but I always have to look to see if the topic interests me.  With R4's "In Our Time" (a similar format)  I generally figure I'll like it regardless). 

 

Finally she mentions R4's play about the BBC & the General Strike of 1926 (Afternoon Play Mon May 1): "Nine Days In May"

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/arts/afternoon_play.shtml

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Article:

"On radio: only the BBC brings you Wayne and Spain
(Filed: May 2 '06

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2006/05/02/bvradio01.xml&sSheet=/arts/2006/05/02/ixartleft.html

 

 

People will only listen via download technology if they want what it brings, writes Gillian Reynolds

Although its moguls say "content" not "programmes" and make heads spin with talk of downloads and portals, the BBC, like any other broadcaster, still has to please its customers if it is to stay in business. If we don't like or trust what it offers, whether on radio, TV or a website, we will turn it off. If we turn it off, why pay for it?

 

Mark Thompson, the BBC's director-general, last week foretold a future where we grow more selective in our choices, no longer catching programmes on transmission but having access to them, via digital technology, whenever and wherever we wish. The BBC, via the licence fee, will provide the means to this end. But all the downloading technology in the world won't make people use it if they don't want what it brings.

How do I know? I listen. I watch. It's unusual for me to spend more than an hour with BBC1 these days, less with BBC2. I listen to Radios 3, 4 and Five Live and BBC7 for a combined average of 10 daily hours. I catch Radio 2 for at least an hour a day, slightly more for the combined commercial stations, slightly less for World Service, Radio 1 about an hour a week.

 

Why? Because I want to. Colm Toíbín's new Radio 3 Sunday afternoon series on Spain, God, History, Fantasy and Reason, is a joy. He looks at a building, walks us around it, talks about its relationship to its region, to Spain, to history. The words are spare, like captions. Music is used like pictures. He began with Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, why it became a place of pilgrimage, how the pilgrims' road became a trade route, the impact of influences from abroad. A Galician bagpipe towards the end linked into Tudor history and connections between Irish and Spanish dynasties. When the music turned into a big jig, it gave Toíbín's words wings.

Six hours later, after lebrecht.live on madness and creativity, after The Choir (the network's best new show), after a superb play, Billiards at Half-Past Nine, by Claire Luckham from Heinrich Boll's magnificent novel, I was still listening to Radio 3, waiting for Dennis Marks's The Search for Sepharad.

 

Marks used to make arts documentaries for BBC Television. They stopped making that sort of thing ages ago. So he brought his eye, ear and sense of history to radio and wonderful series we've had from it too, searches for roots in the wilderness of wars and persecutions. There is an additional fascination to this new series, in that it's sort of the other half to the Toíbín programmes. Those embrace the Moorish centuries but are centred on Spain's Catholic continuity. Marks is looking at what happened to the Jews, expelled along with the Moors by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492.

 

Sepharad is the old Hebrew word for Spain. Sephardic Jews in Bosnia speak ancient Castilian still. Marks is tracing lines, routes, passages from one end of the Mediterranean to the other across centuries. The story is buried, but surfaces in language, food, music, architecture. What it brings to life are potent stories of ancient Moorish-Jewish cultural symbiosis. So he overdoes the knowing narrator a bit, so what? I'd rather share his glimpses of St Paul here and Maimonides there than have any other broadcast company.

 

And if you wanted a few clues as to why the BBC stayed in business in its earliest days and now still balances its own and the national interest, you couldn't have done better than Robin Glendinning's fiercely witty play Nine Days in May on Radio 4 yesterday afternoon, based on John Reith's battle with Winston Churchill over control of the BBC during the 1926 General Strike.

 

As for Wayne Rooney's injured foot, Charles Clarke's big mistake and John Prescott's Whitehall farce, thanks to Radio Five Live's thorough coverage of all three (not just on Sunday morning but continuously) I now feel so richly informed, I can return for the rest of the week to those richer worlds of the imagination that BBC Radio, thank heavens, also still provides.

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A Note From Chet C in NYC:

Hi folks...I got locked out of my old Yahoo account and lost track of the new list addy (And it's telling that a Google Desktop search resulted in no results for shortwave!  I'm still around and consuming good programming on BBC, Radio National (Australia) etc--all via my Creative Muvo (downloads or recorded via Replay Radio).

 

I'd really like to find a list where folk discuss good listens like the Telegraph-lady above does!  I kniw I miss a lot by not coming by the SWListenersr group more frequently, but it's just info overload! 

 

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