Even before lockdown the listener figures for BBC Radio 3 were going up. In February 2020 they were up to 2.13 million compared with 1.83 million the previous year. One suspects that the privations of the pandemic will have driven them up even more.
One reason might be that Radio 3 has revamped itself somewhat.
Updating
Though its listenership is still 66% over 65s, the broadcaster has changed. The success of Classic FM must have had something to do with that, but it also reflects changing times. The station is now more eclectic in its output, with bursts of world music or classic jazz (Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, etc.) to be heard fairly frequently amid the Haydn, Bach and Borodin of Petroc Trelawny’s breakfast show. Further, there has been the introduction of young female presenters with musical nous. The 22-year-old super-saxophonist Jess Gillam fronts a Saturday lunchtime show This Classical Life in which she and a guest introduce each other to different recordings and chat about them. Then, former 6 Music presenter Elizabeth Alker’s Saturday morning broadcast tends to indulge the presenter’s wide-ranging taste which includes folk music along with listeners’ Saturday Sounds – natural noises recorded on smartphones, from the voices of birds on a river walk to the clatter of a three-year-old merrily dancing on a wooden kitchen floor. And the success of the extraordinarily talented Kanneh-Mason family has no doubt had an effect in capturing the interest of multi-cultural Britain for classical music.
The shift probably does not sit too well with some purists, but I expect that, with an increasing audience, the producers are saying ‘hey-ho’!
The news channels
But to be honest it wasn’t the alterations that moved us. We were driven into the arms of Radio 3 by the gloom and doom of Radio 4’s Today programme and BBC News generally. Why?
First, much of what purports to be news, once you get past the headlines, isn’t news at all. It is comment and quite often fairly unbalanced comment at that. Radio 3 gives you the headlines. That’s really all we need. And then music!
Second, the news channels appear to major on depressing everyone. Perhaps the trend started with Brexit? We were bombarded with worst-case scenarios for too long. That trend carried over into the pandemic. If all we were told had been true, Britannia, irreparably holed below the waterline, would have sunk below the waves somewhere between the Channel and the Irish Sea long ago.
Third, in what I suppose is meant to be a pursuit of balance, reporters appear too frequently to dig up people who are not simply putting the other side of an argument, but who are just downright angry with everything and everyone. Whereas Radio 3 was doing its best last year to play a stirring march to raise a sense of national unity, or to get people singing along together to Somewhere Over the Rainbow and the like, the news stations seemed bent on provoking us into becoming a nation of grumblers. The more scathing you can be the better. We’re scathed out.
Fourth, I am not quite sure how this happens, but the way the news, especially bad news, is communicated comes across as a scolding for all listeners. You feel you have been told off. I know there are people who break the Covid rules. However, it is a small minority. The majority don’t need to be continually hectored. But from the effects of heading footballs to global climate change and beyond, the media has become a self-righteous factory of issues with which to beat listeners over the head.
With a smile?
All this is a sad comment on our times. There is a published diary of WWII in London, written by an ordinary woman, Vere Hodgson1. Such had been the common resolve to face the conflict with courage and solidarity that on the last page, once the war was over, with tongue in cheek, she allows herself a wry comment: ‘So great was our danger in certain years that we were forbidden to look miserable. Now we can be as unhappy as we please! Freedom is returning – sing to the Lord with cheerful voice.’
John Benton is Director of Pastoral Support at The Pastor’s Academy, www.pastorsacademy.org
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