BBC 100!

[kernelbogey]

Hearing Neil Nunes announce in the R3 news this morning that today, 18 October, is the actual 100 year anniversary of the BBC, is what inspired me to start this thread.

It would, I believe, be a shame if The New Radio 3 Forum did not in some way acknowledge and celebrate 100 years of BBC broadcasting.

A thread, perhaps, where appreciations of the Beeb might be shared: we have an easy reflex towards criticism on the Forum, which might be set aside, at least here, at least for a day.

A place also, perhaps, for any fond memories, by Members, for example of crouching over the crystal set in the bedroom, straining for the sound of Elgar in the headphones....

[french frank]

Bitter sweet for me. Nostalgic memories of discovering R3 in middle age and remembering a time when I could listen - not saying I did, but I could have - virtually all day and night. Any programme that I listened to was interesting. And then being somewhat insomniac, I remember when the unlistenable schools programme was removed from the - I think - 3am slot, and Through the Night went through from late until early.

[Please note: I have switched off the No Shouting option which prevented people writing entire thread titles in CAPS in order to attract attention]

[kernelbogey]

...Nostalgic memories of discovering R3 in middle age...

For me, my teens, when my brother was at Oxford, and post National Service, introducing me, a 14 year old, to ideas, plays and music I had never before encountered. We had 'listened to the Third' a lot, en famille, and in early days had to tolerate, in West Cornwall, appalling reception. By the time I was discovering stuff through Radio Three (also Network Three for a while - including a brief flirtation with learning Russian) reception had markedly improved. Once the brother had built an FM receiver from a kit, we were veritable kings of the airwaves.

[smittims]

I haven't seen as many anniversary programmes as I'd expected. I recall a splendid TV programme, 'Magic Rays of Light' made to celebrate an anniversary of BBC Television, with actual footage of the famous song being sung to the accompaniment of 'the BBC Television orchestra' (sic) conducted by Hyam Greenbaum, one of a number of promising conductors killed in the war.

My own first experience of the BBC was hearing 'Woman's Hour', 'The Archers' and 'Mrs. Dale's Diary' as my parents listened to them, the reporting of the Anglo-French invasion of Egypt in 1956, adn Sibelius' death in 1957. I also recall the closing years of the Third, with Gielgud as King Lear, when my medium-wave radio added a few moaning winds to those of the play.

My first experience of BBC Television was seeing a horse race at a neighbour's house in 1955. Even then I was struck by the way the camera was allowed to rest on an object (the winning post) between races, with no 'presenter-chat' to spoil the feeling of actually being there.

[Belgrove]

Radio 4 was a mainstay at home as a kid, but I first started listening to R3 seriously as a student. Wednesday lunchtimes would be spent marking up the Radio Times for the next week’s listening before heading off to the playing fields. Early Saturday evenings were spent leisurely soaking in a hot bath, listening to JRR before heading off for a big night out. The opera broadcast on long Sunday afternoons accompanied by the newspapers. Being a largely empty vessel, I was keen to be filled up with the new and the challenging, and R3 was an important agent for fulfilling that. There was variety, not just music, but critical cultural and scientific commentary. That breadth has contracted over the years, indeed the channel has become constrictive. Nowadays one goes elsewhere to be stimulated, entertained and educated. But some programmes still fly the Reithian flag. Words and Music and JRR continue to delight, and the Sunday Feature occasionally broadcasts a corker (check out this week’s programme on Vaughan Williams’ 6th symphony - no gushy breathlessly overwritten commentary here). So R3 is no longer essential listening, but I’d miss it’s good bits.

[cloughie]

For me, my teens, when my brother was at Oxford, and post National Service, introducing me, a 14 year old, to ideas, plays and music I had never before encountered. We had 'listened to the Third' a lot, en famille, and in early days had to tolerate, in West Cornwall, appalling reception. By the time I was discovering stuff through Radio Three (also Network Three for a while - including a brief flirtation with learning Russian) reception had markedly improved. Once the brother had built an FM receiver from a kit, we were veritable kings of the airwaves.

Heathkit? My father built our first ‘tranny’ which had VHF as it was always called then! As I recall it was in a brown leather case!
It seems strange to think I’ve been alive for over 75% of the time that the BBC has been in existence and how much of my early life tuned into 434, 464 and 1500 and even after TV came into my life I always had a preference for radio!

[kernelbogey]

Heathkit? [A] My father built our first ‘tranny’ which had [B]VHF as it was always called then! As I recall it was in a brown leather case!
It seems strange to think I’ve been alive for over 75% of the time that the BBC has been in existence and how much of my early life tuned into 434, 464 and 1500 and even after TV came into my life I always had a preference for radio!

[A] No, not that one: it had a mottled brownish (I think) metallic finish, and obviously designed to fit into a panel.
[B] Yes I should have remembered that!

[gradus]

British Relay Wireless was the deliverer of BBC Radio when I was a young child. The radio sets were hired and the reproduced sound seemed, from memory at least, to be clear of the transmission/reception noise that affected MW. Listening to Children's Hour stays with me, especially David Davis ('Uncle David') whose story and poetry reading remains in my memory 70 years later.
I owe a tremendous amount to the BBC and love it still.

[cloughie]

British Relay Wireless was the deliverer of BBC Radio when I was a young child. The radio sets were hired and the reproduced sound seemed, from memory at least, to be clear of the transmission/reception noise that affected MW. Listening to Children's Hour stays with me, especially David Davis ('Uncle David') whose story and poetry reading remains in my memory 70 years later.
I owe a tremendous amount to the BBC and love it still.

I don’t remember David Davis being called Uncle David, but I do remember Uncle Mac (Derek McCulloch) and his wonderful Larry the Lamb and his very good friend Dennis the Dachshund.
I also remember Daphne Oxenford, Dorothy Smith or Julia Lang making sure I was sitting comfortably before they began to tell the story on Listen with Mother. A bonus from this was getting to know the Berceuse from Faure’s Dolly Suite at a pre school age.

[Serial_Apologist]

One was not aware of the wireless being in any way synonymous with BBC, whatever that meant when I was a child. One thought in terms of "Home Service" and "Light Programme". "Listen with Mother" ("Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin" is as etched on the memory as the movement from Fauré's "Dolly Suite" used as closing theme); "Music While You Work" and "Mrs Dale's Diary" as seamlessly in continuity with classical music as made any difference. Infant's school had a battered old radio ceremoniously placed on stage on a tubular chair with ripped canvas back for "Sounds and Music" or whatever its title was, and we would gather into circles and skip hands held, moving back and forth to the instructions, which were intermittently interrupted by loud farts and crackles from the device which would be corrected by a swift blow to the top delivered by the ever-stern-countenanced teacher with hair pinned in a tight bun.

Back at home I remember twiddling the stations on short wave to locate strange muffled musics and languages beyond the static, and, when television started - in our case to see The Coronation and invite the neighbours in - I would spend every school holiday morning watching the same item - a daily "Look at Life"-type BBC self-publicity documentary showing Ally Pally, Broadcasting House and those busy chappies rolling out cable from giant cotton reels or adjusting mounted cameras on backs of vehicles for outside broadcasts, all introduced with the same clipped accent, backed up with enthusiastic sub-military music which could have been by Alwyn or Rawsthorne, by the style of it. In between were not ads, of course, but interval breaks for displaying The Test Card, to which one would be glued six inches from the screen, transfixed by the shimmering of the close-packed parallel lines while instrumental folk tune arrangements - which might have been by Coates - were interspersed with movements from Mendelssohn, Haydn and Mozart symphonies from whose repetitions one would get to know by heart. This was the kind of music most prominent on the "wireless"; I also remember a lot of Khachaturian too. Telly was memorable for "Andy Pandy", "The Wooden Tops", Annette Mills "Muffin the Mule" (later teenage snigger), and, believe it or not, "Trooping the Colour", for which we mature 8-year olds were invited up to the Headmistress's flat at the top of the redbrick late Victorian Pont Street Dutch-style building to watch with her husband, who ran the business and told us we had to cut up our food before eating it with fork alone, sat upon rotund, flower-patterned armchairs.

As this forum is concerned with Radio 3 I don't think I really became aware of The Third until the early-1960s, when I met a girl who had Schoenberg and Sidney Becket in her record collection and wanted to impress her by matching her self-evident cultural awareness by being able to talk about stuff. The coming of "commercial TV" made no initial impression, since to my unsophisticated pre-Marcuse-reading self it offered a modicum of viewing choice and adverts were "fun". Children's programming was swept aside in the adolsecent quest for adulthood as one watched the news alongside elders and betters, besides, with incrementally later bed times, more exciting dramas such as "No Hiding Place" and "77 Sunset Strip", not to mention "Sunday Night at the London Palladium", which one had enviously heard from the next room, became permitted viewing, though which wavelength they were on has vanished in the mists of time. Meanwhile one's musical tastes were evolving - a very short period of following Pop music at around the age of 14, quickly superseded by jazz - first Trad, then Modern - and at the same time a growing fascination for "modern (classical) music" occasioned by some of the anthems we were made to sing in the chapel choir, and performing Kodaly's "Psalmus Hungaricus" at one of the annual school choral concerts, which took me onto Bartok - all of this contemporary with hearing Coltrane, Mingus and Dolphy on both radio jazz programmes and in a spare school room we "sequestered" for our afternoon jazz listening sessions to avoid organised sport and CCF. Jazz was broadcast both on the Third and Home Service at that time.

Between leaving home to make my way in the Big Wide World and acquiring a first telly on HP in 1983 the main listening area would have been Radio 3 for the music and evening plays, when a group of us would gather for some illicit pot smoking to immerse our senses into these dramas by Pinter and Co and listen to readings of Malcolm Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut and others. In those halcyon pre-political activism days between May '68 and the empty building squats of 1973 I don't think Radio 3 (or the BBC in general) played any really important formative role in shaping one's cultural tastes or appreciating their background - we'd all probably been through experiences such as the abovementioned and, being forward-looking in our thinking and hopes, did not much talk of personal stories or histories, other than in terms of the various therapeutic alternatives freely offered in the radical circles we frequented. Everything around us sort of seemed to feed in; I don't think one thought of the BBC as an agent of capitalist grooming until when we experienced its maligning of the causes we espoused and campaigned on; it's only in hindsight that one develops a roúnded, integrated cultural overview of the kind a lot of us failed to get to grips with back when the luxury of time for reading and reading across had afforded itself to a generation in part questioning where the world was going, in part willing to sacrifice personal aims and conventional lifestyles to bring about change.

[cloughie]

One was not aware of the wireless being in any way synonymous with BBC, whatever that meant when I was a child. One thought in terms of "Home Service" and "Light Programme". "Listen with Mother" ("Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin" is as etched on the memory as the movement from Fauré's "Dolly Suite" used as closing theme); "Music While You Work" and "Mrs Dale's Diary" as seamlessly in continuity with classical music as made any difference. Infant's school had a battered old radio ceremoniously placed on stage on a tubular chair with ripped canvas back for "Sounds and Music" or whatever its title was, and we would gather into circles and skip hands held, moving back and forth to the instructions, which were intermittently interrupted by loud farts and crackles from the device which would be corrected by a swift blow to the top delivered by the ever-stern-countenanced teacher with hair pinned in a tight bun.

Back at home I remember twiddling the stations on short wave to locate strange muffled musics and languages beyond the static, and, when television started - in our case to see The Coronation and invite the neighbours in - I would spend every school holiday morning watching the same item - a daily "Look at Life"-type BBC self-publicity documentary showing Ally Pally, Broadcasting House and those busy chappies rolling out cable from giant cotton reels or adjusting mounted cameras on backs of vehicles for outside broadcasts, all introduced with the same clipped accent, backed up with enthusiastic sub-military music which could have been by Alwyn or Rawsthorne, by the style of it. In between were not ads, of course, but interval breaks for displaying The Test Card, to which one would be glued six inches from the screen, transfixed by the shimmering of the close-packed parallel lines while instrumental folk tune arrangements - which might have been by Coates - were interspersed with movements from Mendelssohn, Haydn and Mozart symphonies from whose repetitions one would get to know by heart. This was the kind of music most prominent on the "wireless"; I also remember a lot of Khachaturian too. Telly was memorable for "Andy Pandy", "The Wooden Tops", Annette Mills "Muffin the Mule" (later teenage snigger), and, believe it or not, "Trooping the Colour", for which we mature 8-year olds were invited up to the Headmistress's flat at the top of the redbrick late Victorian Pont Street Dutch-style building to watch with her husband, who ran the business and told us we had to cut up our food before eating it with fork alone, sat upon rotund, flower-patterned armchairs.

As this forum is concerned with Radio 3 I don't think I really became aware of The Third until the early-1960s, when I met a girl who had Schoenberg and Sidney Becket in her record collection and wanted to impress her by matching her self-evident cultural awareness by being able to talk about stuff. The coming of "commercial TV" made no initial impression, since to my unsophisticated pre-Marcuse-reading self it offered a modicum of viewing choice and adverts were "fun". Children's programming was swept aside in the adolsecent quest for adulthood as one watched the news alongside elders and betters, besides, with incrementally later bed times, more exciting dramas such as "No Hiding Place" and "77 Sunset Strip", not to mention "Sunday Night at the London Palladium", which one had enviously heard from the next room, became permitted viewing, though which wavelength they were on has vanished in the mists of time. Meanwhile one's musical tastes were evolving - a very short period of following Pop music at around the age of 14, quickly superseded by jazz - first Trad, then Modern - and at the same time a growing fascination for "modern (classical) music" occasioned by some of the anthems we were made to sing in the chapel choir, and performing Kodaly's "Psalmus Hungaricus" at one of the annual school choral concerts, which took me onto Bartok - all of this contemporary with hearing Coltrane, Mingus and Dolphy on both radio jazz programmes and in a spare school room we "sequestered" for our afternoon jazz listening sessions to avoid organised sport and CCF. Jazz was broadcast both on the Third and Home Service at that time.

Between leaving home to make my way in the Big Wide World and acquiring a first telly on HP in 1983 the main listening area would have been Radio 3 for the music and evening plays, when a group of us would gather for some illicit pot smoking to immerse our senses into these dramas by Pinter and Co and listen to readings of Malcolm Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut and others. In those halcyon pre-political activism days between May '68 and the empty building squats of 1973 I don't thing Radio 3 (or the BBC in general) played any really important formative role in shaping one's cultural tastes or appreciating their background - we'd all probably been through experiences such as the abovementioned and, being forward-looking in our thinking and hopes, did not much talk of personal stories or histories, other than in terms of the various therapeutic alternatives freely offered in the radical circles we frequented. Everything around us sort of seemed to feed in; I don't think one thought of the BBC as an agent of capitalist grooming until when we experienced its maligning of the causes we espoused and campaigned on; it's only in hindsight that one develops a roúnded, integrated cultural overview of the kind a lot of us failed to get to grips with back when the luxury of time for reading and reading across had afforded itself to a generation in part questioning where the world was going, in part willing to sacrifice personal aims and conventional lifestyles to bring about change.

‘Music and Movement’ - which I never really liked that much but what I really enjoyed were ‘Rhythm and Melody’ and ‘Singing Together’, with William Appleby and Miss Avis on piano, which introduced me to some songs which I still love (but the downside of a few which I probably dislike now more than I did then).
On Children’s Television do you remember Hank and his escapades with Mexican Pete?

[Serial_Apologist]

‘Music and Movement’ - which I never really liked that much but what I really enjoyed were ‘Rhythm and Melody’ and ‘Singing Together’, with William Appleby and Miss Avis on piano, which introduced me to some songs which I still love (but the downside of a few which I probably dislike now more than I did then).
On Children’s Television do you remember Hank and his escapades with Mexican Pete?

Vaguely - along with The Loan Ranger, and Tex Ritter too. Then there was Billy Bean and his Silly Machine, presented by Michael Bentine - a satire on capitalist advances in technology to compare with Chaplin's Modern Times, from what I recall.... But nothing to compare with the later gravitas of Chef Inspector Lockheart of the Yard, with his trilby and toothbrush moustache...

[Ein Heldenleben]

Wasn’t it Music, Movement and Mime ?

https://www.broadcastforschools.co.uk/site/Music,_Movement_and_Mime

[antongould]

The BBC has been a wonderful constant all my life …. Life, for me, would be much less enjoyable without it …. will it survive in a recognisable form in the Hunt for savings ….. ????

[teamsaint]

I gave up my licence a year ago, something I didn’t ever think I would do.

I miss Match of the Day ,( and make do with clips from Sky on youtube and peer to peer streams for live games ) still listen to R3 occasionally, and that’s it really.

I don’t expect to buy a licence for quite a while.