Concert Intervals on R3

[Opsimath]

That's false memory, as French Frank explained yesterday. Firstly, Talks were rescheduled away from concert intervals to a new, guaranteed timeslot (titled The Essay) later in the evening, so there was no significant reduction in talks and hence no saving was contributed. As part of this scheduling change, most evening concerts were recorded live for later broadcast, usually as continuous music programmes (from 19:00 to 20:45) with no interval break. A few years later, Radio 3 returned to Live in Concerts in the evening, which gave them the problem of having a live interval to fill every night. This nightly interval was a genuine "addition" to the schedule and has been generally plugged with either recorded music or with music context: conversation, interview, chat or feature. Obviously, there must be a cost constraint on this because I assume that any type of context costs more than just bunging on a c d.

I suspect our thoughts aren't too far apart. You say "I assume that any type of context costs more than just bunging on a CD" which is where I am saying that the BBC is making a saving by broadcasting fewer talks. I take your point about talks having moved to a fixed slot so reintroducing them to intervals in addition, albeit reduced from previously, isn't a saving but actually extra spend but it wouldn't be the first time the BBC has claimed savings by saying it is spending less than it would have spent if it had spent more!

[french frank]

but it wouldn't be the first time the BBC has claimed savings by saying it is spending less than it would have spent if it had spent more!

I'm not sure that they made that claim on this occasion, but all parts of the schedule have to be taken into account: for example, Night Waves was on five nights a week, with The Verb on Saturdays. NW was then cut down to four nights, with The Verb taking the fifth slot.

And also to be clear: I studied the PAC review and I decided that compared with other stations, BBC and commercial, Radio 3 was pretty efficient with its content budget (on the basis of various charts, of which the breakfast programmes was one). I don't remember that the Select Committee singled it out specially.

Coming back to overall costs: since most radio stations broadcast for 24 hours a day - 24 hours that have to be filled - the only obvious different in cost will be the nature of the content: a station playing only CDs will make for a cheap 24 hours. A station like Radio 3 which has live concerts, drama and features will be relatively expensive, and you can't get away from that unless it goes over to playing CDs all day.

[bluestateprommer]

Sorry that I neglected to put in a plug for this R3 program earlier, but for those who want to give the "Shaw's Corner" concert a listen, you get a nice interval feature about GBS and music:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b048bh30