Radio 3 through its other manifestations over the years was always cast as a guardian of and indeed sharpener and presenter of the challenges fine culture always presents, and as such had a necessarily wide, revelatory educative function. Aut educare aut delectare.
But it seems to me that the soul / raison d’etre of R3 has now passed into the hands of those who have through the impoverished education system now in place last much / any awareness of what R3 was and perhaps ought to be. More worryingly, as if on the other side of a gulf of perception that no amount of shouting can bridge, they genuinely cannot understand why so many of the most loyal listeners are so vexed over what has happened to the principles that seem now to govern R3 in the last decade. It is not wilfulness, IMO, but genuine incomprehension, such is the ‘new’ way that now prevails in the BBC, one of competition, ratings, headlines, box-ticking.
The new managers have been steadily indoctrinated by the belief system that listener numbers more or less alone justify content, however they deny or wriggle around that accusation, and indeed if the numbers do not flock, then your duty as a responsible producer / planner is to reduce the challenge of the content until the numbers rise to a just a bout acceptable level and thus justify expense. It is not a conspiracy, it is not a subtle plot, but a genuine stance generated out of 15 or so years of the tradition of steady undermining.
High culture has never ever been ‘popular’. It never will be and it never will have ‘numbers’ in CFM, football crowd, rock music terms, but that does not make it less valuable – yet that seems to be the equation being embedded as a R3 axiom.
The Mantra of Accessibility has understandably, regrettably, but necessarily had the effect of narrowing, trivialising and rendering banal. An example: on the old R3 mbs, every Saturday you could pretty well guarantee that there would be an explosion of wrath at the twittering trivia in the Met opera relays. The protests were regular as clockwork, loud and enraged. R3 managers must have known that that was the stance of a goodly number of its more articulate listeners who disliked it enough to record their displeasure, but far from modification, those same managers have made that presentation model the default style of ALL R3’s music programmes. The inevitable interview, the inevitable guest speaker, the endless chat by those more or less – usually less – well-informed.
The effect is that the art form / performance on display is undermined by lame attempts to explain or contextualise, or in the very worst cases as tonight on the opera relay, turning it into a sort of Oprah Winfrey revelation of the inner psyche of the singer / producer etc. In that process, the actual work of art gets lost, gets cluttered, gets trivialised, and the sublimity of the work castrated. Risks are not taken in construction of programmes, because risk is expensive, does not raise numbers, is hard to justify.
And we are powerless. The closing of the old R3 boards meant that the last real forum for critical, regular, astute feedback was shut down, so that for the R3 managers the frustrated shouting at the windows went away. They could get on with their deconstruction of our culture untroubled.
But it seems to me that the soul / raison d’etre of R3 has now passed into the hands of those who have through the impoverished education system now in place last much / any awareness of what R3 was and perhaps ought to be. More worryingly, as if on the other side of a gulf of perception that no amount of shouting can bridge, they genuinely cannot understand why so many of the most loyal listeners are so vexed over what has happened to the principles that seem now to govern R3 in the last decade. It is not wilfulness, IMO, but genuine incomprehension, such is the ‘new’ way that now prevails in the BBC, one of competition, ratings, headlines, box-ticking.
The new managers have been steadily indoctrinated by the belief system that listener numbers more or less alone justify content, however they deny or wriggle around that accusation, and indeed if the numbers do not flock, then your duty as a responsible producer / planner is to reduce the challenge of the content until the numbers rise to a just a bout acceptable level and thus justify expense. It is not a conspiracy, it is not a subtle plot, but a genuine stance generated out of 15 or so years of the tradition of steady undermining.
High culture has never ever been ‘popular’. It never will be and it never will have ‘numbers’ in CFM, football crowd, rock music terms, but that does not make it less valuable – yet that seems to be the equation being embedded as a R3 axiom.
The Mantra of Accessibility has understandably, regrettably, but necessarily had the effect of narrowing, trivialising and rendering banal. An example: on the old R3 mbs, every Saturday you could pretty well guarantee that there would be an explosion of wrath at the twittering trivia in the Met opera relays. The protests were regular as clockwork, loud and enraged. R3 managers must have known that that was the stance of a goodly number of its more articulate listeners who disliked it enough to record their displeasure, but far from modification, those same managers have made that presentation model the default style of ALL R3’s music programmes. The inevitable interview, the inevitable guest speaker, the endless chat by those more or less – usually less – well-informed.
The effect is that the art form / performance on display is undermined by lame attempts to explain or contextualise, or in the very worst cases as tonight on the opera relay, turning it into a sort of Oprah Winfrey revelation of the inner psyche of the singer / producer etc. In that process, the actual work of art gets lost, gets cluttered, gets trivialised, and the sublimity of the work castrated. Risks are not taken in construction of programmes, because risk is expensive, does not raise numbers, is hard to justify.
And we are powerless. The closing of the old R3 boards meant that the last real forum for critical, regular, astute feedback was shut down, so that for the R3 managers the frustrated shouting at the windows went away. They could get on with their deconstruction of our culture untroubled.
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