The Eternal Breakfast Debate in a New Place

[oddoneout]

If the new format is, as seems possible, bringing new listeners to R3 can that be such a bad thing ..... ?????

Tsk, you are being mischievous anton, you know very well they are the wrong sort of listeners...
Breakfast has improved - who knows why, I'm just glad it has - and although there are the inevitable irritations, they are fewer and the incidence of less familiar fare seems higher to me. Just looking at the playlist doesn't give the whole picture as the connections between pieces are much stronger than used to be the case but won't be apparent without the spoken elements. Comments from listeners(not all of whom are uninformed concentration-deficient inadequates ) add to the continuity by responding to themes or pieces, influencing items in subsequent programmmes. Yes some of the pieces thus broadcast may be silly, some are doubtless 'not R3 material', but there will also be gems, and encounters with the unknown which otherwise wouldn't occur.
It's a move in the right direction as far as I'm concerned. It does though seem to make the intrusion of the crass trailer trash even more annoying and I suspect(in fact I've read comments to that effect elsewhere) many of the 'new audience' will find them just as tiresome as the remnant old audience does.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Genuine interest - does anybody here know [or "know of"] anyone who has started listening to R3 in the past, say, five years because of the pre-noon programmes?

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

Rajar statistics again.

It's rather like ignoring the £ when it plummets, but then getting over-excited when it rises by a puny amount. Breakfast may well be a teeny-weeny bit better, but it's still pretty dire.

On Saturday, one of the trashy trailers began "Hi, Breakfasters..." Aaaaaaaargh!

[Stanfordian]

Rajar statistics again.

It's rather like ignoring the £ when it plummets, but then getting over-excited when it rises by a puny amount. Breakfast may well be a teeny-weeny bit better, but it's still pretty dire.

On Saturday, one of the trashy trailers began "Hi, Breakfasters..." Aaaaaaaargh!

Stop it! stop it! stop it! Breakfasters, what next? They are either pi**ing yer off or want to be yer mate.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

Stop it! stop it! stop it! Breakfasters, what next? They are either pi**ing yer off or want to be yer mate.

This was a trailer for Jazz Record Requests. He's done the same on other Saturdays, but with Elizabeth Alker at the helm, anyone who came along and said "Good morning, Kiddywinks" would hardly be noticed, so conditioned have some people become.

[antongould]

Genuine interest - does anybody here know [or "know of"] anyone who has started listening to R3 in the past, say, five years because of the pre-noon programmes?

Yes

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Yes

Good start - how many?

[Stanfordian]

This is better entertainment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqLLDZvbG-U

Many of them dead! Plus one whose death beat the judicial system.

[antongould]

Good start - how many?

3

[antongould]

............ so conditioned have some people become.

Not sure what this means ......... and JS has started his trailer this way for years come Handley come Alkers ......

[Serial_Apologist]

Tsk, you are being mischievous anton, you know very well they are the wrong sort of listeners...
Breakfast has improved - who knows why, I'm just glad it has - and although there are the inevitable irritations, they are fewer and the incidence of less familiar fare seems higher to me. Just looking at the playlist doesn't give the whole picture as the connections between pieces are much stronger than used to be the case but won't be apparent without the spoken elements. Comments from listeners(not all of whom are uninformed concentration-deficient inadequates ) add to the continuity by responding to themes or pieces, influencing items in subsequent programmmes.

Admittedly not being a Breakfast listener, I'd need to be given chapter and verse on that claim. As it is, the list on its own lends inescapably to an impression analogous to that confronted with the complete re-arrangement of the pictures at the National Gallery according to the presenter's and listeners' tastes. All very enlightening, to be sure!

[Serial_Apologist]

This was a trailer for Jazz Record Requests. He's done the same on other Saturdays, but with Elizabeth Alker at the helm, anyone who came along and said "Good morning, Kiddywinks" would hardly be noticed, so conditioned have some people become.

I wonder what Alyn Shipton would have thought. As the regular presenter of Jazz Record Requests he shows it is possible to host a programme comprised of listener requests well, even shifting between different eras and styles of the music without it being jarring.

[underthecountertenor]

Tsk, you are being mischievous anton, you know very well they are the wrong sort of listeners...
Breakfast has improved - who knows why, I'm just glad it has - and although there are the inevitable irritations, they are fewer and the incidence of less familiar fare seems higher to me. Just looking at the playlist doesn't give the whole picture as the connections between pieces are much stronger than used to be the case but won't be apparent without the spoken elements. Comments from listeners(not all of whom are uninformed concentration-deficient inadequates ) add to the continuity by responding to themes or pieces, influencing items in subsequent programmmes. Yes some of the pieces thus broadcast may be silly, some are doubtless 'not R3 material', but there will also be gems, and encounters with the unknown which otherwise wouldn't occur.
It's a move in the right direction as far as I'm concerned. It does though seem to make the intrusion of the crass trailer trash even more annoying and I suspect(in fact I've read comments to that effect elsewhere) many of the 'new audience' will find them just as tiresome as the remnant old audience does.

An excellent summary of my own views - couldn't have put it better myself. It's not perfect, and some presenters are (much) better than others, but to posit (as if an objective fact) that it's only a 'teeny-weeny bit better' and 'still dire' is absurd.

I do however think that the Controller would now do well to turn his attention to Essential Classics.

[underthecountertenor]

Not sure what this means ......... and JS has started his trailer this way for years come Handley come Alkers ......

I think it means that those of us who like (for the most part) what Breakfast is now are little better than Pavlovian dogs. Because of course Eine Alpensinfonie must be right and it's all dire.

And re GS (not JS, I think, thank goodness, otherwise we'd be getting our Swains and Smiths in a twist), exactly right. It's his way, and I like it (idiot that I am).

[underthecountertenor]

Admittedly not being a Breakfast listener, I'd need to be given chapter and verse on that claim. As it is, the list on its own lends inescapably to an impression analogous to that confronted with the complete re-arrangement of the pictures at the National Gallery according to the presenter's and listeners' tastes. All very enlightening, to be sure!

As you are admittedly not a Breakfast listener, you will not be aware that there is more method in it than that. Indeed I would hazard that more thought goes into the sequence of items now than in the old days of Overture and Morning Concert, when item followed item with no discernible reason, the whole having been planned sufficiently in advance for publication in the Radio Times. Now, I recognise that some people prefer to plan their listening meticulously according to their existing musical tastes by reference to a precisely timed published schedule, and that for them the Breakfast format is therefore anathema. I understand that, but that's not how my mornings work, and I prefer to be surprised, engaged and led into undiscovered territory, even if occasionally I don't like what I hear.

What I don't appreciate is being told that this makes me in some way a deficient, 'conditioned' patsy.