The Eternal Breakfast Debate in a New Place

[hmvman]

I will miss Petroc's week-long perambulations programmes in the summer (assuming he won't be doing them anymore). I wonder if Tom will be sent out with the hydrophone...

[french frank]

Tom McKinney has an article in today’s I Paper - again on the ‘not dumbing down’ theme but I think he is knowledgeable and affable and will fill the Breafast role very well on 2020s R3.

I see he's also grown a beard, now that he's taken over from PT. By the way, the i headline says: 'If Radio 3 really was dumbing down we'd be at rock bottom by now' ... It's a matter of opinion, of course, but some/many would say most of R3 has indeed been at rock bottom for quite a while. Breakfast is still a mish-mash of short pieces. The first mvt of Beethoven's Op 9 No 2 segues into the 32nd variation of the Diabelli vars. We are told it was a fugue 'near the end' of the Diabelli variations, and who played it. To be clear, I don't think this is Tom McKinney 'dumbing down': it's R3 dumbing down.

In the i piece, the journalist evokes the 's' word but neither he nor TMcK has anything specific, any anecdote, any evidence to explain who are the snobs. It might be implied that people who say R3 is dumbing down are snobs but it certainly isn't said. What is actually said is interesting:

"McKinney’s upbringing, in Stoke-on-Trent, was such that the snobbery around classical music is quite alien to him. For the Radio 3-urging grandfather – a trade unionist who worked as a forklift truck driver – classical music was simply what he loved." It's the job that's beneath Tom McKinney, but if it pays the mortgage ...

https://inews.co.uk/culture/radio/tom-mckinney-radio-3-dumbing-down-rock-bottom-3621567

[LMcD]

]I will miss Petroc's week-long perambulations programmes in the summer ([/B]assuming he won't be doing them anymore). I wonder if Tom will be sent out with the hydrophone...

As will I - it looks as though I shan't be able to persuade him or his producer to take us round the Norfolk and Suffolk coasts.

[french frank]

Some years ago Roger Wright asserted that, unlike Classic FM (and most pop music stations), Radio 3 'does not have a playlist'. That was then: now, allegedly, it does have a playlist - probably bigger than CFM's, but still a limited list from which Walking the Dog, l'Isle joyeuse and Libertango can be regularly plucked, while other composers are totally ignored. Suffolkcoastal could probably reconstruct the entire list from his own indefatigable research.

While searching for the quote in which Wright denied the existence of a playlist, I found this from 2014, which I quite enjoyed:

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/jul/07/roger-wright-approach-wrong-radio-three

[muzzer]

I’ll be listening to PT’s Breakfast shows on Sounds until they’re taken off. No presenter can affect the format but for me he’s developed over the years a really simpatico style. I was a big fan of SM-P and also CB-H. I would gladly listen to them first thing in the morning forever tbh. I’ve sampled T Mc at the weekend and during the day and whilst he is well qualified for the job I cannot - sorry Tom it’s not personal - stand his voice at all. Still eh, surely AI will deliver my fave presenters to me on demand ere long. ( and if you’re yet to watch CB-H’s docu please do so now. Her bravery is for the ages).