Essential Classics - The Continuing Debate

[Nick Armstrong]

no reasoned arguments.

Sadly your contributions tend not to be worth dignifying with any.

A specious line like

If they ignore an e-mail, how do they know they don't like it?

indicates pretty clearly you're here to wind up not debate sensibly.

[french frank]

As there is one person who appears not to understand the situation: it is naive to think any individual listener is either welcome or unwelcome to listen to a radio programme. That verges on pathetic fallacy.

People listen to a music programme for the music and the special information given by the presenter, not to build up a spurious 'friendship' with the "Radio 3 team" or their fellow listeners, as if they're characters in a much-loved soap opera.

Looking at the 'Distinctiveness" scores for the BBC's music radio stations over the past few years, Radio 3 now comes bottom but one (bottom in Q1/2012 and Q2/2013) in several quarters (not easy with BBC's system which tends to level everything). This suggests it is less 'distinctive than other stations' that people listen to. Either it is more like Classic FM (plays classical music of a lighter kind with lighter presentation) or it is more like other BBC radio stations (news, weather, listener participation: tweets, texts emails, charts features, inconsequential chatter). Whichever way, it is not good.

Radio 3 has lost almost entirely any critical perspective. It portrays everything it does as fantastic and everyone who listens as ecstatically happy with it. That is what irks listeners who want greater intellectual sustenance.

[aeolium]

Radio 3 has lost almost entirely any critical perspective. It portrays everything it does as fantastic and everyone who listens as ecstatically happy with it. That is what irks listeners who want greater intellectual sustenance.

Yes, and that obsession with hype is true of the BBC as a whole now. Although it boasts of having no advertising, in fact it is a relentlessly self-advertising organization. It is unfathomable to me why educated people with presumably a high degree of critical acumen have such a low opinion of their audiences that they think they will swallow such guff, rather like the politburos of erstwhile Soviet governments.

[Frances_iom]

...

Radio 3 has lost almost entirely any critical perspective. It portrays everything it does as fantastic and everyone who listens as ecstatically happy with it. That is what irks listeners who want greater intellectual sustenance.

I understood it was only numerology that kept it as R3 as the broadcast content is actually much nearer R2 before that channel decided to concentrate on the under 30's - it has entirely lost its critical faculties - no 'almost' about it

[Ferretfancy]

I have defended RC endlessly on this forum.

Invective? How do you respond when you find stuff offensive, ferretF?

I'm sorry, but I find the BBC attitude to their paying
Audience patronising at the very best, and if HG wants a sensible debate, retweeting a BBC management line on here is no way to get it.

Feel free to delete any posts with too much invective.
Please.
Nobody is listening anyway.

Actually, feel free to close my account, if my style is too confrontational.


(Incidentally, I am glad you found some good music on EC this week)

I seem to have struck a nerve unintentionally, I was not aiming my comment at you, or any other individual. It's just that the collective despair about R3 in general, and Essential Classics in particular, means that the postings get angrier and angrier, and this leads to poor debate.

I remember many years ago attending a meeting about the plans by BBC Television to depend much more heavily on outside production. A film editor asked "What about public service broadcasting' and was told "Don't be sentimental" The break up of the BBC's internal production departments, and the commissioning of programme strands without any real level of oversight higher up the chain, has led to the current disaster. I need hardly add that it was the Thatcher government that forced the BBC to operate in this way, in order to "widen audience choice" We need a return to properly structured departments in which the less experienced production staff can rely on support and criticism from within, and the re-establishment of values that made the BBC unique, but as long as mere head counting fuels every decision, this won't happen.

I've just sent off for the Heifetz / Piatigorsky box, by the way !

[Flosshilde]

How tosh?

Because "the whole audience is 'present at the programme' " in the same way as it was in the past - by listening to it. To paraphrase, as soon as someone starts to talk about 'modern technology' (actually, I believe that tweeting depends on fairly old technology) I want to reach for my gun, especially if they think that everything done with it is a benefit and an improvement on what was done before. Only someone who doesn't think believes so.

[Frances_iom]

...It's just that the collective despair about R3 in general, and Essential Classics in particular, means that the postings get angrier and angrier, and this leads to poor debate....

My own take on the de-intellectualisation (? neologism?) of R3 (and BBC radio in general) is that what we hearing is the rapid Americanisation of the network - the USA style of radio aimed at the uneducated masses produced by the US education system(prob the worst in the industrialised world) plus the assumption, which generally holds good, that repetition of lies or half truths not only sells more products but brainwashes the listeners into an unthinking acceptance of the inequalities built into late capitalism.

[Tony Halstead]

repetition of lies or half truths not only sells more products but brainwashes the listeners into an unthinking acceptance of the inequalities built into late capitalism.

I couldn't have said it better myself!
Totally agreed and seconded.
Many thanks, Frances_iom.

[Tony Halstead]

I don't think you are on a higher plain than Radio 3.

'Plain' or 'plane'?
We should be told...

[amateur51]

I've just sent off for the Heifetz / Piatigorsky box, by the way !

Enjoy!

[Black Swan]

Thanks for your reply, and well put. I have deleted my comments as I have decided that it is easier to deal with comments I disagree with, posts maligning America, the reason for my comment, by ignoring them.

[James Wonnacott]

Am I alone in finding the words "A very warm welcome" particularly insincere?

No. And I feel the same about "thank you very much indeed"

[James Wonnacott]

Why would anyone remain present anywhere they're made unwelcome or even not made welcome?

You tell me.

[teamsaint]

I seem to have struck a nerve unintentionally, I was not aiming my comment at you, or any other individual. It's just that the collective despair about R3 in general, and Essential Classics in particular, means that the postings get angrier and angrier, and this leads to poor debate.

I remember many years ago attending a meeting about the plans by BBC Television to depend much more heavily on outside production. A film editor asked "What about public service broadcasting' and was told "Don't be sentimental" The break up of the BBC's internal production departments, and the commissioning of programme strands without any real level of oversight higher up the chain, has led to the current disaster. I need hardly add that it was the Thatcher government that forced the BBC to operate in this way, in order to "widen audience choice" We need a return to properly structured departments in which the less experienced production staff can rely on support and criticism from within, and the re-establishment of values that made the BBC unique, but as long as mere head counting fuels every decision, this won't happen.

I've just sent off for the Heifetz / Piatigorsky box, by the way !

I'm not sure if the debate necessarily gets angrier, re programming like Breakfast, I think peopel seem to just be sadly resigned to it.
I get much more wound up by the self serving management speak, which is a tool used in the processes you describe,being used on a board like this to justify the damage being inflicted on quality service. I also find the acceptance of trolls and shills pretty hard to take , and goodness knows how FF and her team deal with their "presence".

Poor debate is, I am afraid,mostly provoked by that sort of post. In the normal run of debate on this board, (politics forum excluded perhaps), anybody debating poorly tends to get pretty short shrift, or left isolated, I would suggest.

If any MB member was irritated by my shouty reply to HG's posts (except HG) about emails to R3 and audiences being "present", then I apologise. As FF has pointed out, the BBC management do like to hear us telling them what they want to hear us telling them, and are happy to publicise those contacts. They don't like the critical sort of contact from their audiences.

[mercia]

I think I shall become rather worried about my sense of proportion if the phrase "a very warm welcome to essential classics" leads me to write off an entire three-hour programme. My recommendation would be to turn down the volume for the first 30 seconds of the programme.