Breakfast hijacked by Private Eye?

[Resurrection Man]

I'm not on Twitter, but I wonder, could we bombard them with tweets, all with an agreed text and an agreed time, to flood the system? Those who are responding to their nonsense need to be elbowed aside.

Nice idea but they would soon block and then delete the tweets.

[Nick Armstrong]

Particularly humourous episode of Ed Reardon's week on R4 tonight ....sub plot being parody of Breakfast....

.... yes, wasn't it good?

I had never heard of this, and have now chortled my way through the first half of the episode. Classic

[Barbirollians]

What have you been missing Caliban - this is Series 8 ! It is wonderful .

[Nick Armstrong]

What have you been missing Caliban - this is Series 8 ! It is wonderful .

I know! I just don't ever listen to radio 4, silly me. I see past series are available on CD...

[hackneyvi]

Call me old-fashioned, but once upon a time, people were content with a presenter (with a nice voice) giving a bit of background about the music and simply playing it - no gushing DJ with their endless news updates, texts, tweets, trailers, Your Calls and discussions on sheds, kippers or whatever. Waking up on a dark morning, just me and the presenter and the music, were happy days. I felt I was participating in something that was not just entertaining and educational, but also seemed a beautiful and meaningful way to start my day. The difference between R3 then and now is that no one needed to have such participation relayed to the rest of the world. I think you'll find, hackneyvi, that you're in a minority on these boards about Sarah Mohr-Pietsch being inoffensive and about the 'importance' of hearing listeners' opinions and recollections. My overriding sense is that such listeners do it for the 'thrill' of having their 15 minutes of fame.

So glad to see the comments on this thread about Martin Handley. I too only listen to weekend Breakfast on the increasingly rare occasions he's on, having long ago fled the unspeakably awful Clemency Burton-Hill. Although I've noticed Martin's clearly been told to gush more, there's no getting away from the fact he has a nice voice. One clings onto these vestiges of the good old days!

How do you feel about female broadcasters in general, Carmen?

I am a minority in many regards and holding minority opinions hasn't been of much importance to me for some time. What point does your remark about my minority actually make?

I can see that these are not "the good old days" for many but whilst there are disagreeable people and irrelevant aspects of Breakfast, I think what seems to be missed by your tidal majority is a sense of privacy and reverence. Privacy and reverence are, I think, unnecessary to me in the morning. I revere sufficient quiet to hear natural sound and my own calm mind but I don't revere music. What is agreeable as I face a day of work is music of some variety and interest which catches my ear.

Chat at that time of day is unwelcome in whatever form it takes, musically informed chat no less than a tweet. I'm not attending to AM radio in that way.

Hearing the Arrival of the Queen of Sheeba twice in a fortnight is about twice too often for me, though. I do want variety and there's enough enjoyable music which can be fragmented, if necessary, for the Handel to have a single, annual but not a weekly play.

The world does change but we change, too. It would be interesting to go back 20 years and listen to a morning programme. It would be interesting to go back 60 years - prior to the LP - when presumably any broadcast featuring recordings played sides, indifferentiable from the tracks or chunks which are causing so many here so much grief.

Educational, even scholastic? Whole works not parts. You've got sleeve notes, musicology books, your own CD collections, Spotify. Why do you need radio in the way that you talk about it? May it partly be that it's all you've ever known?

I would repeat only that I am listening to Breakfast Radio 3 every morning where my radio has been silent at breakfast for years. Perhaps, though, my pleasure in it and tolerance of its flaws indicates that I'm simply sub-human?

[hackneyvi]

I had been wondering what it is that I find so tedious about R3's presentational style and Carmen's post absolutely nailed it for me. I don't want to be part of the R3 "gang" (a R1 institution) - oh here comes Rob, I wonder what he's got from his shed today? - where they are all trying so desperately to make me feel included. You know what? It works in precisely the opposite direction. I don't care a fig about anyone else's shed, kipper or musical tastes. All I want is the presenter to be talking to me alone. What is it they tell television presenters - just think that you are talking to one person.

And of course the more they want us all to be included the more the same music gets trotted out - the LCD of musical broadcasting.

This is something I find quite interesting. I never feel that a presenter is talking to me because I know that they aren't. To say that this is what you want is to crave a delusion. To say it's what you feel is to say something which is incomprehensible to me.

The most that I ever feel - and it is sufficient - is that the presenter is addressing him or herself with respect to a person they don't know. Stephen Johnson would be my own best helpmeet here; not presuming foreknowledge of the subject but supposing the capacity to comprehend it if interest is sufficient to listen. This addresses me well but I recognise it may fly very low for many of you.

[Pabmusic]

It would be interesting to go back 20 years and listen to a morning programme. It would be interesting to go back 60 years - prior to the LP - when presumably any broadcast featuring recordings played sides, indifferentiable from the tracks or chunks which are causing so many here so much grief.

They usually used dual turntables, with which you could get a pretty 'seamless' performance. But there were many more live performances, of course.

It is in the nature of humans that we want to change things - we see one thing as 'old-fashioned' and 'irrelevant', just as we see other things as 'cutting-edge' and 'responsive to contemporary needs'. The one replaces the other and, in a generation or so, the people who can remember the old ways are outnumbered by those who have never experienced them and cannot imagine what they were like. And it is this last group that usually has the control. There are good arguments for updating R3, but to create a pseudo-CFM is very risky indeed. It's unlikely to attract the CFM audience (because they're 'regulars'), so has to target young listeners and the uncommitted whilst antagonising the long-term regulars. It is possible (and I'm not usually a conspiracy theorist at all) that a few years' poor ratings will give enough ammunition to close down R3.

[french frank]

supposing the capacity to comprehend it if interest is sufficient to listen

Isn't the problem that much of the time now the supposition that the audience has the capacity to comprehend is almost bound to be correct, so untaxing and superficial are the comments?

One of the unlistenable features for me of a programme that plays a sequence of relatively short pieces is that it multiplies the opportunities for the presenters to talk a lot of nonsense about subjects scraped from the bottom of the barrel; together with my incapacity to be interested in other people's garden sheds, nostalgic memories, favourite tastes/colours/breed of dog/; and my irritation at being informed that I have just listened to Mozart's clarinet concerto when only the CFM movement has been played.

[cloughie]

Isn't the problem that much of the time now the supposition that the audience has the capacity to comprehend is almost bound to be correct, so untaxing and superficial are the comments?

One of the unlistenable features for me of a programme that plays a sequence of relatively short pieces is that it multiplies the opportunities for the presenters to talk a lot of nonsense about subjects scraped from the bottom of the barrel; together with my incapacity to be interested in other people's garden sheds, nostalgic memories, favourite tastes/colours/breed of dog/; and my irritation at being informed that I have just listened to Mozart's clarinet concerto when only the CFM movement has been played.

R3 Breakfast is now CFM meets R5Live! I can tune in to either of those and get the real thing. The real R3 has, it appears, gone forever.

[Richard Tarleton]

Apparently there's a Schubert one-stop shop on the R3 website. Words fail.

Sarah said you could listen to Imogen Cooper, Alfred Brendel and Paul, er, Roberts, talking about various works. Perhaps she corrected herself later. Perhaps there is a Paul Roberts.

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

.where is that Burnside chap when you need him ......

[Carmen]

How do you feel about female broadcasters in general, Carmen?

I am a minority in many regards and holding minority opinions hasn't been of much importance to me for some time. What point does your remark about my minority actually make?

I can see that these are not "the good old days" for many but whilst there are disagreeable people and irrelevant aspects of Breakfast, I think what seems to be missed by your tidal majority is a sense of privacy and reverence. Privacy and reverence are, I think, unnecessary to me in the morning. I revere sufficient quiet to hear natural sound and my own calm mind but I don't revere music. What is agreeable as I face a day of work is music of some variety and interest which catches my ear.

Chat at that time of day is unwelcome in whatever form it takes, musically informed chat no less than a tweet. I'm not attending to AM radio in that way.

Hearing the Arrival of the Queen of Sheeba twice in a fortnight is about twice too often for me, though. I do want variety and there's enough enjoyable music which can be fragmented, if necessary, for the Handel to have a single, annual but not a weekly play.

The world does change but we change, too. It would be interesting to go back 20 years and listen to a morning programme. It would be interesting to go back 60 years - prior to the LP - when presumably any broadcast featuring recordings played sides, indifferentiable from the tracks or chunks which are causing so many here so much grief.

Educational, even scholastic? Whole works not parts. You've got sleeve notes, musicology books, your own CD collections, Spotify. Why do you need radio in the way that you talk about it? May it partly be that it's all you've ever known?

I would repeat only that I am listening to Breakfast Radio 3 every morning where my radio has been silent at breakfast for years. Perhaps, though, my pleasure in it and tolerance of its flaws indicates that I'm simply sub-human?

Dear, dear me, hackneyvi! Sub-human? Defensive or what?! And, please, don't get me started on the state of womanhood today! I'll have you know I'm an unashamed feminist (not many of those around these days) and am all for female presenters, but several of the current crop are as far removed from the great Patricia Hughes as they can get - with their gushing, giggly little girl voices, glottal stops, a hint of the 'street' ever present in their delivery. The very first time I heard Sarah Mohr-Pietsch on the breakfast programme, I couldn't believe my ears and nearly threw the radio across the room when I heard her remark, while noting that Charlie Chaplin had composed the music for all his films, that that made him "a bit of a control freak"! Until that day, Petroc Trelawny had had, in my book, the honour of being most irritating R3 presenter, but now that we have Sarah M-P, Katie and Clemency, I find Petroc almost bearable, and when not required to be 'tweety' and 'streety' himself (e.g. when presenting live concerts, not Breakfast), he's okay, and clearly is a knowledgeable man.

As for my need to have radio broaden my musical knowledge, why ever not? That's one of the joys of radio, to my mind much preferable to trawling through the internet to try and find stuff that might be of interest. Too much sitting down for a start!!!

You can't comprehend what Bax-of-Delights says about wanting the presenter to be talking to him/her alone, calling it a delusion. Of course we know that they aren't really talking to us personally! But again, I suggest it's one of the joys of radio that a good presenter can give the illusion of talking to the individual listener, and the listener can happily give in to that rather lovely illusion. Too bad for you that you can't, but, hey, we're all different!

[french frank]

I sense that it's less a question of male v female presenters as generation (though that isn't the entire story).

Ben Cooper, Controller of Radio 1, has indicated that he looks towards replacing presenters as they become that much older than the average Radio 1 listener. I'd interpret that as meaning that his listeners relate better to their peers, or near peers.

This does present a bit of a problem for a Radio 3 Controller because if the average age of the presenters were 58, a certain number might have exceeded their sell-by date, professionally if not age-wise. But the present group of under 45-year-olds - at one point under 30s - simply seem inexperienced, not very knowledgeable and a bit silly, especially when let loose on their own 'shows'. For Radio 3 there actually is an advantage - even a wisdom - in having listened to classical music avidly for several decades and knowing the repertoire.

I would have preferred presenters either to have served a longer broadcasting apprenticeship in order to develop a good radio technique, or a longer musical apprenticeship in order to advance their knowledge before they became key presenters on Radio 3. Even just a longer life aids the acquisition of Useful Information.

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

well talent matters too; if the choice is personality led presenters with lots of interaction then this is not just a question of behaviours, it takes real talent to engage any listeners on a personal basis [bless Wogan etc] ... there is a way of couching the argument that the present management signally fails to understand the personality of their brand and station ....and keep messing with it ...

i do think R3 is one of the strongest brands in radio but it is a slow moving and deep acquisition by the listener over time ... and it is just not young, the serious audience for anything never is ... and any understanding of polynomial population distributions in the pepsi cola marketing dept should have told them that ..actually what gets me is that their strategy to appear 'accessible' and 'capturing younger audience' is not just daft it is profoundly naff in conception and execution .. ah well let a thousand years pass and the Chinese will have gone home etc

[Carmen]

well talent matters too; if the choice is personality led presenters with lots of interaction then this is not just a question of behaviours, it takes real talent to engage any listeners on a personal basis [bless Wogan etc] ... there is a way of couching the argument that the present management signally fails to understand the personality of their brand and station ....and keep messing with it ...

Both your and French Frank's comments point to the current malaise - management thugs - over whom we seem powerless. Although I appreciate and applaud French Frank's continuing and valiant efforts at dialogue with the manipulators, I'm afraid that, short of civil disobedience, they will prevail. Such are the times.