A good presenter

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  • AuntDaisy
    Host
    • Jun 2018
    • 1779

    #61
    I stumbled across the 2009 R3 presenters page with bios & photos for R3 presenters, some long lost. (Actually looking for the more detailed Notturno listing for a 2009 TTN, but that's another story).

    Since this ancient thread started with...

    Ian Skelly - Radio 3 Network Presenter

    Ian Skelly loves music. A long time ago he discovered that it contains the wisdom of the world, so he listens devoutly.
    He grew up on the Lancashire coast where the wind blows so hard trees rarely grow very high, they all lean drastically inland and flowers are just a rumour, so listening to Radio 3 became an escape, certainly in the winter!
    He presented his first radio programme when he was in his teens and spent his student years either as a permanent fixture in the student seats at the CBSO under Simon Rattle or working as a reporter for the BBC in Birmingham and then in Leicester and Nottingham.
    Then came seven glorious years presenting daily shows for the BBC in Shropshire and Derbyshire where he began to plant tall trees. A spell as an award-winning travel writer for the Observer took him all over the world and too far out into the Atlantic, then he turned his hand to television production. But having never owned a television he found the process permanently baffling and ridiculous so he set his sights on Radio 3 and the music he loves.
    In the decade he has been with the station he has presented programmes from the break of day to the end of it and introduced every kind of music under the sun. He still hears something new every day.
    He is also a published writer on the arts, sacred geometry and other aspects of what is known as the “perennial philosophy” and is much in demand around the world training BBC presenters and correspondents. He has now planted many trees. They all stand tall against the wind and his garden is full of flowers.
    Catherine Bott

    Catherine Bott grew up listening to the radio (everything from Pied Piper to the Critics, Housewives' Choice to Round the Horne). As a teenage wannabe actress, she did two seasons with the National Youth Theatre, and was then intending to read English at university, but the discovery that she could sing well enough to win a place at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama made up her mind about a career.
    After Guildhall she sang with the Swingle Singers, performing everything from Bach to Berio and developing her gift for improvisation and scat singing. After two years she left to begin a distinguished career in early music. Among her many recordings in this field are Bach's St. John Passion, Monteverdi's L'Incoronazione di Poppaea and Purcell's Dido and Aeneas.
    Nowadays she is spreading her musical wings to perform and record works by Jonathan Dove, Joe Duddell and Michael Nyman: her next cd, London Pride, includes a baroque cantata by Joyce Grenfell and Donald Swann and a number by those well-known Early Music virtuosi Kit and the Widow
    Back in the radio world, Catherine's never stopped listening: after all, long before television dared to put an authoritative, intelligent woman presenter on screen, radio had Patricia Hughes, Sue MacGregor and Listen with Mother's Julia Lang and Daphne Oxenford - inspirational voices. She's made many guest appearances on In Tune, Woman's Hour and various Radio 3 programmes, and is now relishing the opportunity to learn the very different skills involved in presenting The Early Music Show. You can also hear her in occasional features for Music Matters.
    Leisure activities? Well, between singing and broadcasting, she doesn't seem to have a day off at the moment….
    Martin Handley - Radio 3's Breakfast programme

    Martin has combined performing musically and vocally for as long as he can remember! At school and university he was always playing the violin, or the piano, conducting or acting. He's spent most of his life since trying to combine his love of music and theatre by working in opera. He began as a repetiteur in Germany, before breaking off to do a post-graduate acting course at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. But the lure of the opera house proved too great, and he spent three years as chorusmaster for Australian Opera.
    On Martin's return to the UK to fill the same position with ENO, he found the stresses of the job were best ameliorated by working as a broadcaster for the BBC World Service at night! If the 80s was his chorus-mastering decade, then since the nineties Martin's been conducting up and down the U.K. and in Germany, France, Ireland, the USA, Canada, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and in Copenhagen, where he spent two seasons as head of music for the Royal Danish Opera. He also 'sang' Tristan at the first night of David Pountney's production of Wagner's opera there, but that's another story!
    Martin enjoys coaching young singers starting out on their careers, and works regularly for the Jette Parker Young Artists Programme at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, the National Opera Studio, and the Royal Academy of Music.
    Home is also behind a microphone, and for the last eight years, Radio 3 has joined the World Service and become a major part of his working life. After living in a dozen different places in the last-half dozen years, Martin, who can't quite believe he has two remarkably nice grown-up children, feels he's finally putting down roots in the Weald of Kent. That even exends to taking part in the local village pantomime, as long as he still has time to support Oxford United Football Club.
    Donald Macleod

    Donald Macleod was educated in Glasgow and at St Andrew's University where he studied psychology. His musical education is fairly rudimentary: his piano teacher gave up on him at the age of 8, telling his parents that he was wasting their money! Listening to Radio 3 became a habit early on.
    Donald had envisaged a career working with an assortment of exotic creatures in the BBC’s Natural History Unit, but they wouldn’t have him. An alternative path opened up when he got a job at the BBC creating often outlandish sound effects in plays for the Radio Drama department. Never imagining that he would find himself rubbing shoulders with his broadcasting heroes, he began his career as a presenter in 1982 on BBC Radio 3 and for BBC1's 60 minutes as a TV reporter and newsreader.
    Donald was head of presentation on Radio 3 for four years, and in May 1996 he took up the challenge of setting up and presenting Through the Night, Radio 3's 24-hour broadcasting service.
    On Radio 3 he has presented a wide spectrum of music, from early plainchant to the premieres of the latest works by leading contemporary composers, and his work at the Proms has included all-night concerts of classical Indian music, and performances from Korea, China and Georgia. He has presented entire concert series featuring non-Western music from the South Bank Centre in London including Music of the Royal Courts, Spirit of the Earth and World Voice, and has also contributed programmes to Radio 3's Japan Season (1992). For several years Donald presented the live Monday lunchtime concert from St. John's Smith Square in London.
    Over the past twenty years Donald has interviewed many of the world’s great singers, instrumentalists and conductors as well as opera designers and directors.
    Opera is one of Donald’s big enthusiasms, and he has presented live relays of performances from all over Britain and Europe; highlights include three complete cycles of Wagner’s Ring – most recently Radio 3’s marathon Ring-in-a-Day in the spring of 2006.
    In the autumn of 1999 Donald landed what is undoubtedly one of the best jobs in broadcasting when he became the first person to present single-handedly Radio 3’s flagship programme Composer of the Week, whose 60th anniversary he was delighted to celebrate in 2003, making it older than him, and even older than Radio 3 and the Third Programme combined! Donald’s been getting away with it every week ever since, and he still hasn’t been rumbled.​
    Here's the full list of 2009 presenters (with links to the WaybackMachine - slow!)
    Michael Berkeley, Bidisha, Catherine Bott, Iain Burnside, Rob Cowan, Philip Dodd, Lucy Duran, ​Louise Fryer, Charlie Gillett, Penny Gore, Martin Handley, Charles Hazlewood, Isabel Hilton, Stephen Johnson, James Jolly, Aled Jones, Julian Joseph, Mary Ann Kennedy, Suzy Klein, Lopa Kothari, ​Norman Lebrecht, Donald Macleod, Claire Martin, Anne McElvoy, Andrew McGregor, Ian McMillan, Rana Mitter, Sara Mohr-Pietsch, Jez Nelson, Chi-chi Nwanoku, Alwynne Pritchard, Max Reinhardt, Sean Rafferty, Tom Service, Verity Sharp, Susan Sharpe, John Shea, Alyn Shipton, Lucie Skeaping, Ian Skelly, Geoffrey Smith, Jonathan Swain, Matthew Sweet, Fiona Talkington, Petroc Trelawny, Sarah Walker, Robert Worby.

    Comment

    • Serial_Apologist
      Full Member
      • Dec 2010
      • 37823

      #62
      For anyone interested, with reference to Lancashire coastal trees leaning inland in Ian Skelly's entry above, the common phenomenon of weather-shaped or stunted trees and shrubs along windswept coasts and hillsides is known as "wind pruning". ..

      Comment

      • oddoneout
        Full Member
        • Nov 2015
        • 9282

        #63
        Originally posted by Serial_Apologist View Post
        For anyone interested, with reference to Lancashire coastal trees leaning inland in Ian Skelly's entry above, the common phenomenon of weather-shaped or stunted trees and shrubs along windswept coasts and hillsides is known as "wind pruning". ..
        Away from the coast and the effect of saltspray, the lean will indicate the direction of the prevailing wind - although given the increasingly inconsistent weather patterns that may in future not be the case?

        Comment

        • Serial_Apologist
          Full Member
          • Dec 2010
          • 37823

          #64
          Originally posted by oddoneout View Post

          Away from the coast and the effect of saltspray, the lean will indicate the direction of the prevailing wind - although given the increasingly inconsistent weather patterns that may in future not be the case?
          Indeed so. One of the consequences of gales now blowing from unaccustomed directions has been uprooting trees.

          Comment

          • LMcD
            Full Member
            • Sep 2017
            • 8644

            #65
            Originally posted by Serial_Apologist View Post

            Indeed so. One of the consequences of gales now blowing from unaccustomed directions has been uprooting trees.
            Might that be a not-so-veiled reference to recent changes to BBC Radio?

            Comment

            • edashtav
              Full Member
              • Jul 2012
              • 3671

              #66
              Originally posted by Serial_Apologist View Post
              For anyone interested, with reference to Lancashire coastal trees leaning inland in Ian Skelly's entry above, the common phenomenon of weather-shaped or stunted trees and shrubs along windswept coasts and hillsides is known as "wind pruning". ..
              Thank goodness that Patrick Hadley [The Trees So High] was born and lived inland.

              Comment

              • Old Grumpy
                Full Member
                • Jan 2011
                • 3643

                #67
                Originally posted by Serial_Apologist View Post

                Indeed so. One of the consequences of gales now blowing from unaccustomed directions has been uprooting trees.
                Thought I'd fallen into the Stormy Weather forum there...


                ...until I remembered Ian Skelly's Lancashire coastal comment.

                Comment

                • Nick Armstrong
                  Host
                  • Nov 2010
                  • 26574

                  #68
                  The heading of this thread is spot-on when it comes to a name & voice that were new to me on Radio 3: Mark Forrest, who presented the evening concert from Bridgewater Hall yesterday (23/5).

                  More of him please - pretty much ideal, I’d say
                  "...the isle is full of noises,
                  Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
                  Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
                  Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices..."

                  Comment

                  • LMcD
                    Full Member
                    • Sep 2017
                    • 8644

                    #69
                    Originally posted by Nick Armstrong View Post
                    The heading of this thread is spot-on when it comes to a name & voice that were new to me on Radio 3: Mark Forrest, who presented the evening concert from Bridgewater Hall yesterday (23/5).

                    More of him please - pretty much ideal, I’d say
                    Mark is one of the 5 presenters who left Scala Radio recently when it decided to broadcast more presenter-free programmes.

                    Comment

                    • Old Grumpy
                      Full Member
                      • Jan 2011
                      • 3643

                      #70
                      Originally posted by LMcD View Post

                      Mark is one of the 5 presenters who left Scala Radio recently when it decided to broadcast more presenter-free programmes.
                      ​He's been around...


                      ...BBC biog from a few years ago (unspecified*): "He's had a hugely successful and eclectic radio career. He is perhaps best known for his 10 year stint working as drive and then breakfast host on Classic FM, but he has also worked on Virgin, Heart, BBC Radio 5 live, BBC Radio York, Talk Radio, Radio Tees, Metro, Smooth and Magic 105.4.

                      As well as his great love and knowledge of music, Mark is a film buff, a keen gardener and a runner. He looks after goats, sheep and chickens on his farm in the Yorkshire Dales."

                      https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/art...X/mark-forrest

                      I knew I'd heard the name somewhere.



                      *Edit: 2016 perhaps, reading further down the web post.

                      Comment

                      • antongould
                        Full Member
                        • Nov 2010
                        • 8833

                        #71
                        Originally posted by LMcD View Post

                        Mark is one of the 5 presenters who left Scala Radio recently when it decided to broadcast more presenter-free programmes.
                        Do we know if this decision was made to cut costs or because of intense lobbying by Friends Of Scala Radio …. ????

                        Comment

                        • Pulcinella
                          Host
                          • Feb 2014
                          • 11063

                          #72
                          Originally posted by antongould View Post

                          Do we know if this decision was made to cut costs or because of intense lobbying by Friends Of Scala Radio …. ????
                          Scala Radio has Friends?

                          Comment

                          • LMcD
                            Full Member
                            • Sep 2017
                            • 8644

                            #73
                            Originally posted by Pulcinella View Post

                            Scala Radio has Friends?

                            The increase in presenter-less programmes as from early March was apparently a response to falling listener numbers.

                            Comment

                            • Nick Armstrong
                              Host
                              • Nov 2010
                              • 26574

                              #74
                              Originally posted by antongould View Post

                              Do we know if this decision was made to cut costs or because of intense lobbying by Friends Of Scala Radio …. ????
                              "...the isle is full of noises,
                              Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
                              Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
                              Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices..."

                              Comment

                              • LMcD
                                Full Member
                                • Sep 2017
                                • 8644

                                #75
                                Mark Forrest sometimes reads news bulletin on Radio 4.

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