The RW Legacy

[DracoM]

I think many were taken aback by RW's decision to jump ship. He has been the longest serving Controller of R3, possibly with the highest profile and possibly having had one of the bumpiest rides.

I am genuinely interested in his legacy i.e. what things both good and less good do Forum contributors see RW as having brought to / lost from R3.

[Thropplenoggin]

'Style' over substance. Trolley dolly/air head/hairdresser-style presenters offering a thin gruel of badinage in lieu of sound knowledge.

An excess of news, news headlines, front pages, and other features I associate with Radio 4.

A playlist that has degraded to such a degree that it is no longer fit for purpose.

A dearth of quality programming.

Butchering of once consistent fare (e.g. Lunchtime Concerts now an awful hotchpotch and, of course, EMS, which I had only recently discovered )

I could go on but I'm depressing myself and surrounded by sharp objects...

[french frank]

I'm genuinely puzzled, because Nicholas Kenyon was the controller many saw as 'popularising' Radio 3 (Paul Gambaccini, Brian Kay) and when Roger Wright took over there were many good things - think CD Masters and Discovering Music. The mornings had Morning Performance with coverage of music festivals.

But the children's programme, The Music Machine (a Kenyon innovation which had some of the charm of Pied Piper), was replaced in RW's time by Making Tracks, which was then dropped; CD Masters morphed into Classical Collection, and then Essential Classics; Discovering Music was dropped. At one point all the live evening concerts were dropped too. Fifteen years is a long time to be running a station, but Radio 3 does seem to have undergone a tremendous amount of programme and presenter change: some slots have had two or three changes. There have been two distinct strategy changes without obvious benefit. Many ideas have been launched with a great fanfare and subsequently dropped quietly.

My impression is that there have been a lot of high profile headline-grabbing 'good' things (good from a publicity point of view, at least), most of which have been very temporary. Too much of the high audience listening times have been dedicated to seeking a 'wider' (i.e. popular) audience. Specialist programmes have been diluted or axed. It will be interesting to analyse what he inherited and what he left for his successor

[aeolium]

I was trying to think of some positive aspects, and for me valuable improvements compared with the Kenyon era have been the Listen Again feature, combined with being able to listen in HD sound quality. Perhaps those keen on world music will feel he has at least improved its profile. There were some good special features and occasionally ambitious drama programming, like the broadcast of the two parts of Goethe's Faust.

The worst aspects for me have been the composerthons; the steady deterioriation in weekday morning music programmes (recall that for some years of his tenure the fine CD Masters programme occupied part of the morning schedule); the increasing tendency to replace concert programming with what I would call magazine programming - i.e. rather than a carefully compiled concert programme of works related at least by genre, a succession of unrelated pieces; the reduction in serious programmes of musical analysis; and the further downgrading of the spoken arts.

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

i think he did good things for jazz and world music in his early years but gave way to the constant barrage of auto immune deficiencies that is AUNT committees in full flood ...

sometimes brave proms

the thons were a mixed bunch but worth it overall imho, as was the pop up in Southbank Centre .... but he has the CHAT stuff all wrong and badly so ... it is not a betrayal of the old geezers like me so much [of course it is] but a profound loss of faith in the identity and integrity of the station and its future .... on This Week last night Portillo announced the end of the License Fee ... and no one argued ...

[doversoul1]

To me, the worst aspect of Radio3 in the last few years is the obsession with accessibility.

This seems to be the base of almost every programme now. It may be a general trend in society but RW could have stood up and said that accessibility was not the same as availability and it was availability of a wide range of music that was what Radio3 should be concerned.

[amateur51]

Many good examples of the good and the bad. I'll just throw in this obession with consistent time slots which has resulted in the careful thoughtful work that goes into planning a 'live' concert being thrown to the wind and the broadcast concert's being chopped up to fit the time slot

Barbarians!

[MrGongGong]

To me, the worst aspect of Radio3 in the last few years is the obsession with accessibility.

There is nothing at all wrong with accessibility
Making music available AND accessible is exactly what the BBC should be doing.
BUT accessibility doesn't have to mean "lite" versions of supposedly "difficult" things
get the context right and the right people communicating about it then all music can be accessible

People need to know where to go and also to feel that the are allowed to go there !

[french frank]

for me valuable improvements compared with the Kenyon era have been the Listen Again feature

That wasn't RW's improvement, though I suppose he could have refused to allow it for Radio 3 ... And remember that the first audience-broadening strategy was to introduce/raise the profile of a range of non-classical music - all of which 'specialist' programmes were on Listen Again before any of the classical programmes were made available. This was an added irritation because of the schedule times when no classical programmes were being broadcast (e.g. from 9.30pm onwards), but neither were they available on LA.

And incidentally, that was the period when Classic FM's reach shot up to 6.7m. I'd hazard a guess that the reason why it has declined in subsequent years is because Radio 3 was beginning to make classical programmes available on the iPlayer.

[aeolium]

That wasn't RW's improvement, though I suppose he could have refused to allow it for Radio 3...

No, I realise it was a BBC initiative not one of RW's. I was just trying to think of aspects of R3 that were better in RW's time than previously, and this was one of the few that came to mind (even though it was merely an improvement to the way in which one could listen to R3, not its content).

[amateur51]

There is nothing at all wrong with accessibility
Making music available AND accessible is exactly what the BBC should be doing.
BUT accessibility doesn't have to mean "lite" versions of supposedly "difficult" things
get the context right and the right people communicating about it then all music can be accessible

People need to know where to go and also to feel that the are allowed to go there !

excellent boldness MrGG

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

All Radio 3 has to do to make music accessible is to play great works from early music to the present day, during the day and in the evening, and to publish in advance what they are going to broadcast. It's a simple formula that enabled many of us to access a wide range of music before the rot set in.

[MrGongGong]

All Radio 3 has to do to make music accessible is to play great works from early music to the present day, during the day and in the evening, and to publish in advance what they are going to broadcast. It's a simple formula that enabled many of us to access a wide range of music before the rot set in.

I'm sorry but that really isn't enough.
I'm sure you have met many people who would be passionate enthusiasts for the music that R3 plays BUT feel that, for whatever reason, it somehow isn't for "people like them" ?
Not everyone reads.
Some people need to be taken to a place and "given permission" to be there.
If the gatekeepers keep people out then we need to get rid of them.

What's a "great work" anyway ? ..... surely an opinion rather than a fact
I want people to introduce me to music that I would never listen to
to music I might have dismissed because I had a bad experience with it in the past
and to music that I know nothing about.

Reading from a list of things to be played assumes that the audience knows what they like and knows what they want to listen to. For that we have iTunes, Spotify and CDs

[teamsaint]

excellent boldness MrGG

Well quite.
Shows great enterprise.

Re gongers excellent post # 13, part of the answer lies in looking to successful models from the past.

[MrGongGong]

Re gongers excellent post # 13, part of the answer lies in looking to successful models from the past.

Are you suggesting that "great works" of the present are models of "great works" of the past ?
Hummmmmmmm