So very Upper?

[John Wright]

Can it be possible? When I was young the RT cost 2d [old pence, 240 to the £1] So one purchased 120 of the RT for one pound. Over two years of the mag that is now full of things I don't want to read for £l.40 a week.

That's inflation as never seen before, surely.

Nah. When I was very young a good (working class) wage was £5 a week. Nowadays it's £500 a week. So about 100 times.

[teamsaint]

Can it be possible? When I was young the RT cost 2d [old pence, 240 to the £1] So one purchased 120 of the RT for one pound. Over two years of the mag that is now full of things I don't want to read for £l.40 a week.

That's inflation as never seen before, surely.

I take it you don't like a day out at the football then ?

Old days....... division 1.terrace admission, same as going to the pictures (say £7/10) today.
nowadays Premier league seat.........anywhere from £30 upwards.

[Serial_Apologist]

I take it you don't like a day out at the football then ?

I'm all for the internationalism and fraternalism that Association Football represents - and of course prepared to pay for it.

Not

[Lateralthinking1]

Broadly, I think it is probably true. The first category you mention though was very nuanced. Both sides of my family had the same education - hardly any - and money - not a lot. Culturally they couldn't have been more different.

Father's - Labour, council houses, light working class accents, basic clean manual jobs, average to low IQs, interests in towns, window shopping, the soaps, films, musicals, more ITV than BBC, always the Light Programme. Mother's - Voters of all parties, mostly Conservative, privately rented accommodation, London, almost cockney, accents, one or two office jobs in the City but mainly hard manual labour, a mixture of very low and well above average IQs, interests in news, sport, nature and the countryside, nearly always BBC television, always the Home Service, more radio than television.

The idea - it seems ridiculous now - was that there was a better class with better standards, a better education, a better voice. The aspiration was not pretentiousness but to improve with those as an ongoing yardstick, albeit with further development for the modern era. It wasn't expected that non-financial equality would be brought about by the elites showing their true colours and dragging everyone down to their level. I find it insulting and downright depressing.

The above pen pictures are forerunners to acute distinctions in today's lives. We have the chavs and the hugely aspiring and the just ordinary getting by. Decision makers don't get it. They didn't experience it or did and quickly went into denial. Interestingly, people were more likely to flit between television channels than radio stations. Class could have been a factor. Radio came in earlier when class was fixed. TV coincided with supposed "class breakdown". Then, those who listened to the Home Service had a personal interest in the war. They tuned in to find out how relatives were doing in the battlefields and, in London, would they be bombed again? Thirdly, it was the difference between having push button and a dial.

You mention the '30s and the '40s. They were of course a very short space of time. By the late 1970s, the soundtrack in the sixth form common room at my middle to upper class school was provided by Emerson Lake and Palmer and Rush. Truly dreadful. The very same people were becoming proficient on the violin or the euphonium, just in case they weren't going into big business. Now the CEOs meet at old boy awaydays with "Smile Like You Mean It" by the Killers playing in the background. With hindsight, their principal interest had always been the zeitgeist. Find a bandwagon. Sell loads.

I am staggered by how people of all backgrounds with power and wealth today often have such dire cultural tastes. Mostly the movers and shakers don't "do" radio and television. They are too busy and too important. When they do, you can find them listening to Radio 1 in their forties or watching Desperate Housewives and The Only Way is Essex. They want fun and something to mock. They don't feel they need "teacher". Mostly, they can't stand criticism. In that way, those inputs are entirely safe.

[Segilla]

and a complete Radio Times from 1946 can be studied here

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/classica...allery.shtml?1

Bless you John Wright for posting the BBC Radio Times site. I have had a good read of the pages which brought back so many memories.
How civilised the BBC used to be!

[antongould]

Yes many thanks to John for that very, very interesting link.

Very early in the page one introduction to the Third we have from the DG

"...BBC has to feel .........that it is providing for all classes of its listeners...." so perhaps there was just a little "class" in the genes!

A couple of other points how would the founding fathers have felt about 2012 Breakfast with their principles that ..."...the listener was expected to select their programmes in advance ........giving it his(!) full attention".
And again there were to be No News Bulletins - No Fixed Schedules

Times have indeed changed......

Although maybe not so much it all started with the Goldberg Variations!

[Vile Consort]

Crikey! There were concerts on the Light and Home more high-brow than some of the fare currently being served up on R3.

It does seem to feature repeats in rather a big way - e.g. Man and Superman taking up almost all of Tuesday evening, then repeated Wednesday evening and the Jean-Paul Sartre play repeated within a fortnight. And I am not sure about the programme of contemporary French poetry at 6pm on a Monday.

I notice there was quite a lot of Bach played on the harpsichord. That rather surprised me - it must have been rather avant-garde at the time. Of course, these days we are more enlightened - nowadays we hear Bach on the piano, because we know how much he would have enjoyed writing for it - grrrrrr!

[Flosshilde]

Melvyn Bragg writing in the New Statesman on the cultural and class changes started in the 30s and 40s - " For the BBC, it seemed the three tiers of class were in the genes......the Light Programme, the Home Service and the Third Programme became the very replica of lower, middle and upper.

Of course, this is the opinion of Baron Bragg of Wigton, the son of Mary Ethel, a tailor, and Stanley Bragg, a stock keeper turned mechanic.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

Can it be possible? When I was young the RT cost 2d [old pence, 240 to the £1] So one purchased 120 of the RT for one pound. Over two years of the mag that is now full of things I don't want to read for £l.40 a week.

The real problem is that they haven't sacked the attention-seeking Alison Graham. I would willingly pay much more than £1.40 per week not to stumble upon her arrogance.

[Lateralthinking1]

That Radio Times is fascinating.

- Far greater emphasis on the classics - plus
- No saturation news - plus
- Content suitable for Third Programme included on other stations - plus
- More serious talks - plus
- Far more live broadcasts - plus
- Far more regional material - plus
- Far more music on the Home Service - minus

1. Great care has gone into it. What comes across is kindness. The promotion of education, time and space for children, discussions about peacekeeping, programmes to explain increases in pensions. I'd think there was 1% of what we get given today on war, violence, relationship problems and drug taking and 5% of the vulgarity. More happiness as a consequence.

2. The Reith opposition to silos - a fact that I discovered only recently and a surprise - is obvious here. The objective is that the Third Programme is most definitely not for listening to from morning to night. Programmes should be chosen ahead of listening time. Is there just a little something in this that could be applied positively today, both in scheduling and the expectations of listeners?

3. Arguably if you reduced the number of national stations from seven (plus) to three, you could get close to meeting the standard. Does the filler add or detract? How would it be better distributed? Personally, I think that 4X has gone a long way towards making up for the problems on R4 and 6music is doing the same for the limitations of Radios 1 and 2.

[salymap]

Remember the 1946 edition shown was only a year after the war finished. We needed the Third, we needed Hilda Tablet and the Stephen Potter/Joyce Grenfell series. We were still surrounded by bomb damage, rationing went on for several more years. I seemed to live in a 'grey' world and the radio, discovering classical [and other] music, five years later the Festival of Britain, were live enhancing for me and my friends.

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

Kultur and the british middle and upper classes .... nah just greeks and buggery ..... i like many, acquired my acquaintance and appreciation of European culture from the great diaspora of Jewish intellectuals and also from African Americans ... with some help from Lawrence Huxley and Orwell ... and if it had not been for the early programming of Jazz on the Third on a Saturday afternoon it might have taken decades more before i hit upon Bach and Beethoven etc .....

in fact i must say that the great fascination of Kultur for me was how very un-British it all was ....

[John Wright]

All this discussion about classes of listeners, and classicfm-ication, I was thinking today that there is now a 'class of listener' that didn't really exist back in 1946.

This new class of listener, is probably the most abundant today. And his/her existence spawned the creation of Classic FM.

And I am one of this new class of listener.

I'm self-employed, work I suppose part-time. I'm out attending to customer 3 or 4 days a week, and in the daytime my listening habits (Radio 3 or ClassicFM) are restricted to 'in car' and often are as follows:

8.30-9.00am maybe catch 20 minutes of radio play

12noon - 1.00pm maybe catch 20 minutes

2.00pm - 2.45pm maybe catch half an hour of radio as I drive from Coventry to Stratford-upon-Avon, or to Leicester, or to Birmingham.

Now, you see, that limited amount of listening is hardly of great value really, it's never going to be 'quality' time, snatches of symphonies and quartets, maybe a whole concerto, and I might not find out who the performers were, indeed might not find out who the composer was.....

Does it matter if I listen to Radio 3 or Classic FM? I don't think so. But it is a pity that those stations are becoming indistinguishable, in style and content, even on those days when I'm sitting at home!

(I've also posted this on the other thread)

[antongould]

Does it matter if I listen to Radio 3 or Classic FM? I don't think so.

I am also part of your new class and I think it does matter - even dipping in to CFM you get masses of adverts and although I may be biased I find the Radio 3 presenters very much better!

[teamsaint]

I am also part of your new class and I think it does matter - even dipping in to CFM you get masses of adverts and although I may be biased I find the Radio 3 presenters very much better!

true. Despite all the things that annoy about the R3 DJ's, everything is preferable to the non stop egomania of presenters of most other stations.
Or the politicians friends on R4.