The Doctrinaire stupidity of the BBC

[french frank]

I agree. There is no reason at all that "breakfast shouldn't be composed of generally shorter works.
There is plenty of the day left for longer , complete works. 21.5 hours.

Yes, but ...

The morning 'drivetime' programme on Radio 3 was introduced by N Kenyon in 1992 (as On Air). It has always had 'generally shorter works'. That's because people have been doing all the things Flossie specifies at that time in the morning (getting up, bathing/showering, getting breakfast, eating breakfast, getting the kids up &c &c &c) since long before Radio 3 or the BBC came into existence.

But the pieces become shorter and shorter and the chat becomes longer and more trivial. And the programme as a whole is a cross between Radio 2 and Classic FM with a bit of the old R3 thrown in for nostalgia's sake. It's banal and derivative and is expressly catering for people who don't listen to Radio 3 but who perhaps might if it's made as much like R2/CFM as possible.

It really isn't hard to see why people who have been brought up able to concentrate for longer than three minutes and who are used to intelligent conversation dislike it: it isn't aimed at them.

And yet ... the period between 6.30am and midday historically - and this applies to most radio stations - is the time of heaviest radio listening because it's the time when people want to listen and are available to listen. In the case of Radio 3, I would estimate that well over half the total audience would like to listen then (the breakfast time show alone once hit 900,000, plus, conservatively, 200k-300k new people tuning in for the following programme).

But that half of the audience isn't being targeted and the other half isn't listening anyway, preferring Today or not listening to radio at all.

This is why - sorry to spell it out again - 'redefining' the morning audience of Radio 3 is not only unfair on the rest, it also won't work because they've been trying this trick one way or the other for 20 years.

[teamsaint]

Yes, but ...

The morning 'drivetime' programme on Radio 3 was introduced by N Kenyon in 1992 (as On Air). It has always had 'generally shorter works'. That's because people have been doing all the things Flossie specifies at that time in the morning (getting up, bathing/showering, getting breakfast, eating breakfast, getting the kids up &c &c &c) since long before Radio 3 or the BBC came into existence.

But the pieces become shorter and shorter and the chat becomes longer and more trivial. And the programme as a whole is a cross between Radio 2 and Classic FM with a bit of the old R3 thrown in for nostalgia's sake. It's banal and derivative and is expressly catering for people who don't listen to Radio 3 but who perhaps might if it's made as much like R2/CFM as possible.

It really isn't hard to see why people who have been brought up able to concentrate for longer than three minutes and who are used to intelligent conversation dislike it: it isn't aimed at them.

And yet ... the period between 6.30am and midday historically - and this applies to most radio stations - is the time of heaviest radio listening because it's the time when people want to listen and are available to listen. In the case of Radio 3, I would estimate that well over half the total audience would like to listen then (the breakfast time show alone once hit 900,000, plus, conservatively, 200k-300k new people tuning in for the following programme).

But that half of the audience isn't being targeted and the other half isn't listening anyway, preferring Today or not listening to radio at all.

This is why - sorry to spell it out again - 'redefining' the morning audience of Radio 3 is not only unfair on the rest, it also won't work because they've been trying this trick one way or the other for 20 years.

"Breakfast" has changed in its content in the relatively few years since I started listening. I seldom give the programme more than a cursory listen now.
Personally, I don't see the issue in having a slightly different emphasis in the programming, in terms of music, between 6.30 and 9.00, and the rest of the day.
It perfectly possible the progamme 2.5 hours of interesting, diverse, high quality music, where the length of those pieces work well for those many people who are on the move, whilst still providing quality for those who have the time to give more concentration.
Perhaps my perspective is wrong. I tend to think that if the show works, the audience will find it.The BBC don't seem to see it that way though.

[Stillhomewardbound]

<< No, for me it's the banality of the chirpy inconsequential prattle coming out of the presenters mouth like some form of verbal diarrhoea plus the emails, tweets and Your-bloody-call. >>

The word that always comes to my mind is 'ianity', so I thought I better look up the definition before applying it. Here goes:

Definition of INANITY. 1: the quality or state of being inane: as . a: lack of substance : emptiness. b: vapid, pointless, or fatuous character : shallowness

Well, if that doesn't perfectly describe the presentation on 'Breakfast on 3', I'm not sure what would.

Frankly, I think I'd have more funny listening to a parrot with a repertoire of one catchphrase.

xxxx

ps. and to those who will cavil that I don't have to listen to this drivel if I don't want to, I frequently don't and waste much of my time in the morning turning the radio down for the linkage and up for the music. That Radio 3 editors deem I should be spoken to like an idiot does not, by default, make me one.

[Domeyhead]

I'm glad the thread is veering back to the original subject. Many of the half million or so listeners to the Breakfast programme are captive because they are driving, so feeding the cat is not exactly an option. And on the hour or half hour as every driver knows you can run the channel select up and down the FM frequencies and you will find nothing but news bulletins -some local , some national, but all badgering to tell the listener "things". And out of that mass of "news" you will be hard pushed to find a bulletin as inane and innapropriate as BBC Radio 3's. It doesn't satisfy and it doesn't inform - it just exists in a box-ticked nether ground of the listener being told a series of random bits of (usually unpleasant) information all apparently of great import but which do not leave the listener better informed than before, merely itrritated depressed and dissatsified.
So why do it? The BBC is free from needing to increase listener ratings to survive, so by what conceit do its programme controllers and editors spend their time trying to emulate their competitors in an effort to increase their own listener figures while at the same time denying the license payer a choice of styles? Where once I had Classic FM and a more measured, possibly esoteric usually less frenetic style of music, I now have two Classic FMs - the real one and a poor saccharine mediocre "Radio two-and-a-half" desperately trying to beg borrow and steal listeners from any other radio station in a pathetic attempt to justify its existence. Classic FM does what it does far better than Radio 3 trying to do Classic FM, so if that's the kind of programme I want I am going to go to the real thing, not the tribute show. As the RAJAR figures show quite clearly that is the judgement that literally hundreds of thousands of former listeners have made.
And the Controller's response? "Let's be even more like Classic FM. Plus a bit of Radio 4! And a bit of Radio 2! And how about a bit of wild and wacky Capital FM style joshing with the listener too!" . As my kids would say in one word - fail.
The case against tweeting, "your call" and the rest has been made in other threads but the reason I started this thread was specifically at the pointless stupidity of a news interval that on top of all the other nonsense doesn't serve anybody - not tweeters, not emailers, not facebookers, let alone the long suffering listener who just wants to listen to an adult programme without being patronised. Every thirty minutes whatever happiness and joy has been achieved by the music is trashed on the bonfire of half a dozen or so pieces of unhappy information that simply set the mood back to less than zero.
Ah joy, that happiest of emotions - it takes a long time to attain that level of happiness - yet the brekfast programme assumes it can be turned off and on again like a light switch. every thirty minutes.
As I said before the news bulletin is like being doused with a bucket of slop every thirty minutes. Does BBC Radio 3 Breakfast even have a raison d'etre if the mood of the listener is actually more depressed than if he/she had not even turned on the radio at all?

[doversoul1]

teamsaint

I tend to think that if the show works, the audience will find it. The BBC don't seem to see it that way though.

The BBC thinks the same but what is different is the audience the BBC seeks, as ff says:

and the chat becomes longer and more trivial. And the programme as a whole is a cross between Radio 2 and Classic FM with a bit of the old R3 thrown in for nostalgia's sake. It's banal and derivative and is expressly catering for people who don't listen to Radio 3 but who perhaps might if it's made as much like R2/CFM as possible.

I think we should stay focused on this point rather than the length (types to a certain extent) of the music that is played on the programme. This is not the audience Radio 3 should be targeting.

[teamsaint]

teamsaint


The BBC thinks the same but what is different is the audience the BBC seeks, as ff says:



I think we should stay focused on this point rather than the length (types to a certain extent) of the music that is played on the programme. This is not the audience Radio 3 should be targeting.

well, as I said, perhaps my perspective is wrong....I guess I am looking at it from an "If I were doing it " perspective, rather than from what the BBC seem to want.
It just seems a pity. I happen rightly or wrongly, to see that slot as an opportunity to present the music in a way which fits in with what a lot of people are doing at that time of day, and part of that, but only a part, would be the length of pieces played. Another part would be not treating the audience like idiots. Another part, for me would be the specialist classical chart, but , I appreciate lots of people don't like it. Another part might be hourly news, but not every 15 mins, since this really does interfere with quality music programming.
But you are no doubt right that the BBC really want to convert listeners from other stations. It's bad enough going after the R2/CFM audience....Imagine if they ever target the commercial local radio audience for R3.!!Spire FM with tasty Baroque chunks.

[Resurrection Man]

Post 79...eloquently put, Domeyhead.

Your sentence regarding feeding the cat from the car, however, nearly made me spill the morning coffee in the keyboard ! Visions of a cat running down the M1 behind a car eating morsels flung from out the window .........

[Stillhomewardbound]

I've written about this before, but the primacy of 'News' in the radio schedule is down to its perceived value as a lead tenet of public service broadcasting. It is a pure form of information and therefore proposals that feature it prominently in their schedule are deemed as being 'worthy'.

Radio 3 got its quarterly news breaks on the breakfast sequence not because there was a clamouring cry for it but because it would have been deemed to be crucial to the serivce ethos. By the some token, this is why we suffer weekly death by a thousand trails because that most tedious and nullifying of processes is enshrined in the corporation's programming committments, under sub section something or another which reads, more or less '... we the BBC commit to inform the listeners about the output ... and [contibutor added sub text] it means we'll have worn down the customers' resistance down for the day when we start the Ads. That's also why we've turned the entire presentaion set-up to a rolling info-mercial format, in readiness for the time when we starting losing space to the Ads. We'll still be covered then!'

[kernelbogey]

Post 79...eloquently put, Domeyhead.......

[JFLL]

Oh really, this is such rubbish. News items, in newspapers as well as other media (or even before other media) have always been called 'stories'. Only someone steeped in paranoia would think that they were 'fictions'. They might be partial, they might have a particular point of view, but they are still about something that has happened - they aren't concocted entirely from the writer's imagination.

Well, thank you for those kind words, FH. Actually, I wasn't saying that I thought news items were fictions. I was trying to say (not too well, apparently) that a story is a fiction, and that that is why 'story' is the wrong term to use, because the news, particularly from the BBC, should be about facts. The word 'story' is symptomatic. My point was about the use of language -- nothing that wasn't said much better by Karl Kraus years ago, admittedly.

'News items have always been called 'stories'.' Well, since 1892 in America and 1942 in Britain, according to the OED, which has an interesting if ominous quotation:

1976 Task of Broadcasting News (B.B.C.) ii. 17/1 ‘Story’ is only a journalist's professional jargon for an item of news. The proper place for it is a news bulletin.

That's just where it shouldn't be, in my view. The proper place for it is in a story-book. But enough of paranoia ...