January schedule changes

[DracoM]

I can think of the odd PG that might be disbanded, but to be serious for a moment........

Formulaic programming pleases / benefits the bean counters and neurotic managers looking over their shoulders. It inevitably leads to playing safe, keeping stables of war horses fed, keeping in the frame the same performing groups / same 'safe' composers one knows won't frighten the punters. It's box ticking.

Erm.....Glock? Even Kenyon at times?

All very well having nightly live concerts, but the orchestras scheduled to do so also have boxes to tick for the same reasons i.e. keep the punters coming in, and they too are reluctant to subsidise much out and out innovation.

Often the same with the drama / speech programmes - the usual suspects who meet each other on the circuits cosily spouting i.e Free Thinking. Playing safe. Plus plays that have already gained success on the London etc stage in radio re-working and chopping back on The Wire. For someone like me who lives hundreds of miles from that, those re-workings are welcome, BUT very often the experimental, the truly innovative can get shut out. A subsidised station like R3 inside the BBC should be bolder in patronage, bolder seeking out and pursuing the next wave.

The whole ethos of R3 as I see it day in day out is playing safe, pretending to be innovating, bigging up the standard as if it was new / thrilling or whatever, but actually projecting an image [at least to me] of being deep in the DNA scared to back hunches. Hear and Now is being squeezed, Discovering Music axed and a paltry and merest fig leaf retained to spare blushes. No-one is fooled. And if you are a station that SAYS it is after wider audiences, you do NOT get audiences fully formed, you have to educate and lead them. Axing Music Matters, or Discovering Music is actually diminishing and undermining that very remit.

There are indeed BBC PG's that could go. eg WHY the BBCSO when there are four or so very, very fine orchestras in the capital, and outside it the CBSO, the brilliant BBC Phil and Halle in Manchester, and the constantly surprising BBCSSO? Why the BBC Singers when in almost every genre in choral music there are now ensembles with expertises and genre-specific skills? I fully approve of the Young Artists Scheme, so long as they are encouraged to play not just the standard repertoire but to reach out and dare.

For me, Radio 3 gives all the signs of a station that is flapping about in search of an idea, scared to evaluate what it is actually doing, and very clearly has no sense of mission any more. It educated me, it opened eyes and hearts. I simply do not see it doing that any more. Witness the number of loyalists who admit to drifting off to sample and stay with other internet stations. And where do the hungry young go now to feed their curiosity? I've tried talking about R3 to the young musicians I know well, and they look at me pityingly. R3 never crosses their horizon unless it's doing Dr Who Proms. How sad is that?

Do Lord Patten / Tony Hall sleep easy knowing what has happened to their flagship high end station in their lifetime?

[teamsaint]

I can think of the odd PG that might be disbanded.

I do sometimes wonder if more use could be made of the PGs, DracoM's targets notwithstanding!!

They ARE a huge (and worthwhile)investment out of a budget of £50m.

Perhaps another discussion.

[DracoM]

Indeed, teamsaint, another time, another thread.

[Honoured Guest]

That's very interesting. I didn't *know* that - only about the review proposals. I simply inferred the DQF proposals: given the membership of the BBC Executive, it's quite impossible for them to be close enough to individual services to make definite proposals, but it made sense for the Director of the Proms to make out a case for reinvestment in the Proms. What is strategically contradictory is that a case could also be put for retaining quality by reducing the quantity of the ever expanding concerts/events - in line with what Radio 3has done. I'm fairly sure there was at least one DQF submission that suggested that (I think FoR3 responded in that vein - must check).

I fear I may have misled you! When I said I "knew", I was intending simply to acknowledge and assent to your previous comment that the DFQ Summary of BBC management's key proposals - Radio 3 came from Roger Wright. I don't have any special knowledge!

I understand your point that, in a sense, one cannot be said to have completely retained quality if one has reduced the quantity of concerts / events. But I think it's a semantic point and that the actual strategy is to safeguard the quality of each of a reduced quantity of concerts / events. It's similar to the Arts Councils' talk of funding excellence - fund fewer better. I know this raises hackles but that's the strategy isn't it? If you follow the other path of maintaining the quantity of live and specially recorded music and drama, but with a reduced budget, then the output is compromised and loses its distinctiveness which is the BBC's principal purpose.

Without drilling too deeply into detailed costings, I'm sure you're right about special treatment for The Proms and BBC Performing Groups. Similarly, you can quite easily identify the content beneficiaries of internal re-investment or ringfenced financial support in each of the other BBC services, television and radio. That was the nub of DFQ, to determine which distinctive content to produce with high quality and how to present it to the widest audience who might appreciate it.

[french frank]

They ARE a huge (and worthwhile)investment out of a budget of £50m.

The content budget is much less than that - £38.3m last year, and not all of that is controlled by the ... controller. It includes an allocation for shared expenses like news gathering.

If they cost 20% of budget, that would mean using them for 5 hours a day, between 6.30am and, realistically, 4.30pm. Take out the Lunchtime concert and you're left with 9 hours of which 5 would be BBC PGs. As that's not really on, logically the alternative is that they are 'underused' and recognised as expensive to Radio 3 (and they have their own separate budgets - almost £30m in total last year). They can't have been too short of £10m out of R3's budget last year, if they took £7.9m in 2009/10.

[And yes, we did suggest that cutting the Proms would be better than further cuts to Radio 3. As far as I know, all our suggestions were ignored. Over the years this makes a score of approximately BBC = 10,000 FoR3 (& Radio 3) = 0]

Nil carborundum ...

[Honoured Guest]

I'm sure you discussed this throughly at the time, but here's a link to the BBC Performing Groups Report.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/aboutthebbc/insidethebbc/howwework/reports/bbcperforminggroupsreport_johnmyerscough.html

[Alain Maréchal]

Presumably there is little chance of R3 broadcasting a concert like this

http://www.francemusique.fr/emission/le-concert-contemporain/2013-2014/hector-parra-et-raphael-cendo-joues-donaueschingen-12-23-2013-00-00

most mondays at peak times.

[Roehre]

Presumably there is little chance of R3 broadcasting a concert like this

http://www.francemusique.fr/emission/le-concert-contemporain/2013-2014/hector-parra-et-raphael-cendo-joues-donaueschingen-12-23-2013-00-00

most mondays at peak times.

Then you have to tell'm first what Donaueschingen means

[Old Grumpy]

The content budget is much less than that - £38.3m last year, and not all of that is controlled by the ... controller. It includes an allocation for shared expenses like news gathering.

In that case get rid of News from Radio 3 - more money for music at a stroke! Excellent!

[french frank]

In that case get rid of News from Radio 3 - more money for music at a stroke! Excellent!

What are you saying? How is Radio 3 to fulfil its Public Purpose of 'Sustaining citizenship and civil society' if there is No News!

(That said, our submission to the SCCMS junked the idea of 'public purposes' altogether, and replaced them with 'Public Commitments'.)

[Old Grumpy]

What are you saying? How is Radio 3 to fulfil its Public Purpose of 'Sustaining citizenship and civil society' if there is No News!

(That said, our submission to the SCCMS junked the idea of 'public purposes' altogether, and replaced them with 'Public Commitments'.)

I would have thought playing music certainly fulfilled "Sustaining civil society". Citizenship is another thing altogether. I am not sure the news does either!

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

alas we are the wrong audience .....

[Quarky]

alas we are the wrong audience .....

If I correctly understand your comment, Calum, that goes to the root of Radio 3's problems.

There isn't just a single group of people that listen to Radio 3, enjoying all the different facets of its offerings, the deciding factor of whether to listen being the artistic quality or intellectual content of the programme. There are different groups , enjoying (?) different programmes, and some may be broad minded, but many will be narrow minded, and wouldn't dream of listening to other forms of music. Unfortunately for society as a whole, it cuts deeper than that, and the life styles, and approach to life, of these groups may be completely different from one another.

Certainly for the recent changes to the weekend schedule, it seemed to me that the "new" Saturday night would appeal to a completely different set, from the Opera set that previously inhabited Saturday night. But I would assume that the new schedule wasn't attracting a large enough audience, and so we appear to have gone back to the previous formula.

[Bax-of-Delights]

If I correctly understand your comment, Calum, that goes to the root of Radio 3's problems.

There isn't just a single group of people that listen to Radio 3, enjoying all the different facets of its offerings, the deciding factor of whether to listen being the artistic quality or intellectual content of the programme. There are different groups , enjoying (?) different programmes, and some may be broad minded, but many will be narrow minded, and wouldn't dream of listening to other forms of music. Unfortunately for society as a whole, it cuts deeper than that, and the life styles, and approach to life, of these groups may be completely different from one another.

Certainly for the recent changes to the weekend schedule, it seemed to me that the "new" Saturday night would appeal to a completely different set, from the Opera set that previously inhabited Saturday night. But I would assume that the new schedule wasn't attracting a large enough audience, and so we appear to have gone back to the previous formula.

The sad truth of the matter is that R3 no longer knows what its audience is and - more alarmingly - the management is either so brow-beaten or lacking in-depth knowledge that it is frightened into seeking a middle-of-the-road audience that will, at least, stay with it intermittently if not permanently. The word "elitist" has surfaced any number of times during the last few years of battling with the changes and, I would argue, this goes to the core of the fear that has pervaded R3 and the BBC in general. Lowest Common Denominator is the over-riding factor in much of the BBC's output these days and although there might be the occasional nod and curtsey to a more erudite and demanding audience we can see that what stalks the corridors of Broadcasting House (and the outer reaches of its Empire) is a desperate need NOT to display one's education (in the widest possible sense) in any kind of overt way.

The emphasis has subtly changed from the music towards the presenters so that on the R3 website you will more often see a glam-shot pic of the presenter - especially if it is a woman - rather than anything that is relevant to the content. Bearing in mind that the average age of R3's audience is over 45 (and has been such for many years) and the wesbite will be constructed and fashioned by a younger generation (borne out partly by the average "liker" on R3's Facebook page being in the 25-35 age bracket) one can begin to see how the tail is beginning to wag the dog. One could argue that the "construct" of R3 is shifting inevitably not because there is a demand for MOR music and "interaction" with the audience but that the visibility of R3 within the broadcasting spectrum now demands that it fits in with the social media world that drives the tweeters and facebookers.

[bb]

This should never have been posted on Platform 3.

New Statesman - Discovering Music is sometimes the best thing on Radio 3 - but is it about to be axed?



New Statesman - The sad decline of BBC Radio 3 into Classic FM without adverts

Merry Christmas to you all! We have just been discussing the January schedule changes to BBC Radio 3 over Breakfast! The BBC Trust sees Radio 3 listeners as a subset of Radio 4, whilst others see Radio 3 as Classic FM without adverts.

As most Radio 3 listeners also listen to Radio 4, on occasion, Radio 3 listeners can be regarded in this way. As both Radio 3 and Classic FM principally broadcast classical music on the radio, Radio 3 can also regarded as Classic FM without adverts (apart from when the BBC advertises its own programmes)!

I suppose that 'Free Thinking' could also have gone on Radio 4, and it is not something which the Friends, for example, have ever really embraced. Would you prefer more serious programmes on Radio 3, french frank?