January schedule changes

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

..and indeed why is R3's budget reduced? ... surely it should be increased; cutting two committee's worth of executives could offer £2 -£3 million ... spend it on R3 music documentaries and analysis .... and R3 could do itself a major favour by ditching the CD and Charts ... so 20th Century and sweaty dj style ...

the point about thinking is that it takes time and should be useful; free thinking is just another word for whimsy and self indulgence, some hard thinking would be welcome ... fat chance with the current executive and its last century mind set ... its is no crime to be 'hard' or 'difficult' so long as you are indispensable ... they no longer know how to be that ...

[antongould]

..................... I mean, it would be understandable in the Morning programme which is aimed at the lighter listener and serves as a shopwindow to make a general audience fully aware of the more specialised output in the rest of the day.........

Careful Hon. Guest people, including myself, have been sent to the Tower for less.......

[Anna]

I confess to being rather baffled at the direction that R3 is taking. When I first 'came' to classical music programmes like Discovering Music were invaluable and I would have thought that programmes such as this would educate the new listeners that R3 is after but it seems they are only after the CFM middle of the road listeners who like a nice tune, it's all rather sad isn't it, so many lost opportunities?
(looking forward to Suffolk's analysis and how many times Copland's b/*£+y Buckaroo has been rolled out!! )

[teamsaint]

..and indeed why is R3's budget reduced? ... surely it should be increased; cutting two committee's worth of executives could offer £2 -£3 million ... spend it on R3 music documentaries and analysis .... and R3 could do itself a major favour by ditching the CD and Charts ... so 20th Century and sweaty dj style ...

the point about thinking is that it takes time and should be useful; free thinking is just another word for whimsy and self indulgence, some hard thinking would be welcome ... fat chance with the current executive and its last century mind set ... its is no crime to be 'hard' or 'difficult' so long as you are indispensable ... they no longer know how to be that ...

AND the BBC's income from the license fee is increasing each year, due to the increased numbers of license fee payers.

[teamsaint]

I confess to being rather baffled at the direction that R3 is taking. When I first 'came' to classical music programmes like Discovering Music were invaluable and I would have thought that programmes such as this would educate the new listeners that R3 is after but it seems they are only after the CFM middle of the road listeners who like a nice tune, it's all rather sad isn't it, so many lost opportunities?
(looking forward to Suffolk's analysis and how many times Copland's b/*£+y Buckaroo has been rolled out!! )

well quite. They want to bring more listeners in, but cut the shows that might make that happen.

[Il Grande Inquisitor]

well quite. They want to bring more listeners in, but cut the shows that might make that happen.

It's the obsession with changing to encourage new listeners which gets my goat. Why does Radio 3 need more listeners? How about encouraging your current listeners to, well, listen more?

This blog post, On An Overgrown Path, sums up the dilemma rather well:

http://www.overgrownpath.com/2013/12/classical-musics-big-opportunity-is-its.html

I'm saddened by the loss of Discovering Music, which used to be extremely good. I preferred it when it was a full 45 minutes devoted to analysis, with musical examples. When it switched to being an event recorded in front of an audience, with a BBC Orchestra at hand, which then played the work in full afterwards, it was less penetrating. Surely, this was a more expensive option than the previous Sunday afternoon scenario, where the Beeb was only paying for Stephen Johnson and a CD to illustrate?

[french frank]

I'm not against strategies to attract new listeners. I'm against the lunatic way the BBC/Radio 3 tries to do it. If some people find Radio 3 'inaccessible' or elitist (Fiona Sturges?), perhaps those people should stick to Radio 2? Why should people who find the struggle worth attempting be denied the opportunity because everything that presents a challenge has been surgically removed? How much more expensive was Stephen Johnson + one CD than Matthew Sweet + a dozen CDs? (Is he on holiday or has the programmes also been axed?)

If you start with the assumption that not everyone is going to take to classical music (jazz, world music, poetry, drama) shouldn't you be working on a strategy to target the section of the population most likely to be attracted? Rather than the Fiona Sturgeses of this world?

[Honoured Guest]

Surely the cost per minute of a scripted, illustrated talk (Discovering Music) is greater than that of a programme presenting recorded music (Sound of Cinema)? But the actual change of ouput is that DM is to be replaced by unscripted interval conversation which must be cheapest of all.

On the last two Saturdays, Opera on 3 from the Met poached Jazz Line-Up's 90-minute slot, and Radio 3 kindly rescheduled a shorter 60-minute JL-U in the SoC slot. Next Saturday, normal service resumes for both SoC and JL-U.

[DracoM]

Actually, HG, how about trying to encourage your resident listeners to stay, listen and use?

The capacity of the BBC and R3 in particular to serially patronise, pat on head, shift programmes, axe schedules, and at the same time relentlessly dumb down what is left have become by-words on almost all the major radio-supporting / R3 supporting social media sites. The message from core listeners is unequivocal: if R3 goes on eroding the quality of content, the bases / fixatives which keep people loyal to years of splendid broadcasting, then they now have choice. They will vote with their mouses, find new internet stations that suit, and leave R3 to the R2.5 / CFM followers it is steadily being geared to attract and becoming. The uneasy feeling is that currently under RW's management, we are having an awful lot of moving of deckchairs as a substitute for core deep analytic evaluation of what R3 is about, what it does well, what it SHOULD try to do well, and how it can become an opinion maker and not a nervous flappy, floppy courtier to passing fads. How about Andre Rieu for the New Year's Day concert from Vienna?

Informal poll after poll on this Forum shows that many loyal and enthusiastic listeners to R3 have gradually had their ties to the station loosened by incremental erosion of quality, the axing of the provenly excellent and usable. Remember the 'innovation' of starting of the Evening Concert at 7 p.m. some years ago? How long did that last? R3 opinion resisted, refused, and finally defected. Story now? Evening concert usually starts at 7.30 Tiny point, but significant. R3 management thought it could dictate the same schedule on R3 as R2/R4 - i.e. the 'evening schedule' starts at 7. Well, for the vast majority of R3 listeners who are so many of them performers of various sorts, 7.30 was when concerts began, not 7 p.m. The internet has lethally for R3 management given us all choice, and if that management insists, as it has and continues to do, on routinely dismissing, ignoring the patient but rising clamour, resists the fierce desire for informed, intellectual excellence, thoughtfulness, debate and polemic, and keeps the paths to the musical summits unchoked with herds of war horses in the way, then R3 will simply become a poorly resourced subset of R2.

There are times when cost is more than money.

[french frank]

Surely the cost per minute of a scripted, illustrated talk (Discovering Music) is greater than that of a programme presenting recorded music (Sound of Cinema)?

I don't know how they pay in-house presenters, though I believe indie progs are just given an all-in programme budget.

But the actual change of ouput is that DM is to be replaced by unscripted interval conversation which must be cheapest of all.

To which the response might be "And you get what you pay for."

The end of Discovering Music - surely the most 'educational' programme on Radio 3? - is a real loss. When the BBC messageboards started, DM was a weekly topic of discussion. Gradually it was fiddled about with, expanded, reduced and finally axed. An unscripted interval conversation may be cheap, and may be nigh on worthless, as unscripted radio often is.

[Flay]

But surely the BBC has to save money in this way to help it fund paying for all the celebrity shows?

I watched a few minutes of Sarah Millican tonight on BBC2. What trash!

[Honoured Guest]

But surely the BBC has to save money in this way to help it fund paying for all the celebrity shows?

I watched a few minutes of Sarah Millican tonight on BBC2. What trash!

That's a fallacy. The Delivering Quality First estimated changes to content spend as result of savings 2016-17 were -5.8% for BBC2 (tv) and -4.4% for Radio 3, so by your logic Sarah Millican might have a justifiable claim on the Discovering Music budget.

From some of the comments on this board, I wonder whether everyone understands why the BBC had to make such cuts at all - I mean the new Charter requirement for the BBC to pick up all expenditure on the World Service etc., previously funded directly by Government, with a licence fee fixed in cash terms for the whole term of the Charter. Are these basic facts posted somewhere on this website? Sorry I don't know, I'm quite new here.

[teamsaint]

well in a budget as big as the BBCs, there is a lot of room to manipulate the figures the way you want them.
So in great part , the question is not so much "where is the money being spent" as " What do we want to do with the money".

Looking at this report, I have wondered before what " £164.8 m costs incurred to generate intra group income" actually is.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/annualreport/2013/executive/finances/expenditure.html

Disovering Music is surely (or ought to be) a core programme, on a core station, and at minimal cost in the overall scheme of things .Its axing is to do with how somebody sees the content changing and not cost.

[subcontrabass]

An unscripted interval conversation may be cheap.

Having done such a conversation (with Paul Guinery) some years ago I can vouch for the fact that they are extremely cheap. The presenter is being paid anyway. The guest gets a small fee, which in my case barely covered travel expenses.

[french frank]

From some of the comments on this board, I wonder whether everyone understands why the BBC had to make such cuts at all - I mean the new Charter requirement for the BBC to pick up all expenditure on the World Service etc., previously funded directly by Government, with a licence fee fixed in cash terms for the whole term of the Charter. Are these basic facts posted somewhere on this website? Sorry I don't know, I'm quite new here.

I'm sure everyone does not understand why the BBC has to make the cuts. One does one's best to explain.

The Delivering Quality First estimated changes to content spend as result of savings 2016-17 were -5.8% for BBC2 (tv) and -4.4% for Radio 3

Yes, but comparing the network radio stations, like with like, Radio 1 -2.5%, Radio 2 -2.9% Radio 3 -4% Radio 4 -0% Radio 5 Live -5.8%/ So, of the three music/speech stations, the station with the smallest budget (current and estimated for 2016/17) has to make the biggest savings in actual money too. Radio 5 Live has the second largest service licence budget (after Radio 4) and had some mammoth increases earlier in the decade; whereas as far as one could tell from the not-very-transparent BBC Annual Accounts, Radio 3's budget has been regularly declining in value.

It's not WHY the BBC cuts have to be made (that was in the press at the time) so much as why some (roughly comparable) services are hit more heavily than others, as is implied in teamsaint's post.

You may well think that people here are 'griping' about the loss of valuable programming, but, new as you are, you seem to have absorbed the BBC message very quickly.