BBC radio has excelled itself over the past week

Listening to BBC Radios 3 and 4 over the past week has been like meeting an old friend who, after decades of squeezing into age-inappropriate designer clothes, has suddenly reverted to a sensible wardrobe. It’s a pity that it took the death of our beloved Queen for this to happen, but I’ve been enjoying it while it lasts – because, like the miracle drug that Robin Williams gives his dementia patients in the film Awakenings, this dose of sanity will quickly wear off.

Radio 4’s long-prepared tributes to Elizabeth II were, by the BBC’s standards, remarkably impartial. Even Saturday’s Today programme rose to the occasion. The Catholic journalist Catherine Pepinster’s Thought for the Day, on the humility of true kingship, was magnificent – better than the Archbishop of Canterbury’s heartfelt but characteristically messy contribution on Friday.

The only slightly annoying interview was with Tony Juniper, chair of Natural England, who hailed our new king as ‘the world’s greatest environmentalist’. Maybe so, but what about His Majesty’s enthusiasm for homeopathy, sacred geometry and other fantasies? Juniper was one of Charles’s scientific advisors. Perhaps this wasn’t the right time to ambush him on the subject, but I hope someone does it soon.

The Queen Remembered was a survey of a 70-year reign expertly boiled down to eight 15-minute episodes by James Naughtie. He was so even-handed that I almost missed the flamboyant bias of his time on Today. (If you want to hear the BBC in full mourning, track down Naughtie’s reports from Washington when George W. Bush was re-elected in 2004.)

Although the script wasn’t short on clichés – ‘Coronation Day became the stuff of memories’; ‘borne along by the river of history’; ‘A Thoroughly Modern Monarch’, etc – they didn’t matter because the underlying analysis was so subtle. But don’t ask me to summarise it, because I was too distracted by the archived interviews, which among other things demonstrated how drastically the voices of the establishment changed during the Queen’s reign.

The 14-year-old Princess Elizabeth’s vowels, which turned ‘happy’ into ‘heppy’, were antiquated even in 1940, and it wasn’t until the last decade of her life that the traces of this essentially Victorian accent became hard to detect. Then there were more recent oddities. We heard from an ancient Ted Heath, almost asphyxiated by his attempts at RP, and from Tony Blair, recorded I think when he was still PM, who made an equally peculiar noise with his random glottal stops.

What we didn’t hear, of course, was a recording of the Queen mimicking her prime ministers. Churchill, Macmillan, Wilson, Heath, Thatcher, Major, Blair, Boris: no shortage of material there. My guess is that, being essentially kind and not snobbish, she resisted the temptation to skewer the low-hanging fruit of the lower middle class – unless, like Ted, they were self-important. Sir Roy Strong recalled that, when he was showing the Queen round the V&A as its young director, she said: ‘You’re getting too pompous.’ I’m sure it didn’t rankle at all, and that Sir Roy was just being affectionately candid when he told us that Her Majesty was ‘not intellectual at all, tone-deaf, not interested in the arts’.

The most touching reminiscence came from Lady Pamela Hicks, happily still with us, who accompanied the new Queen on the flight back from Kenya after her father’s death. Elizabeth waited until the last minute before dressing in black and, looking out of the plane as it touched down, noticed that her own car had been replaced by much grander vehicles. ‘Ah, they’ve sent those hearses,’ she said – a horribly poignant observation when you consider what was happening at Balmoral as the programme was being broadcast.

The Queen Remembered was the sort of thing that Radio 4 has always done well. Radio 3, by contrast, has screwed up most of its output over the past 30 years, so what a relief that for a few days it gave us programmes simply entitled A Sequence of Music that left no room for diversity-obsessed banter and gimmicks. None of them featured the late Queen’s favourite classical music because, so far as I know, she didn’t have any.

It goes without saying that some derivative and clumsy music by Clara Schumann was shoehorned into the sequences. Like every other musical institution in the western world, Radio 3 subscribes to the cult of Clara. But don’t accuse me of misogyny, because we also heard several pieces by an infinitely more gifted composer, Judith Weir, who has just become the first Master of the King’s Music since Sir Arnold Bax. Her anthem for the Platinum Jubilee, By Wisdom, combined her own dancing syncopations with the harmonies of Sir Hubert Parry. It bodes well for the Coronation.