Why we must defend Radio 3 from threatened cuts

Who doesn’t love Eurovision? All that razzmatazz. The ghastly frocks and gloopy pop songs, the false bonhomie and bare-faced bias when the voting comes around. It’s an irresistible annual event, guaranteed to put a smile on your face and provide the pretence that we are all one happy European family.

But all that showbiz comes at a cost (€6.2 million, and rising), with the host country’s broadcaster expected to cough up about one-third of that. What might have to be lost by the cash-strapped Corporation in the next year, or curtailed, to ensure that we put on the biggest and best show ever next year?

The BBC budget has become a hot topic in recent weeks. Cuts are in the air, with the forthcoming review into the licence fee still not announced because of the current parliamentary hiatus. At the same time formidable commercial rivals such as Netflix, Disney, Amazon, Audible and HBO are nipping at the Corporation’s heels, if not tearing at its collar, forcing it to compete on unfair terms as a publicly owned broadcaster without commercial funding.

We should never take for granted what the BBC provides for its audiences in the UK. Nor should we forget how significant its cultural role is abroad, helping to sustain that idea of a free-thinking, balanced nation which can encompass TV adaptations of Shakespeare and the Proms, as well as Downton and Strictly Come Dancing.

BBC Radio has always been television’s poor relation, required to fight harder each year to justify itself, and none more so than its signature highbrow station Radio 3. It is more expensive than some of the other stations because of its emphasis on live performances of the classical repertoire, but also of world music, jazz and folk, as well as its willingness to spend money on developing experimental programmes such as Between the Ears.

Its audience (1.99 million) is smaller than the more fashionable Radio 6 Music (although its listening figures have fluctuated very little for decades), with an average listener age of 57 years. But it does a lot more than 6 Music, with its schedule of speech programming and its support for young musicians and fledgling academics through its commissioning of new works (a minimum of 30 each year) and its New Generation Artists and New Generation Thinkers schemes.

Radio 3 is definitely not for everyone. But that’s not the point. Its ambition is not to reach as broad an audience as possible but to be as broad-ranging as possible, introducing its loyal listeners to music they never expected to hear on the station (Shirley Bassey this morning as I write, for instance), while drawing in new listeners with programmes like Classical Fix and Freeness. Music has become its core business, promoting young artists, new composers and an amazing archive of past works, but its speech programming is fundamental to its character. Without programmes such as The Essay, Free Thinking, Drama on 3, Sunday Feature and Words and Music, Radio 3 would be just another classical-music station. The talks and experiments with sound are Radio 3’s USP, its brand, its export value; the envy of broadcasters throughout Europe and beyond. And yet it’s precisely these programmes that are most under threat whenever decisions about cuts have to be made because they serve a niche audience.

When the Third Programme was created in 1946 as a complement to the existing Home Service and Light Programme, its remit was ‘to seek every evening to do something that is culturally satisfying and significant’. It had to be international, taking in programmes from Europe, live where possible. Above all, its listeners were asked to be ‘alert’, to meet the performers halfway, not to have the radio on as background noise but to sit down and listen.

This, of course, has become an outmoded, out-of-date model for radio, or should we now say audio. Manufactured sound and broadcast speech are available non-stop and pretty much anywhere we choose to go. But in 2020, during the first wave of the pandemic, new ways of listening were discovered as we suddenly had more time with nothing to do and nowhere to go except our own armchairs. The idea of sitting down and listening to a live concert as if you were in the concert hall itself has been rediscovered as an experience, as has the pleasure of listening to a play from your living room rather than in an expensive front-row seat in the West End.

Many of the BBC Board’s members, who make the ultimate decisions about where cuts in the Corporation’s output will have to be made, are not from the broadcasting or media world. Their experience is in the commercial environment. This makes it difficult for stations such as Radio 3 to argue the case for expenditure on experimental programming for its service to a niche audience. All the more reason for those listeners to remain on the alert for any changes, or threatened cuts, prepared to write to the papers, their local MPs, the Board itself with a brief outline of why Radio 3 matters. Never let it go.