Diverse questions concerning the BBC classes

1) I mentioned briefly in class the magazine "Spare Rib". Here is more information:

Spare Rib, the most influential women’s liberation magazine of the 1970s

https://archive.org/details/spareribmagazines 

 

2) Several students said they would like to practise their text commentary before the exam. If you would like to know how well you are doing, write a commentary on the following document,  and send it to me by email (john dot mullen at univ-rouen.fr )

BBC Radio 3 at 70: not just Proms and pizzicati

The Guardian, September 2016

It was nearly named after a transmitter. When the BBC was looking for a name for its new music and arts radio station in 1946, for one epoch-changing moment, the Droitwich Programme was a contender. However, a compromise name was found; as the third BBC radio service after the Light and Home services, it was called the Third Programme. It was born at 6pm on 29 September 1946, and its first cries were a light-hearted guide on How to Listen, a talk on world affairs, Bach harpsichord music, Monteverdi madrigals and a new work by Benjamin Britten. Something old, something new, something surprising.

In that week’s Radio Times, the BBC’s director general, Sir William Haley, had set out the Third’s stall to the nation: “presenting the great classical repertoire in music and drama, and so far as they are broadcastable, in literature and the other arts … it will seek every evening to do something that is culturally satisfying and significant.”

The Third Programme shared a certain distaste for popular culture, and expected its audience to come prepared with a level of prior knowledge. For this it was both admired and mocked. One contemporary cartoon showed two working men sitting by the fire listening to the radio. One says to the other: “The pizzicato for the double basses in the coda seems to me to want body, Alf.” Unfair, even then, but you can see how a reputation for chilliness grew up.

Yet from almost the first, while classical music was crucial, it was just one part of the mix. Jazz, poetry and drama were at least as core to the schedule, with new commissions helping the career of the up and coming

From the beginning, the Third and its successor from 1967, BBC Radio 3, had a far more promiscuous and pioneering approach to what constituted culture than its caricatures might suggest. The new, the shocking, the obscure have always rubbed shoulders with the established classics – which themselves were once shocking – quite happily. What changed long ago, though, is the attitude to the audience: love of music and culture, and a sense of curiosity, have replaced the need to come equipped with technical knowledge. Although we do try to help with that with our range of online resources.

Ever since the coronation, commentators have been predicting the death of radio. It was going to be doomed first by TV, then hi-fi, then the internet and now by streaming services. But radio remains a portable, high quality sound‑delivery system; with a tiny investment in equipment, listeners can enjoy a curated choice of both the new and familiar. There is every sign, judging from the last Rajar radio audience figures including our own, which were the highest in five years, that there is plenty of life left in this oldest of broadcasting technologies.

What Radio 3 does is a great example of using public money – the licence fee – as venture capital to expand and enhance classical and other music and push boundaries in words and sound. It is investment in the future of culture and an exploration of the human condition as well as a celebration and investigation of past pioneers. And it allows us to surprise and take the audience to places they never knew they may like. Yes, some of it seems niche, but that’s how innovation starts.

 

If you would like me to comment on your work, send it to me before midnight on the 20th of November. (Do not send me notes, but a completed commentary only).

 

 3) I will try to find a moment to write up an example of one of the commentaries I have presented orally in class. Some people said this would be useful.