I was rummaging through my books the other day and came across a pamphlet published by the BBC in 1965 and entitled, disarmingly, A Few Ideas. It comprised six talks given on concepts of then current scientific interest with the aim of revealing the scientific method in action, and included, for example, C.A. Coulson (Rouse-Ball Professor of Mathematics at Oxford), O.R.Frisch (Jacksonian Professor of Physics at Cambridge) and Roger Blin-Stoyle (Professor of Theoretical Physics at Sussex). Not much dumbing-down there then, and such talks being broadcast was not exceptional; it was what one had come to expect.

Then there was the Ideas and Beliefs of the Victorians series, in 48 parts, all reprinted in The Listener; that was truly a remarkable undertaking – has there ever been a longer series of talks on the BBC devoted to one such major theme? But I recall also the discussion broadcast in 1948 on the subject of the existence of God, between Bertrand Russell and F.C. Copleston, SJ (the text appears in Russell's Why I am not a Christian). No concessions to listeners were made on that notable evening, and no one said, 'Well, that's all we have time for tonight'. The programme ran long over time and was allowed to do so without interruption.

Does one look any longer to Radio 3 for this sort of thing? I think not: the programming is now so heavily corseted and constrained that there seems to be little space left for much with novelty value, and when the schedulers do break out there is a sense of recklessness about it, as with the six-day Beethoven Fest we are promised for the summer – a hundred hours of the master might prove to be more than even the stoutest heart can cope with (what next – Vivaldi's 400 concertos?, Mysliviczek's thirty operas?). And regrettably it is also the case that speech programmes now get only the smallest look in in a schedule almost exclusively musical.

Of course, one realises that now R3 broadcasts every day for four times as long as the old Third and that there is thus a great deal more time to be filled up, but the predictability of each day, while having its benefits, also has its limitations.

My own wish for a changed R3 would have rather less music, certainly much less of the dross that has progressively crept in, and rather more talk. The country cannot be lacking in men and women capable of speaking clearly and informatively about their chosen fields; let them be given some air time to tell us what they do and what they think, and not used simply to fill in the gaps during concert intervals.

There have been many occasions in my life when I have wanted to be able to share with others my experience when, for example, I have heard a piece of music or heard a particular performance of a piece of music, read a novel or a poem or seen a painting and been deeply moved by it. This, of course, is not possible. All one can do is draw others' attention to whatever it happens to be, hoping that perhaps it will be as significant for them as it was for oneself. Shouting from the rooftops has not proved to be very effective.

At a time when I am finding it increasingly difficult to reconcile my beliefs with those demonstrated by the society in which I live, a society itself, which seems to me to be built on the shifting sands of uncertainty, I have found a recently published book which, with its wisdom, assisted me to understand the causes of my difficulties and, consequently, to helped me to deal and come to terms with them. That book is Professor Richard Hoggart's, Mass Media in a Mass Society, published by Continuum.

To quote the dustjacket:

"Hoggart takes a number of aspects of mass society today – celebrity worship, youth culture, broadcasting, and a decline in the proper use of language – and considers the paradox that the ready accessibility of information does not automatically lead to a greater comprehension of our world. Information itself is inert and only leads to knowledge if it has been ordered and assessed. He considers the slow but uninterrupted dissolution of old beliefs, the erosion of traditional pillars of authority throughout a century and a half of sustained intellectual criticism and the resulting corruption of language.

"The central focus of the book is an examination of broadcasting as the prime disseminator of mass information. Hoggart makes an impassioned argument for Public Service Broadcasting in its truest form, and sees the Public Service ideal as coming increasingly under attack from today's BBC broadcasters who seem to believe that the overwhelming function of television today is to entertain." (I would include radio in the last paragraph)

There are many wonderful insights in the book, one of which, quoted below, is of special relevance to Radio 3. As with all quotes taken out of context, it needs to be read within the context of the writer's thesis. All I can do is to draw your attention to this book and encourage you to read it…

"When the Third Programme began, not long after the war, well-educated people were pleased. Together with each week's issue of The Listener, it provided good nourishment for the mind and, for Britain, an exceptionally wide introduction to the best music after those six long years, especially if one was by then working in the outer provinces.

Its early history can seem rather comical now, especially in some of its statements of aims, such as the one which claimed to be seeking to recreate something of the best conversation in universities' senior common rooms. To that some academics responded that in their senior common room the conversation was chiefly about mortgages, family and football. Certainly the records of the channel's management meetings in those early days have an old-fashioned, almost dustily academic, air. But not always; that channel gave Dylan Thomas and many another their early opportunities; there are accounts of penniless poets going along from Fitzrovia to Upper Regent Street confident of a warm greeting and perhaps the offer of a programme or some other kind of help. The Third Programme experimented with new kinds of work unique to its medium. Its music coverage was unashamedly and rightly high-level; it did not talk down; it did do much to increase the appreciation of classical music.

"Radio 3 still does some good work, but now more jumpily than when it was born. Once again the old assurance has gone, the fear of being called highbrow and elitist. In a recent conversation on air, the channel controller uttered the usual reductive defence; that no distinction of worth can automatically be made between pop music and Mozart. Each can be excellent in its own way and has its place. We are back with Beethoven and the Beatles. From the controller of Radio 3 that sounds ominous.

"Jazz has long had its place on the channel and there's an argument for including something of the best in popular music. But from the conversation on that occasion the impression came that many fewer distinctions were being made, that the flood-gates to a wide plain were being opened. One can – it has been done here – argue that a mix of types of programme is central to the BBC's purposes, especially to give us all, the listeners and viewers, the chance to see that the world is more varied and inter-sting than we habitually think. But since there are already four other channels, ranging from one which offers mainly pop music through a resolutely light channel to one heavily concerned with sport (5 Live) to Radio 4. At such a time Radio 3's role as a channel of the intellectual and imaginative life should be reinforced. Yet today light classical and film music are parts of Radio 3's regular output; that is dilution."

(Quoted, with kind permission, from Richard Hoggart, Mass Media in a Mass Society – Myth and Reality, Continuum, 2004, pp 128-129)

The BBC has claimed, in its Annual Report, that Radio 3 "has never been bolder in its scheduling or the ambition of its output". I want to examine the validity of the claim with reference to R3's non-musical arts provision, and especially its output for the 'spoken arts', drama and poetry. In this first article I will give a personal view of what was achieved in this area during the period from the start of the Third Programme to (roughly) the end of John Drummond's stint as Controller.

I will separately consider classic drama (by which I loosely mean that vast repertoire from the time of ancient Greece to 1945), modern drama including the radio play since 1945, poetry, and other significant programmes on the arts. I have relied heavily on Humphrey Carpenter's book on the Third Programme and R3, The Envy of the World, on my own memory as a listener to such programmes from the early 1970s, as well as some internet resources, listed below.

The Third Programme's dramatic output in the first 10 years of its existence was prodigious. Leaving aside for the moment the newly commissioned works, the Third managed to broadcast productions of: the Aeneid, Aristophanes'The Frogs and Lysistrata, Euripides' Alcestis, both parts of Goethe'sFaust in a new translation by Louis Macniece (this for the Goethe bicentenary in 1949), Racine's Britannicus – in the original language! – and numerous productions of the English (and Anglo-Irish) classics: much of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Sheridan, Shaw, Wilde, Synge, Yeats. There continued to be a flow of high quality productions of European drama under the Third's successor, R3: much of Chekhov, Ibsen, Kafka adaptations, Büchner, more Goethe (Egmont and Torquato Tasso), Schiller, Molière, Kleist, Lorca.

What was the value of these productions? There were certainly periodic complaints that they were too dull, too long, too obscure or difficult and aimed at too restricted an audience. In the case of the ones I heard it was a chance to hear the texts of some of the best imaginative works of the last two and a half millennia, brought to life in generally intelligent (i.e. not gimmicky) productions with fine radio actors. Shakespeare especially seemed ideally suited to the radio: located in the landscape of the imagination, the words mercifully free of the histrionics, or just plain shouting, which the stage often provided and which was so despised by Hamlet. Above all it was an opportunity for the text to speak for itself, without the baggage of critical comment with which it was loaded in school or university studies.

From the very first, contemporary drama and the radio play were vital elements in the Third's output. Poetry and drama were blended in some of the earlier plays: Louis MacNiece's Dark Tower (with music by Britten) and Dylan Thomas' Under Milk Wood, performed just after the poet's death. Thereafter the Third, and R3, continued to perform and commission many significant plays by writers such as Pinter, Arden, Orton, Frayn, Fry, Plater, Barnes, Terson, Barker, Caryl Churchill, as well as foreign dramatists such as Dario Fo, Ionesco, Dürrenmatt, Genet, Arthur Miller. But the highlights of modern radio drama, for me, were the plays of three writers: Beckett, Stoppard and Giles Cooper.

Beckett, whose first radio play was All That Fall in 1956 found the medium highly congenial for the development of his dramatic style. A keen musician, he used words and non-verbal sound effects with the precision of a musical score to create the dramatic effect he required. He wrote several more radio plays, and even his later plays for stage showed the influence of his writing for radio: e.g. the use of musical dynamics in Not I, in which the disembodied Mouth soliloquises. In Beckett's work, the radio play becomes a form of chamber music.

Stoppard's first radio play was broadcast in 1964, before Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead made him famous. Despite that fame, and the stage and TV commissions it brought him, he continued to write for radio up to 1991. The plays show all Stoppard's usual wit and verbal dexterity as well as his versatility. In If You're Glad I'll be Frank elements of the older Third Programme drama-with-poetry are combined with the new 'absurd' theatre as a woman employed as the 'speaking clock' becomes embroiled in a telephone love affair. In The Dog It Was That Died the era of cold war espionage is lampooned as a double agent commits suicide following a career of pointless multiple bluffs in an environment of eccentric buffoonery.

Giles Cooper is little known now but had a high reputation at the time of his bizarre death, stepping out on to the tracks from a fast-moving suburban train (he probably would have survived on today's railways). His plays take apparently unexceptionable situations which develop in extraordinary ways. In Unman, Wittering and Zigo a new teacher at a private school slowly comes to the realisation that the pupils he teaches brought about his predecessor's death. In his most powerful play, Mathry Beacon, a group of people are put in charge of a rocket deflector in an isolated location during wartime; they lose communication with the outside world and carry on their duties long after the war has finished. The tensions arising from their isolation result in a horrific denouement, charted with remorseless logic and dark comedy, constantly accompanied by the eerie sounds of the machine.

Whereas the medium of television encourages the use of realistic representation, the medium of radio has drawn playwrights to present 'reality' as if through a distorting prism, showing life in extreme, absurd, and surreal tableaux, where the unpredictable and the extraordinary are ever-present.

Poetry was at the heart of the Third Programme's arts provision. Much of the classic drama (and some of the modern drama) had a strong poetic content. There were also dedicated poetry readings and longer performances, such as those of Milton's Paradise Lost and David Jones' difficult and allusive long poems In Parenthesis and The Anathemata (the latter thought by Auden to be the finest long poem of the century). One great strength of the poetry output was the chance to hear modern poets reading their own poetry – Eliot, Pound, Dylan Thomas, MacNiece, Stevie Smith, Betjeman among others. One interesting programme later broadcast on R3 was a comparison of poets' reading styles – including recordings of Tennyson, Yeats, Auden and Lowell.

Though less airtime was accorded to poetry on the new R3, with some of it moving to the 'speech' network, R4, the quality remained high. An increasing emphasis was given to foreign poetry in translation: Lorca, Neruda (memorably read by Auden), the poetry of Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Brodsky (including a fine programme in which the Russian versions of the poems were read followed by their translations). There was above all a recognition that more time should be given to hearing poetry spoken rather than hearing people talk about it: poetry has been well described as that which cannot be paraphrased without loss.

There were of course lots of programmes which were not 'spoken art' at all but talk about art, or ideas, or events. Quite a lot of this, as now, was ephemeral and forgettable – and I have duly forgotten it. But there were excellent programmes, either of a conversational nature or more usually a single person talking knowledgeably. Examples of these include: the series of radio portraits of well-known artists by Bertrand Russell in the 1960s (some repeated on R3); Thomas Mann's talk on Goethe; George Steiner on Büchner. But the set of programmes which to me showed R3's arts coverage at its best was the series of talks given by Isaiah Berlin on Romanticism – taken, apparently, from a largely unscripted set of lectures. Here one felt in the presence of a great mind at the peak of its powers, presenting a succession of original perceptions, in clear and cadenced prose, in his characteristically nervous and urgent style of delivery. Berlin made no assumptions about his audience, except that they should contribute the informed interest and intensity of concentration that he believed the subject deserved. It was unforgettable radio.

The current debate about quality, accessibility, elitism, audience ratings is not new – it dates back to the very early years of the Third Programme. The Third's programming – especially its speech programming – was regularly satirised and criticised for being esoteric, stuffy, pretentious, downright dull, obscure or meaningless. The critics have sometimes been right at the heart of BBC management, as when Ian Trethowan condemned those who objected to the dismantling of the old Third at the end of the 1960s as wanting a 'private playground for elitists to indulge in cerebral masturbation' – the latter phrase presumably being a BBC management euphemism for intellectual activity.

But the Third and R3 have been fortunate that for most of their history those in charge of them have rejected these attacks and continued to provide a complete arts coverage. These stewards have generally possessed a holistic view of the arts which opposed the idea that they should be shut up in separate boxes and ghettoised – a view which would have been understood, and shared, by Goethe, Schumann or Auden.

They have appreciated that beyond the straightforward patronage that R3 provides by commissioning new works (whether music or plays), there is an indirect and perhaps more valuable contribution that radio makes to creative life by broadcasting the best imaginative work of the ages. The narrow emphasis on music (and accessibility) that has characterised the last decade has been at the expense of this essential provision. R3 is still a fine station, but whereas it has been at its best a broad river fed by many tributaries, it has become of late a narrow stream, with the spoken arts little more than a stagnant backwater choked with weeds and flotsam. The situation is retrievable, but the will needs to be there.

National Sound Archive Catalogue

International Radio Drama website

Samuel Beckett's Radio Plays (paper)

To elaborate on this at more length:

1. Not Enough. According to figures from the Annual Report for 2002-3 there are 204 hours of non-music arts output (just under 4 hours per week) and 106 hours of drama (2 hours per week). My own recent calculations of the spoken arts provision have suggested it is under 5 hours per week so it is possible that items such as interval talks are included in the BBC calculations. Either way, 5-6 hours per week is a feeble allocation, and cannot possibly do justice to the rich heritage of the spoken arts. Even as recently as the early 1990s, the provision was around 10 hours per week.
2. Not Good Enough. Inadequate as the provision is quantitatively, it also falls far short on quality. Drama is particularly disappointing. The plays broadcast in the slot mysteriously entitled 'The Wire' all too often betray poverty of language, thinness of characterisation and incoherence of plot. There is frequently a gritty realism, often conveyed in menacing regional tones (not that these accents need be menacing - it seems to be a cliche of modern radio drama that they usually are); and sometimes a fantastic implausibility of scenario which yet fails to illuminate our present condition in any meaningful way, unlike in the best plays from the Theatre of the Absurd. The longer dramas are also uneven but at least sometimes reveal an ambition and concern for language usually absent from The Wire: for instance, a fairly recent play featured a modern plot in which all the characters spoke in verse. It didn't entirely come off, but it was an interesting idea. The longer form of the drama can also still feature – though all too infrequently – impressive classic or 20th century plays, such as a recent production of Miller's Death of a Salesman. The current head of radio drama, Jeremy Mortimer, is reported as believing that the 'single drama' on radio is becoming a thing of the past; that, increasingly, radio drama will be dominated by a 'happening' or an 'event' – similar, perhaps, to the 'Monsoon Night' evening broadcast earlier this year. Whatever the merits of the 'event' production as a concept, it is certainly odd to learn that the man in charge of radio drama doesn't believe the play has any future on that medium.
3. Too much Talk about Art, not enough Art. A majority of R3's spoken arts provision consists of people talking about art, rather than performing it – pre-eminently in the regular Night Waves slot. Sometimes, undeniably, this can be of a high standard: the Sunday Feature and John Tusa's conversations with artists were impressive examples of how discussion about the arts can be interesting and illuminating. But in the 'Night Waves' format which usually features a few critics talking about a recent production or book, it is almost always ephemeral and instantly forgettable. And in the 'Lebrecht Live' format, with a 'critic' making a controversial – and usually poorly thought out - claim simply to get some reaction, it is the absolute nadir.
   
   There should be a space for intelligent discussion about the arts, but it should always be a smaller space than that assigned to performance. Spoken poetry, for instance, has almost vanished from the schedule – why?
4. Lack of Ambition and Commitment. The lack of ambition is revealed in the small amount of time devoted to the spoken arts, the short duration of one of the two drama slots, the virtual absence of spoken poetry and the excessive proportion of talk about art. It also shows in the kind of works that tend to be chosen for performance in the longer dramatic slot, the increasing infrequency of productions of classic drama in translation (whether from the European heritage or from other cultures). It can be seen in the failure to attract playwrights of the calibre of Beckett, Pinter, Stoppard and Giles Cooper to the medium. It reflects in the generally weaker quality of casts for dramatic productions compared with those of past decades (to give a few examples, the fabulous cast for Stoppard's radio play The Dog It Was That Died, the cast for the production of Büchner's Death of Danton, and that for the adaptation of Bulgakov's Master and Margerita). The key players in R3 seem unwilling or unable to commit the resources required to its dramatic productions. More seriously, they appear not to trust the intelligence or the appetite of the R3 audience for high-quality and challenging drama.

What Is To Be Done?

All the problems outlined above need to be addressed concurrently and quickly. My own suggestions to the BBC are as follows:

• Increase the spoken arts allocation from its current 5-6 hours per week to a minimum of 10 hours per week, with effect from Spring 2004.
• Set high standards for the quality, and production of radio drama. A poor new play should not displace a proven classic. Writers of radio drama should demonstrate exceptional talent or promise. Ideally, those with proven expertise in radio drama should read and advise on 'borderline' scripts. At least one drama production per week should come from the classic or 20th century repertoire – or a dramatic adaptation of a classic work.
• Ensure that the time devoted to the performance of art always exceeds that devoted to art discussion or chat.
• Be ambitious and serious in your commitment to the spoken arts. Do not underestimate either the intelligence of the R3 audience or its hunger for the great 2500-year inheritance of drama and poetry in world civilization. This is nothing less than the architects of the Third programme, and its first successors in R3, would have expected.

My own weekly schedule, for what it is worth, would include: one full-length drama production (3 hours); a second shorter drama slot (1.5 to 2 hours); a 1-hour poetry slot, dominated by spoken poetry; the remaining arts provision varying, but including specials such as the Sunday Feature, programmes similar to Discovering Music about particular works of art, talks by distinguished artists or thinkers, programmes on philosophy, the history of ideas, language, architecture and the visual arts. I would abolish Night Waves in its present form.

I can foresee three primary objections to these proposals: (i) Other music programmes must suffer to allow for the extra scheduled time for the non-musical arts (ii) Where will the resources come from to provide the quantity and quality of performance? (iii) Why can't much, or all, of this provision be on R4. the 'speech' station? I answer as follows:

1. It is obviously true that music, the only other component of R3's output, must be the victim if more time is given to speech. I don't think the modifications I would propose would be a serious loss to the channel. I would remove Private Passions, which is nothing more than a glorified Desert Island Discs and has no real place on R3. I would scrap one of the In Tune slots; there is much padding and unnecessary material in this programme, and its format and content need serious improvement. And lastly I would trim 30 minutes per programme off Late Junction, ensuring that western classical excerpts and pop were excluded.
2. It's also true that extra resources would be needed to support the extra provision. But while there is a need for R3 to maintain a commitment to new productions, it has a huge archive which includes a plethora of excellent performances, many of which a large proportion of the current audience may never have heard. Why not draw on this? And why not follow the lead of BBC4, which broadcast live a production of Richard II from the West End? I have never understood why a top-quality dramatic production in a London theatre should be confined to the theatre audience of a few hundred, and not be broadcast to a potential audience of millions, here and overseas. This was achieved in the technologically unsophisticated days of the Third Programme, so should not be beyond the radio engineers of today. It should remain an occasional event – the ideal is a rehearsed studio production – but could usefully fill gaps in the drama provision. Why not start with a live broadcast on R3 of Ödön von Horvath's mordant satire on inter-war Viennese life, Tales from the Vienna Woods, from the National Theatre this autumn?
3. Why on R3 rather than R4? For one thing, R3 from its very origin has had a strong commitment to the arts as a whole - not just music. Also, its arts coverage has always been of a different kind from that of R4. R3 has often pioneered the difficult and the avant-garde. R4's programmes are more middle-of-the-road and never last more than an hour. If full-length 20th century drama were regularly broadcast on R4 in place of the usual evening programmes, the Middle England listeners to that excellent station would soon rise up and descend on Broadcasting House threatening the Controller with an ugly doom involving garden implements. The difference between the arts provision of R3 and R4 can roughly be characterised as the difference between the poetic and the prosaic.

It is a tough challenge to restore the reputation of R3 for high-quality drama and poetry, for being a radio station not just for music but for the arts. It is not a matter of returning to the ideals of the Third Programme – that was a completely different intellectual and cultural climate. One cannot – and should not – imagine an interview with a major foreign playwright today being conducted in his own language – as was the case with the interview, in French, with Eugene Ionesco broadcast in 1964. But that does not mean that the spoken arts should be allowed to become a tiny island of speech lapped by ever-encroaching waters of music. Most of the major classical composers were inspired by the drama and poetry of their own and earlier ages, and their music should ideally not be heard in splendid isolation from this literary inheritance.