The Long View | Pity the boss of Radio 3

I’ll be sad to see Alan Davey step down from BBC Radio 3. It was nice to have a fellow Nordic music enthusiast in the top job. Thankfully his successor Sam Jackson is the very definition of a good egg. When I was interviewed for a post as a Classic FM producer in 2007, he gave me a brilliant piece of inadvertent advice: if you’re really passionate about music, be wary of a job that could taint that passion with stress, banality or procedure - or at least be sure your passion is strong enough to override those things. Check.

I didn’t get invited back for a second interview, but I did end up working indirectly with Jackson as a section editor on the station’s magazine. Our offices may have been twelve miles apart but he was always there at meetings and at Classic FM events, full of enthusiasm, always approachable, with a sense of fun that neatly obscured his ambition and strength of will. It surprised none of us that he went on to run the station after Darren Henley left for Arts Council England.

Satisfying Global Media’s shareholders with a constantly increasing RAJAR share is a tough job, but we all know that leading Radio 3 is tantamount to placing yourself in the village stocks every day of the year. Every single Radio 3 listener seems to have an opinion about what the station should and shouldn’t be. Looming even larger in Jackson’s in-tray will be internal BBC politics and the corporation’s determination to redefine ‘public service’ as ‘public popularity with commercial options’.

Not that the listeners aren’t venomous enough. Critics of Radio 3 tend to fall into two camps: reactionary, change-resistant dinosaurs on the one hand (invariably die-hard listeners with an admirable sense of ownership) and dispassionate content-pushers on the other (usually media professionals, focus groupers, free-marketeers or people who want a Classic FM without ads).

A column in The Spectator a few weeks ago so perfectly captured the prejudices of the former group that I’m still unsure it wasn’t a satire. Melinda Hughes wrote that she was migrating her listening to France Musique because of the ‘smorgasbord of schmaltz’ on Radio 3 – and, of course, the insufferable indignity of having to listen to foreign words pronounced inaccurately (presumably France Musique’s presenters get British, Nordic, Czech and African names absolutely right every time).

It was an odd article, from its corny sexual fantasies to its extreme self-satisfaction. If it was satire, it was a good shot but misleadingly headlined. If it wasn’t satire, it was poorly commissioned. Because it turns out Hughes, besides being sufficiently bilingual to prefer her studio repartee in French, is an opera singer with presumably more than a decade of rigorous musical education under her belt. The moment Radio 3 defines its target audience as people with music degrees and their heads in scores every day, it will ship listeners like never before.

So often, there’s a tone-deafness to those who levy this sort of criticism against Radio 3 – who froth so incessantly on mispronunciation or insufficient Bruckner. They can’t stand any presenter under the age of 40. They don’t hear it when Elizabeth Alker places her tongue deliciously in her cheek on a Saturday morning. I suspect many simply can’t hear past the ‘noise’ of an accented northern woman, let alone the lightness with which she wears her knowledge and the breadth of quality music she plays.

We all have our Radio 3 axes to grind. I lament the fact that Choral Evensong is so rarely live these days that it’s rapidly losing any sense of a genuine, communal event. I wish the station would have the verve to experiment with dual-host formats - to have two presenters spar off on another, ignoring the listener, like enthusiastic concertgoers at the interval bar.

I’d also bargain that the station would improve listener retention if it had a better idea of its own general ‘sound’ across the board - even in links, which so often sound sterile and banal. But I also recognise that I’m an individual with obsessive and distorted tastes. Jackson will have his own priorities. Who knows if he’ll be a successful controller, but at least he lives in the real world.