Radio 3

Queen Victoria began to experience dark visions after giving birth to her second child. Concerned that she might have inherited the madness of her grandfather, George III, Prince Albert summoned her doctor. Robert Ferguson was not the obvious man for this scenario – he was an obstetrician – but the doughty queen had heard that he ‘paid much attention to mental disease’, and willingly consulted him. It wasn’t until 2009 that the precise nature of Victoria’s ‘mental disease’ came to light. Dr Ferguson’s diaries, formerly kept in private hands, came up for auction that year and entered the collection of the Royal College of Physicians. Their contents made for sad

A few years ago I had a panic-stricken phone call from a female friend. ‘Help!’ she wailed. ‘Remind me what classical music I like. I think I’m going to be a guest on Private Passions.’ I could understand her anxiety. The programme, which celebrated its 30th birthday this month, is BBC Radio 3’s lofty version of  Desert Island Discs. Eminent writers, scientists, artists and businessmen, plus the occasional book-plugging celeb, explain how music – mostly but not exclusively classical – is, well, one of their private passions. Even if, as in the case of my friend, it isn’t. It’s an honour to be asked on the show, which is presented

‘When you’re not offensive in life, you obtain absolutely nothing,’ declares a twinkly-eyed Pierre Boulez in one of the archive films that the Barbican were screening to celebrate the composer’s centenary. What a joy to be reminded of the young Boulez – the unashamed elitist, the unbeatable snob. Not even allies such as Schoenberg (too trad) and Messiaen (‘vulgar’) were safe from his tongue. To Boulez, pop music wasn’t good or bad; it didn’t exist. Ditto his own life. ‘I will be the first composer without a biography’, he proclaimed. Forget that Boulez was entangled in a love triangle with Camus’s mistress and for most of his time on earth

When a phrase really takes off in the political sphere, you will recognise it by the frequency with which it crops up on the Today programme. Many years ago, I noticed that politicians had begun using the line ‘it’s not rocket science!’ when attacking the alleged inability of their opponents to get even the basics right. It had a muscular, common-sense ring to it, which they clearly relished, and it spread like norovirus through a cruise ship. How times have changed. Where once we had politicians who never stopped talking about rocket science, the ascent of Elon Musk in the US has brought us a rocket scientist who never stops

Soon after the launch of Classic FM in 1992, the then controller of Radio 3, Nicholas Kenyon, asserted that his high-minded station was not in any competition with its commercial rival and certainly not lurching into ‘some ghastly descent into populism’, even as he hired Classic FM’s presenters and fiddled with the programming to create ‘access points’ for novice listeners. Classical music once had a higher calling than to be this subdued That argument is now over, the pretence dropped. The current controller of Radio 3, Sam Jackson – appointed last year – was previously the actual boss of Classic FM, as well as Smooth and Gold. Earlier this year,

On Saturday 12 December 1964, Harold Wilson addressed his first Labour party conference as prime minister, George Harrison was photographed with his new girlfriend in the Bahamas, Pope Paul VI told Catholics they could drink alcohol ‘in moderation’ before Midnight Mass and, according to the Mirror, ‘two strip-tease girls fought in the nude in their dressing room after finishing their fan dance at a night club’. The station has become little more than a Spotify playlist interrupted by the disc-jockey burbling It was also the day that Record Review arrived in its Saturday morning slot on the BBC’s Third Programme, now Radio 3. And there it remained. During the Three-Day

A recent Sunday Feature on Radio 3 contained some of the best insults I have ever heard. Contributors to the programme on the early music revolution were discussing the backlash they experienced in the 1970s while reviving period-style instruments and techniques. Soprano Dame Emma Kirkby remembered one critic complaining that listening to her performance was ‘as about as interesting as eating an entire meal of plain yoghurt’. Another critic, writing in Gramophone, pronounced the strings of the new ensembles ‘as beautiful as period dentistry’. Those strings were mostly made of animal guts. There was, as one of the musicians interviewed recalled, ‘a DIY atmosphere’ to the movement, which developed alongside

Welcome back to Room 101, which has returned to the radio – after nearly 30 years on TV – and reverted back to its one-to-one format with presenter Paul Merton. The programme sits comfortably within that peculiarly British corner of the landscape that champions The Archers, the Proms, Rich Tea biscuits and knitted dog coats. And its success makes sense. A nation of good-humoured grumblers is arguably more likely to be excited by a list of common grievances than by, say, an overly jubilant selection of Desert Island Discs. Why listen to someone talk about what makes them happy when you can witness a guy losing it over the incomprehensibility

One so often hears about famous people who are horrible when they think no one important is looking – barking at assistants, or snapping at waiters – that it’s heartening to learn of the opposite: kindness in circumstances that promise little obvious reward. The author and filmmaker Jon Ronson had just such a story last week about his pick for Radio 4’s Great Lives series: the late Terry Hall, lead singer of the Specials and Fun Boy Three, and an attractively morose and compelling presence on the 1970s and ’80s music scene.  The 12-year-old Ronson was at the front of an ‘excitingly feral’ Specials gig in Cardiff when he conceived

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

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

Last April Fools’ Day, Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo wound up their award-winning film review show on BBC Radio 5 Live after 21 years on air. A little more than a month later they are back with Kermode and Mayo’s Take, a podcast so similar in flavour and format that you could call it an up-yours to their critics. While Mayo stressed that it was their decision to go their own way – ‘we have decided, and to be clear: that’s no one else has decided’ – he was slightly more candid about his experience in an interview with the Radio Times a few weeks ago. People of my generation

This week marks the beginning of modernism season on BBC Radio 3 and 4, which means it’s time for some pundit or other to own up to abandoning Ulysses at page seven, or to finding T.S. Eliot a bore, or to infinitely preferring the landscapes of J.M.W. Turner to the repetitive squares of Kazimir Malevich. That pundit, however, won’t be me. Modernism is rather like the birth of the Roman Empire. It could be seen as a brilliant sloughing off of everything that had decayed in favour of sensible revolution, or as the predictably reactive consequence of years of wrangling over a loss of identity. Most of the contributors to

Boris Johnson, Dominic Raab and Jeremy Hunt have all admitted that they tried cannabis as young adults. Neither the admission nor the THC psychoactive component of the drug, which makes you high, seem to have done them much harm in their pathways to successful careers in parliament. But a new governmental war on drugs is afoot which some fear may lead to unexpected consequences, and not just for those who ply their trade on street corners or draw up on Deliveroo-type scooters to supply cannabis as if it were a takeaway curry. I wouldn’t bet on everyone getting caught up in judicial dragnets, though; I imagine that middle-class consumers will

The story is likely apocryphal — and so disgraceful I almost hesitate to tell it — but it goes like this. On the night of 14 November 1940, as more than 500 Luftwaffe rained bombs on the people of Coventry, the newly appointed city architect Donald Gibson was watching the fires. Gibson had been appointed to the newly created position of ‘city architect’ three years earlier by the radical Labour council that had come to power in a local election. His job was to modernise what was then Britain’s best-preserved medieval city, and build the ideals of social justice and equality into the city’s brick and mortar. That night, as