Looking ahead ...

Nine o'clock in the morning and the playwright David Greig is flattering us. He's sure an audience that turns up for theatre at breakfast won't mind stepping in to play the hundred-strong chorus the production budget wouldn't stretch to. Sure enough, we rise to challenge - even singing when the projected script prompts us - coffee cups in hand. Clearly I'm not blogging from the Proms - though perhaps we could bring some drama into the Proms Literary Festival next year - but from Edinburgh. Radio 3 is already broadcasting lunchtime concerts from the Edinburgh International Festival and busy recording other musical highlights for the post-Proms Performance on 3 strand in September. However I've been here for a couple of days primarily to catch some of the new writing. Whether or not we eventually commission any of the productions for Drama on 3 or The Wire, the sheer concentration of new work is exhilarating and sometimes a window on wider cultural preoccupations.

Participation and interactivity in their many different forms are some of the most dynamic cultural trends of our time, a greater permeability between artists and audiences, for example, and collaborations between professionals and amateurs - whether it's a thousand people with ukuleles at the Proms or a hundred of us in a studio theatre at the Traverse. Broadcasting of course has been revolutionised by the voices and views of the listeners, though as the techniques and technology of interaction develop we're constantly reviewing the ways it may or may not enhance the experience for audiences in different places (I don't think anyone wants to return to the early days of broadcast emails when it sometimes seemed, yes I admit even here on Radio 3, as if programmes were in competition to request listener engagement).

The audience involvement in David Greig's play was nothing to do with finances and everything to do with humour and texture and meaning, and so for me it provided a model of creative participation. On Radio 3, I'm looking forward to the return of our Pianothon and can vividly remember some of the stories and performances from last year's line-up of amateur pianists, and with the countdown to this year's Free Thinking festival of ideas under way we're thinking hard about the development of the different forms of participation that have become such a distinctive feature of the festival. Sometimes of course it's the simplest form of interaction that's the most effective. For the three years Free Thinking was based in Fact in Liverpool, the audiences at the events got used to plastering the walls with post- it notes like so many brightly coloured butterflies flying ideas around the building. I hope theSage in Gateshead, where we're moving this year, is prepared for the invasion.