John Shea's week of afternoons in Radio 3 Continuity ...
Post categories: Radio 3
|19:33 UK Time, Friday, 2 October 2009
Only connect... There's nothing a Radio 3 presenter likes more than a bit of serendipity - especially at 4.00 on a Friday, when he's been presenting Afternoon on 3 all week and has promised his Radio 3 Interactive colleague Graeme Kay to write a blog about it which he hasn't started yet!
A couple of examples: we've just played Poulenc's suite Les biches. In the middle of it, the Afternoon on 3 editor comes in to point out that today's In Tune (an outside broadcast from the City Halls in Glasgow) includes a live performance of Poulenc's Concert champêtre, with Radio 3 New Generation Artist Mahan Esfahani as the harpsichord soloist. I make a note to remind myself to mention this after Les biches.
Then the e-mail newsletter about tomorrow's Music Matters pops up on my computer screen. Tom Service is actually in the neighbouring studio recording the programme as I'm reading it, and one of the items is about the choreographer Kenneth MacMillan. Much of this week's music on Afternoon on 3 has had dance connections: Les biches, for instance, was commissioned from Poulenc by Diaghilev. MacMillan would have been 80 this year and Jann Parry's new biography of him - Different Drummer - is out. So a pointer to Music Matters is the ideal connection for me to make at the end of this afternoon. Eureka!
An ability to remember connections can be as important as spotting the unexpected ones. Presenting this week's broadcast - episode, I almost wrote - in our year-long Handel opera series does feel rather like joining the cast of a long-running drama. Just as a nervous young thesp might look to his more established colleagues, for this one I'm in the supremely safe hands of producers David Gallagher and Kevin Bee, not to mention this week's guest, the musicologist Annette Landgraf, editor of the forthcoming Cambridge Handel Encyclopedia. (They're all younger than me, by the way; sometimes presenters get carried away with their metaphors.)
And suddenly it's 5.00, time to say thank you and good evening. I do hope Graeme hasn't given up waiting for this and gone home ...[No I haven't! - Graeme]
Comment number 1.
At 10:46 3rd Oct 2009, french frank wrote:I wonder whether there is any research to show that this kind of connection, serendipitous or planned, is a particularly effective way of leading listeners from one programme to another?
I think (though I'm not in marketing) that those who are listening with interest will pick up the connection, and when a little nugget of information is included, that's a bonus. Quite an art?
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