Screenshot of the Best of British playlist
I’ve recently moved jobs. Instead of the usual packing all your notepads, assorted pens, stapler and hundreds of paperclips (which, by the way, were never to be found when you actually needed them) into a bag and bumping into people on your tube journey home, I carried my modest stationary collection up two floors in Broadcasting House to Radio 3 Multiplatform. After over four years working in production, the last two spent on Radio 3’s Breakfast show and overseeing the majority of this year’s major project – Breakfast’s Best of British, I’m now on the other side; working on all of Radio 3’s and the Performing Groups’ web pages, social media and developing their online content.
When we first started Breakfast’s Best of British at the beginning of the year, after slightly too much pudding and cheese at Christmas-time, we didn’t really know what we were getting ourselves into… After the popularity of the Musical Map of Great Britain in 2013 (I pinned all those markers on that map, by the way) we knew that Breakfast listeners loved to tell us about the pieces of music that originated close to home: those pieces with a connection to that bridge in their hometown; or that stretch of coastline they used to visit as a child on holiday. We decided in 2014 that working with BBC Playlister we could draw together a list of what we at Breakfast, and all our listeners, consider to be 365 unmissable Great British works. Works that evoke the scenery and life that we know so well, those pieces from well-worn CDs or cassettes by composers from just down the road. I got used to the steady daily rhythm of updating the basic list we had on the website of what he had played so far. As the months went by and more and more requests came in from listeners, I would start a new month, in slight disbelief that the year was passing by so quickly again, trying carefully to keep a handle on which works we had played and what really obvious ones were still missing. Soon we started to receive the odd email from listeners who mentioned how helpful it would be if they could see the list ordered alphabetically by composer. It’s true, we thought, because as the months progressed it had become harder and harder to find out exactly which Benjamin Britten works had made the list so far in the scrolling-marathon that our Best of British page had quickly turned into. But I had no idea how this could be achieved.
That all changed when I moved upstairs though. New programmes, software, skills and an understanding of building webpages under my belt and it was very fitting that the very first web page I created was the Best of British Playlist in alphabetical order. After a bit of angry muttering over Excel whilst trying to alphabetise over 300 works ‒ making sure that George Frideric Handel hadn’t ended up stuck somewhere between Finzi and German, whilst Ralph Vaughan Williams was firmly rooted under ‘V’ ‒ I had my list which I then got into a streamlined format and created my webpage.
Hopefully this list will make it that much easier for everybody to see what we’ve covered in 2014 – Breakfast are having a last hurrah for the Best of British Playlist on December 31. Don’t forget to tune in!
