Season highlights: Features
Season highlights: Features
Published: 22 September 2016
Sunday 2 October
The writer Philip French, who died in 2015 was the creator for Radio 3 of its first regular review programme, Critics’ Forum. On the 70th anniversary of the station, Laurence Scott talks to those who knew Philip and explores his long involvement with arts programming on BBC Radio. When he died in 2015, Philip French received many and heartfelt eulogies to his intellect and sheer enjoyment of film as deployed for many decades in the review pages of the Observer newspaper. But French’s contribution to shaping the taste of Britain’s radio listeners was less remarked upon. This programme attempts to redress that.
Critics’ Forum was Radio 3’s first formal review programme, but the network was, from its inception as the Third Programme in 1946, always the home of legendary critical voices, and this feature traces that pernickety pathway from the sometimes snooty 1940s and 50s to the more demotic 1960s when Philip French’s creative voice began to be heard on the network. Laurence Scott also charts what happened after Philip French's retirement, and whether formal reviewers still enjoy power in the digital age, when it's easy to express and share an opinion on anything.
Sunday Feature: The Secrets of the Music Panel
Sunday 9 October
To mark the 70th anniversary of the Third Programme, Charlotte Higgins investigates how the BBC chose new pieces of music for performance and broadcast - who were the gatekeepers? And how did they decide? And how did their decisions shape the wider musical landscape?
Charlotte focuses on the early years of the BBC, and also the 1940s and 1950s, when a new spirit of adventure and experiment arrived in concert halls and academies. How did the BBC react? Inevitably there were composers who enjoyed success - and others who felt rejected, which even led to rumours of a 'blacklist' of those whose work, it was suggested, would never make the airwaves. Did such a list ever exist?
