It has not been a good year for the BBC. Cuts and job losses were announced. Blue Peter got entangled in a phone vote scandal. There was widespread disgust at the vast sums paid to Jonathan Ross. Mark Thompson, seen as a safe pair of hands when he took over as director general in 2004, has looked unsure in his dealings with both public and staff.
But for once, let us not bury the BBC. For when it trusts its audience, believes in its programme-makers and remembers its original purpose, there are still some things it does better than anyone else. There is no better example of this than Radio 3's Sunday schedule.
Radio 3 is primarily a broadcaster and provider of classical music. Yet in the breadth of its coverage, the Sunday schedule is a return to the Third Programme, Radio 3's predecessor. As well as music, you get drama, religion, documentaries, conversation and even poetry. Like the Third Programme, Radio 3 is unapologetically highbrow.
If the Radio 3 Sunday has a fulcrum, it is Private Passions, broadcast at noon. As with Radio 4's best programmes—Start the Week with Andrew Marr, Melvyn Bragg's In Our Time—Private Passions works so well because it is the personal fiefdom of a clever and curious man, in this case the composer Michael Berkeley. Berkeley invites another clever and curious person into the bedroom of his Suffolk house—his interviews are conducted "as live" on a desk between two beds. The guest selects pieces of music, sometimes drama or comedy. Unlike Desert Island Discs, which the show resembles, the music is played in full and dissected expertly by Berkeley, who then coaxes thoughts from his guests, in the manner of a British Anthony Clare.
There is nothing new in this. The one- to-one has been intermittently successful ever since Face to Face, John Freeman's BBC television series of the late 1950s and early 1960s, but it lives or dies on the quality of both inquisitor and guest. Recent guests have included novelists Jeanette Winterson and Joyce Carol Oates, mathematician Robin Wilson and cartoon satirist Martin Rowson. None has disappointed. Indeed, Rowson provided an example of the delightfully perverse avenues Private Passions is liable to meander down, claiming Syd Barrett was a greater artist than Bob Dylan, and being openly moved by Flanders and Swann's song about an armadillo who mistakes a tank on Salisbury plain for the object of his love.
Under-40s are rare on the programme, which perhaps explains the bias among the guests towards chamber music. Joan Bakewell discussed this matter with Berkeley, suggesting that the first half of life was about experience, the second more about judgement—the paring down to what really matters. Janácek's austerely beautiful string quartets, one of which is suitably titled Intimate Letters, were what mattered to her, along with English choral music.
There are numerous other delights to Radio 3's Sunday schedule. The Early Music Show, presented by the distinguished singer Catherine Bott, mixes history with music, examining the birth of opera, papal bans on music, theatre in Shakespeare's London and Japanese interpretations of Bach. For Discovering Music, Stephen Johnson, a lucid evangelist for classical music since his days at the Listener, dissects orchestral masterpieces movement by movement. Drama, always a strength of Radio 3, continues to impress in a prominent early-evening spot: recent treats include Lorca's Blood Wedding (in Ted Hughes's translation) and, thrillingly, Schiller's Don Carlos.
But the best is left till last. Words and Music is broadcast at 10.30pm. For almost two hours, music and poetry entwine around a theme: magic, rhythm, London and Paris, ecstasy. A reading of George Herbert's Temple might be followed by Lou Reed's "Ecstasy"; Kit Wright's poem "All Souls" is followed by the very piece of music it celebrates, Elisabeth Schumann's breathtaking rendition of Schubert's Litany for the Feast of All Souls. There is no commentary, no announcements. If you want to find out what you've just heard, you have to visit the Radio 3 website.
It is brave, brilliant programming. And such boldness is increasingly evident during the rest of the week, in such cherishable gestures as the playing at 8 o'clock each morning of one of Bach's 48 preludes and fugues from The Well-Tempered Clavier (each one lasting the time it takes to make a decent bowl of porridge). When Bach's great cycle concludes on 5th January, experts will gather to discuss its legacy. Informative, educational and entertaining, Radio 3 under controller Roger Wright is the best of the BBC. Let us hope it is not also the last.
