BBC's NEW SERVICE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 388, 29 November 1946, Page 28

BBC's NEW SERVICE

Third Programme is International and Experimental

series now being heard from the BBC by British listeners (and in the overseas broadcasts) Tommy Handley was preparing to leave for the moon. Colonel Chinstrap, making his will, was reminded to leave his moustache-cup to Sir Adrian Boult, and someone asked Tommy Handley what he would do when he reached his destination. He said: "I’m going to start a Fourth Programme." It- is now nearly two months since the BBC started its "Third Programme," promised some months ago by the Direc-tor-General, but the Radio Times containing the first week’s programme has only recently reached us. Apart from the seven days’ programmes (6.0 p.m. to midnight each day) which obviously strike out a new path for broadcasting, the same issue contains an introduction by the Director-General (Sir William Haley), and an article on aims and intentions by G. R. Barnes, the Head of the Third Programme. We print here some extracts from what Sir William Haley and Mr. Barnes had to say, and then a brief description of England’s first week of listening in the new. programme. Here are some of Sir William Haley’s remarks: The Pattern Completed "With the opening of the Third Pro- gramme on Sunday the pattern of the BBC’s post-war broadcasting for listeners in the United Kingdom will be complete. Within that pattern there will, we hope, be many advances and improvements. Each of the three separate services must continually seek to experiment, to innovate, and to raise the general broadcasting standards in its particular field, But the overall pattern itself should for a considerable period remain set. The complications of radio engineering, the difficulties over wavelengths, and indeed the convenience of Jisteners all demand a settled system of programmes so long as it is well-conceived and adequate. . This matter of adequacy is important. There are many conceptions of the functions of broadcasting, some of them narrowly limited. But a public service such as the BBC has to feel that it is covering the whole range of its possibilities, that it is providing for all classes of its listeners, and that it is, among its other functions, presenting the great classical repertoire in music and drama, and-so far as they are broadcastablein literature, and the other arts. To do this within the two services already existing, the regionalised Home Service and the Light Programme, is not possible. Quite apart from the already great pressure upon their time, the basic conceptions of ordinary broadcasting with its news bulletins and other fixed points, its desire in the course of the limited peak listening hours every evening to give some service to every possible taste, restrict to a hampering extent the possibility of devoting the necessary time to the full and frequent performance of great works in their entirety or to the development of thuse highest forms of music and drama which, while they have a major importance | FEW nights ago, in the ITMA

have, as yet, only a minority audience. The range of the Home Service and the Light Programme is admitted by all who have studied broadcasting programmes throughout the world to be outstanding. But in view of all this, it is not enough. The Third Programme will have no fixed points. It will devote to the great works the time they require. It will seek every evening to do something that

is culturally satisfying and significant. It will devote occasional series of evenings to some related masterpieces, a Shakespeare historical cycle, all the Beethoven quartets; or a series of Mozart operas. It will, so far as circumstances permit, be international. Concerts, operas, plays will be taken from abroad as landline conditions improve. Its talks will include contributions from the great European thinkers. Its whole content will be directed to an audience that is not of one class but that is perceptive and intelligent." And here is part of what Mr. Barnes (Head of the Third Programme) said in the same issue: No News Bulletins-No Fixed Schedules "We start with two advantages. The first is that we have no news bulletins to broadcast at fixed hours. Plays and operas can be given in full and symphony concerts need not be built to fit into a schedule. The second advantage is that we can give more than one performance of all major works. We shall repeat items from our own and other programmes generously and often, "Music will occupy a third of the programme. The main orchestral concerts of the week will be on Thursday and Saturday; opera, when available, on Friday; chamber concerts on Monday in the Concert Hall® of Broadcasting House, for which the public can buy tickets. We hope to broadcast one performance of opera every week, an aim which we will have realised in October with a performance of Don Pasquale from the Cambridge Theatre, the Glyndebourne production of Britten’s new opera The Rape of Lucretia, and

two complete performances of Tristan and Isolde which Sir Thomas Beecham is to conduct for us. The winter Promenade Concerts, which are to be revived, will be heard in part in the Third Programme. The BBC’s gramophone library will be drawn upon for those who are interested in comparing the interpretations of the same work played-by different artists. Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Shaw "Plans for radio drama provide for a new production of a full-length play every month, The three plays chosen for this autumn are Man and Superman, broadcast in its entirety for the first time; the Agamemnon of Aeschylus; and Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida. Two festivals of drama, each lasting a week of ten days, are in the process of being planned; one, in January, of plays of Bernard Shaw; the other, next summer, of the historical plays of Shakespeare from Richard II to Richard III, ‘World Theatre’ is remaining in the Home Service, but recordings of the performances will be broadcast in the Third Programme. We shall take the opportunity to repeat past plays in this series. Experiments this autumn will be the adaptation for broadcasting of Ghaucer’s Canterbury Tales and a series of Imaginary Conversations, either written for the occasion or adapted from a_ published work. Twenty-minute periods of poetry will bé broadcast at least three times every week, divided between the contemporary and Classical, between readings with and without comment, and between selections made from a single poet and from many poets. Longer poems, classical and contemporary, will be broadcast once every month. The Spoken Word "As for talks, we can afford to give time to a speaker to develop his argument at length; we can experiment with impromptu talks; and we can repeat outstanding talks from the past and recent talks in our own and other Services which are worth a second hearing, And every Thursday we intend to devote half-an-hour to the visual arts-painting, sculpture, and architecture have been too long neglected in sound broadcasting. The absence of news bulletins and commentaries on current affairs does not relieve the new programme of responsibility for dealing with such matters. Field-Marshal Smuts talks on world affairs on Sunday at 7.30, and during the four Fridays in October Professor E. H. Carr will make an appraisal of British foreign policy. The pattern of the Third Programme. is still, necessarily, incomplete. The place to be taken by light entertainment, for instance, is undecided, though it is probable that satirical revue will be the main contribution. But through the pattern certain consistent principles may be discerned. The Third Programme will be international, it will experiment; and, above all, it will be flexible, believing that flexibility is the only framework which will ensure life and vigour to its particular purpose." The First Programmes The programmes themselves cover the first 42 hours of a radio service that is unlike anything ‘that has been dorie anywhere else. : On the first day, which was Sunday, "September 29, the Third Programme opened with "How to Listen," a special nufber in the "How" series written by Stephen Potter. That was at 6.0 p.m. It was followed by Bach’s Goldberg

Variations played on the hatpsichord by Lucille Wallace. Then Field-Marshal Smuts spoke on World Affairs, and at 8.0 p.m. began a choral orchestral concert of English music-a Festival overture specially written by Benjamin Britten, Handel’s "Fireworks" music, Purcell’s "Come, Ye Sons of Art," Vaughan Williams’s "Serenade to Music," Bliss’s Music for Strings, and Parry’s "Blest Pair of Sirens." Sir Adrian Boult and Arthur Bliss conducted. In the Interval, Sir William Haley introduced the new programme. After the concert, there was a discussion between "Ex-Servicemen and Others" on "The World We Fought For," then some madrigals by Monteverdi, and a repetition of a talk given by Sir Max Beerbohm in 1935, in a new series called "The Best of Yesterday" (repetitions of the best talks of past years). The evening ended with half-an-hour of readings from the Bible, and organ music. A small footnote to the first day’s programme indicates what arrangements the BBC has made to fill in gaps between separate features: "Prose readings in interludes between programmes have been selected for this week by Desmond McCarthy from the works of Henry James." Here are some of the offerings in the rest of the week: MUSIC: Pubiic Concert. of Chamber Music (quartets and madrigals); Comus (the masque by John Milton and Henry Lawes) done twice;- "Boyhood’s End" (cantata by Michael Tippett); Bach’s "Coffee Cantata’; Italian Madrigals; a programme of music by Kodaly, conducted by the composer; a-concert by the Paris Conservatoire Orchestra (apparently relayed from Paris); a complete performance of Don Pasquale (from the Cambridge Theatre, London); a Saturday Evening Concert, at which Kodaly and Walton conducted works of their own; and various recorded works by Alban Berg, Beethoven and others, SPOKEN: A French poet (Pierre Emmannuel) reading his own poems from Paris; a talk on films; Dean Inge on "Bernard Shaw — Socialist or Rebel?"; new poems (unpublished) by Walter de la Mare, W. J. Turner, Dylan Thomas; C. Day Lewis, and others; "The Critic on the Air" (criticisms of productions in the Third Programme, given weekly by Cecil McGivern, who left the BBC a year ago); readings from William Morris and from Miéilton;. an_ international affairs talk by a staff correspondent; "Science Survey"; "The Visual Arts," "Living Writers," "Contemporary Music and the Listener," and other weekly talks. DRAMA: Shaw’s "Man and Superman" (performed twice, with ThalbenBall playing Bach in the interval on one night, and a recital by Szigeti on~the second), Huis Clos, a play by Jean Paul Sartre (in English). The Third Programme has no monopoly of the classics of music and literature: The Home Sertvice retained its usual chafacter, and Sir Thomas Beecham’s new orchestra, the Royal Philharmonic, made its first broadcast there in the same week, A glance through the Light Programme, for that week, also discovered a Bach Brandenburg Concerto, a Haydn Symphony, a piano concerto by SaintSaens, a Mozart violin concerto (Alan Loveday), a Brahms Symphony, and one act of The Barber of Seville (from Covent Garden).