BBC Third Programme
Encyclopedia
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
. The network first went on air on 29 September 1946 and became one of the leading cultural and intellectual forces in Britain, playing a crucial role in disseminating the arts. It was the third national radio network broadcast by the BBC, founded in 1946 and finally incorporated into BBC Radio 3
BBC Radio 3
BBC Radio 3 is a national radio station operated by the BBC within the United Kingdom. Its output centres on classical music and opera, but jazz, world music, drama, culture and the arts also feature. The station is the world’s most significant commissioner of new music, and its New Generation...
in April 1970. The other two were the Home Service
BBC Home Service
The BBC Home Service was a British national radio station which broadcast from 1939 until 1967.-Development:Between the 1920s and the outbreak of The Second World War, the BBC had developed two nationwide radio services, the BBC National Programme and the BBC Regional Programme...
(mainly speech based) and the Light Programme
BBC Light Programme
The Light Programme was a BBC radio station which broadcast mainstream light entertainment and music from 1945 until 1967, when it was rebranded as BBC Radio 2...
, principally devoted to light entertainment
Light entertainment
Light entertainment is a term used to describe a broad range of usually televisual performances. These include comedies, variety shows, quiz/game shows, sketch shows and people/surprise shows.-Light entertainment in Britain:...
and music, usually cover versions of popular music of the day played by the BBC's own orchestras. The Home Service is now known as Radio 4
BBC Radio 4
BBC Radio 4 is a British domestic radio station, operated and owned by the BBC, that broadcasts a wide variety of spoken-word programmes, including news, drama, comedy, science and history. It replaced the BBC Home Service in 1967. The station controller is currently Gwyneth Williams, and the...
and the Light Programme is Radio 2
BBC Radio 2
BBC Radio 2 is one of the BBC's national radio stations and the most popular station in the United Kingdom. Much of its daytime playlist-based programming is best described as Adult Contemporary or AOR, although the station is also noted for its specialist broadcasting of other musical genres...
.
Description and history
When it started in 1946, the Third Programme broadcast for six hours each evening, from 6.00 pm to midnight, although its output was cut to just 24 hours a week from October 1957, with the early part of weekday evenings being given over to educational programming (known as "Network 3"). This situation continued until the launch, on 22 March 1965, of the BBC Music Programme, which began regular daily broadcasts of classical music between 7.00 am and 6.30 pm daily (with some interruptions for live sports coverage) on the Network 3 / Third Programme frequencies. The Third Programme itself continued as a distinct evening service, and this continued to be the case for a short while after the inception of Radio 3 in 1967 until all the elements of the BBC's "third network" were finally absorbed into Radio 3 in April 1970.The Third's existence was controversial from the beginning, partly because of perceived "elitism" – it was sometimes criticised for broadcasting programmes of "two dons
Academia
Academia is the community of students and scholars engaged in higher education and research.-Etymology:The word comes from the akademeia in ancient Greece. Outside the city walls of Athens, the gymnasium was made famous by Plato as a center of learning...
talking" – and also for the costs of output relative to a small listener reach
Reach (advertising)
In the application of statistics to advertising and media analysis, reach refers to the total number of different people or households exposed, at least once, to a medium during a given period of time. Reach should not be confused with the number of people who will actually be exposed to and...
. In actuality its existence went against Reithian principles, as Reith
John Reith, 1st Baron Reith
John Charles Walsham Reith, 1st Baron Reith, KT, GCVO, GBE, CB, TD, PC was a Scottish broadcasting executive who established the tradition of independent public service broadcasting in the United Kingdom...
himself had, during his time at the BBC, been against segmenting audiences by splitting programming genres across different networks. From the start though, it had prominent supporters: the Education Secretary
Secretary of State for Education and Skills
The Secretary of State for Education is the chief minister of the Department for Education in the United Kingdom government. The position was re-established on 12 May 2010, held by Michael Gove....
in the Attlee
Clement Attlee
Clement Richard Attlee, 1st Earl Attlee, KG, OM, CH, PC, FRS was a British Labour politician who served as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1945 to 1951, and as the Leader of the Labour Party from 1935 to 1955...
government, Ellen Wilkinson
Ellen Wilkinson
Ellen Cicely Wilkinson was the Labour Member of Parliament for Middlesbrough and later for Jarrow on Tyneside. She was one of the first women in Britain to be elected as a Member of Parliament .- History :...
, spoke rather optimistically of creating a "third programme nation". When it faced those 1957 cuts, The Third Programme Defence Society was formed and its leaders included T. S. Eliot
T. S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...
, Albert Camus
Albert Camus
Albert Camus was a French author, journalist, and key philosopher of the 20th century. In 1949, Camus founded the Group for International Liaisons within the Revolutionary Union Movement, which was opposed to some tendencies of the Surrealist movement of André Breton.Camus was awarded the 1957...
, and Sir Laurence Olivier
Laurence Olivier
Laurence Kerr Olivier, Baron Olivier, OM was an English actor, director, and producer. He was one of the most famous and revered actors of the 20th century. He married three times, to fellow actors Jill Esmond, Vivien Leigh, and Joan Plowright...
.
Output and programming
The network was broadly cultural, a Leavisite experiment dedicated to the discerning or "high-brow" listener from an educated, minority audience. Its founders' aims were seen as promoting "something fundamental to our civilisation" and as contributing to "the refinement of society". Its musical output provided a wide range of serious classical music and live concerts, as well as contemporary composers and jazz. Voice formed a much higher proportion of its output than the later Radio 3, with specially commissioned plays, poetry readings, talks and documentaries. Nationally known intellectuals such as Bertrand RussellBertrand Russell
Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRS was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, and social critic. At various points in his life he considered himself a liberal, a socialist, and a pacifist, but he also admitted that he had never been any of these things...
and Isaiah Berlin
Isaiah Berlin
Sir Isaiah Berlin OM, FBA was a British social and political theorist, philosopher and historian of ideas of Russian-Jewish origin, regarded as one of the leading thinkers of the twentieth century and a dominant liberal scholar of his generation...
on philosophy or Fred Hoyle
Fred Hoyle
Sir Fred Hoyle FRS was an English astronomer and mathematician noted primarily for his contribution to the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis and his often controversial stance on other cosmological and scientific matters—in particular his rejection of the "Big Bang" theory, a term originally...
on cosmology were regular contributors.
The network became a principal patron of the arts. It commissioned many music works for broadcast by the BBC Music Department, playing a crucial role in the development of the career of composers such as Benjamin Britten
Benjamin Britten
Edward Benjamin Britten, Baron Britten, OM CH was an English composer, conductor, and pianist. He showed talent from an early age, and first came to public attention with the a cappella choral work A Boy Was Born in 1934. With the premiere of his opera Peter Grimes in 1945, he leapt to...
. Particularly notable were its drama productions, including the radio plays of Samuel Beckett
Samuel Beckett
Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet. He wrote both in English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.Beckett is widely regarded as among the most...
, Henry Reed (the Hilda Tablet
Hilda Tablet
Dame Hilda Tablet is a fictitious "twelve-tone composeress" created by Henry Reed in a series of radio comedy plays for the British Broadcasting Corporation's Third Programme...
plays), Harold Pinter
Harold Pinter
Harold Pinter, CH, CBE was a Nobel Prize–winning English playwright and screenwriter. One of the most influential modern British dramatists, his writing career spanned more than 50 years. His best-known plays include The Birthday Party , The Homecoming , and Betrayal , each of which he adapted to...
, Joe Orton
Joe Orton
John Kingsley Orton was an English playwright.In a short but prolific career lasting from 1964 until his death, he shocked, outraged and amused audiences with his scandalous black comedies...
and Dylan Thomas
Dylan Thomas
Dylan Marlais Thomas was a Welsh poet and writer, Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 11 January 2008. who wrote exclusively in English. In addition to poetry, he wrote short stories and scripts for film and radio, which he often performed himself...
, whose Under Milk Wood
Under Milk Wood
Under Milk Wood is a 1954 radio drama by Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, adapted later as a stage play. A movie version, Under Milk Wood directed by Andrew Sinclair, was released during 1972....
was written specially for the Programme. Philip O'Connor
Philip O'Connor
Philip O'Connor was a British writer and surrealist poet, who also painted. He was one of the 'Wheatsheaf writers' of 1930s Fitzrovia...
discovered Quentin Crisp
Quentin Crisp
Quentin Crisp , was an English writer and raconteur. He became a gay icon in the 1970s after publication of his memoir, The Naked Civil Servant.- Early life :...
in his radio interviews in 1963. Martin Esslin
Martin Esslin
Martin Julius Esslin OBE was a Hungarian-born English producer and playwright dramatist, journalist, adaptor and translator, critic, academic scholar and professor of drama best known for coining the term "Theatre of the Absurd" in his work of that name...
, BBC Director of Drama (Radio), was associated with the network's productions of European drama, and Douglas Cleverdon
Douglas Cleverdon
Douglas James Cleverdon was an English bookseller and radio producer, in both fields associated with numerous leading cultural figures in the United Kingdom.-Early life:...
with its productions of poetry and radio plays.
The Programme's contribution to contemporary poetry and criticism was outstanding, under producers and presenters such as John Wain
John Wain
John Barrington Wain was an English poet, novelist, and critic, associated with the literary group "The Movement". For most of his life, Wain worked as a freelance journalist and author, writing and reviewing for newspapers and the radio. He seems to have married in 1947, since C. S...
, Ludovic Kennedy
Ludovic Kennedy
Sir Ludovic Henry Coverley Kennedy was a British journalist, broadcaster, humanist and author best known for re-examining cases such as the Lindbergh kidnapping and the murder convictions of Timothy Evans and Derek Bentley, and for his role in the abolition of the death penalty in the United...
, George MacBeth
George MacBeth
George Mann MacBeth was a Scottish poet and novelist. He was born in Shotts, Lanarkshire.When he was three, his family moved to Sheffield....
and Patrick Dickinson; here it promoted young writers such as Philip Larkin
Philip Larkin
Philip Arthur Larkin, CH, CBE, FRSL is widely regarded as one of the great English poets of the latter half of the twentieth century...
and Kingsley Amis
Kingsley Amis
Sir Kingsley William Amis, CBE was an English novelist, poet, critic, and teacher. He wrote more than 20 novels, six volumes of poetry, a memoir, various short stories, radio and television scripts, along with works of social and literary criticism...
, as well as the "difficult" work of David Jones
David Jones (poet)
David Jones CH was both a painter and one of the first generation British modernist poets. As a painter he worked chiefly in watercolor, painting portraits and animal, landscape, legendary and religious subjects. He was also a wood-engraver and designer of inscriptions. As a writer he was...
and Laura Riding
Laura Riding
Laura Jackson was an American poet, critic, novelist, essayist and short story writer.- Early life :...
. The Third Programme was for many years the single largest source of copyright payments to poets.
The decision to close down the Third Programme was opposed by many within the BBC, some of them senior figures. Within the music division, a 'BBC rebellion' gathered force, with its most vocal members including Hans Keller
Hans Keller
Hans Keller was an influential Austrian-born British musician and writer who made significant contributions to musicology and music criticism, as well as being an insightful commentator on such disparate fields as psychoanalysis and football...
and Robert Simpson
Robert Simpson (composer)
Robert Simpson was an English composer and long-serving BBC producer and broadcaster.He is best known for his orchestral and chamber music , and for his writings on the music of Beethoven, Bruckner, Nielsen and Sibelius. He studied composition under Herbert Howells...
. Ultimately, however, the attempt to prevent the culture-conscious Third being replaced by what Keller called "a daytime music station" proved unsuccessful.
Some of its announcers
- Patrick ButlerPatrick ButlerPatrick Butler is an Irish professional rugby union player. His position is in the back row as either a Number 8 or a Blind-side flanker. He plays his club rugby with Shannon and provincially with Munster. He was the captain of Rockwell College in the Munster Senior Cup in 2008 having also played...
- Alvar LidellAlvar LidellTord Alvar Quan Lidell was a BBC radio announcer and newsreader.Lidell was born in Wimbledon Park, Surrey, to Swedish parents. His father John Adrian Lidell was a timber importer; his mother was Gertrud Lidell . Lidell attended King's College School, Wimbledon and Exeter College, Oxford...
- Christopher Pemberton
- Philip O'ConnorPhilip O'ConnorPhilip O'Connor was a British writer and surrealist poet, who also painted. He was one of the 'Wheatsheaf writers' of 1930s Fitzrovia...
See also
- For the sequence of Controllers of the Third Programme, see the list on the page relating to BBC Radio 3.
External links
- BBC Third Programme Scripts catalogue The collection of Douglas CleverdonDouglas CleverdonDouglas James Cleverdon was an English bookseller and radio producer, in both fields associated with numerous leading cultural figures in the United Kingdom.-Early life:...
, a leading talks and drama producer for the Third, at the University of Delaware Library. - The Envy of the World: Fifty Years of the Third Programme and Radio Three by Humphrey Carpenter
- 60th anniversary