The office of the controller of Radio 3, in Old Broadcasting House in London, has one solitary wood-panelled wall, a remnant of a more stately era of the BBC, before the glassy, shimmering heights of New Broadcasting House rose up to overshadow its 1930s predecessor. The current incumbent is Sam Jackson. He is, perhaps, the least suited-and-booted of any of his forerunners – he is wearing jeans, sneakers and a printed blue shirt straight out of the wardrobe of Simon Harwood, W1A’s director of strategic governance. This former boss of the commercial radio stations Classic FM, Smooth and Gold is also wearing a high-wattage smile. He uses the word “unpack” a lot and “brand”. He is a radio controller for our age. I can imagine the glowering ghost of Lord Reith staring at him in slight bewilderment.
Jackson, who began at the network in April, and last week added director of the BBC Proms to his responsibilities, is today announcing changes to Radio 3 – always a perilous moment for the much-loved BBC institution. Saturdays will see perhaps the biggest transformation. Music Matters, where Radio 3 did its most probing journalism, is being axed – or rather rebranded, moving to a 1pm slot in which series lasting up to eight weeks will be broadcast. One, presented by violinist Nicola Benedetti, will explore the Edinburgh international festival, which she directs.
The post-breakfast Saturday slot will be a new show with Tom Service running from 9am to noon, with guests and interviews. This will be the place, says Jackson, for the more reporterly aspects of Radio 3. It will be followed by another new show, Earlier … With Jools Holland, the point of which, says Jackson, “is simply to have a very well respected musician and broadcaster playing really brilliant music for a Saturday lunchtime. I hope, when people hear it, they will understand why Jools is a perfect fit for Radio 3.” Record Review and Jess Gillam’s This Classical Life move to the afternoon, while J to Z, the jazz programme, is replaced by a new late weeknight jazz show, Round Midnight, presented by saxophonist and poet Soweto Kinch.
Another move, I think predictably given the decades-long edging of Radio 3 away from speech, is that poetry programme The Verb and the cultural debates of Free Thinking will move to Radio 4 (though Drama on 3, the Sunday Feature and The Essay remain). Composer of the Week moves from its 12pm start to 4pm, leaving mornings to run unbroken from Breakfast through to Essential Classics and what is now to be called Live on 3, the lunchtime and afternoon concerts. Friday nights will host the old Radio 2 stalwart, Friday Night Is Music Night, with “anything from Eric Coates to Robert Farnon, Angela Morley to film music, and if the BBC Concert Orchestra are doing a night of arrangements of music from James Bond, that could absolutely sit there”. Whether you think that 007 sounds a lot of fun, or a fatal loosening of Radio 3’s intellectual bonds, is a matter of opinion.
Taken as a whole, there are some changes I will personally look forward to: Sara Mohr-Pietsch has a new, fascinating-sounding Sunday afternoon show, “where she can really unpack that question of how we listen to music”. But it’s hard to avoid – for me at least – a sense of middle-of-the-roadness, a lack of unpredictable spikiness. The other presenters, aside from Benedetti, in the remade Music Matters slot are the Times’s chief culture writer Richard Morrison, author and violinist Clemency Burton-Hill and BBC journalist Clive Myrie – all excellent individuals and yet, taken together, expressive of a certain safety-first, middle-way attitude.
In his memoir, John Drummond, controller of Radio 3 in the early 1990s, wrote that the station presided over by his predecessor had once been described as a senior common room, and his own as an artists’ cafe. What is Jackson’s Radio 3? “If it’s your favourite cafe,” he says, “and you’ve been going there for years, every morning, and you love the breakfast, then Radio 3 needs to continue to feel like the absolute best place, with a menu that you love. It’s also got to be the place where the people who’ve just rocked up in the neighbourhood, who were thinking of going through the door, actually feel, ‘Yeah, I’m going to step into that.’”
Radio 3 is much more than its menu – or schedule. Through its commissions of composers, through the BBC’s orchestras and choir, through the enthusiasms and knowledge of its broadcasters, it has brought music – often new, extraordinary and dazzlingly different – directly into the homes of Britain in a way that was unthinkable in any previous era.
The early BBC pioneers took their responsibilities intensely seriously. “It is a means of enlarging the frontiers of human interest and consciousness, of widening personal experience, of shrinking the earth’s surface,” Hilda Matheson, the BBC’s first director of talks, said. I’m sure Jackson wouldn’t disagree, but the language of today is more smoothed out, less intellectually serious – and of course, a century on from Matheson’s words, anything is available to hear, while at the same time, paradoxically, our horizons are algorithmically narrowed. “Fundamentally, at our core, what we are there to do is offer distinctive programming that nobody else can do,” says Jackson. “And to, as you say, really shape culture. I think we need to be bold on Radio 3 about how we do that.”
But what does that really mean? Jackson gives me examples of how this might happen. Next year, he says, Radio 3 will look back on a quarter-century of 21st-century music and “take the whole year to really unpack the story of contemporary music, to look at which pieces have stood the test of time, where is music going, how AI is going to affect the way music is written. I think we can do something that stretches right across Radio 3 and makes a really bold statement about the living, breathing here-and-now nature of classical music.”
He waxes lyrical about the success of Radio 3’s Shakespeare Day in November, for which listenership increased for themed programming celebrating the 400th anniversary of the First Folio. Would you, I ask, do a Pierre Boulez weekend to mark his centenary in 2025? Boulez’s work is still, rightly or wrongly, regarded as the epitome of “difficult” modernism. “Of course we could,” he says. But would you? “Yes, if the execution of it is going to be right, yeah. We’ve got orchestras, we’ve got a choir. Absolutely that’s something on our list. We haven’t confirmed anything for next year yet, but of course, we could do that.”
Talking of the choir and orchestras, last spring a scandal erupted when the BBC announced plans to dismantle the BBC Singers, its salaried choir established in 1924, and to cut positions in its orchestras by 20% – against a backdrop of widespread cuts forced by the government’s flatlining, then below-inflation lifting, of the licence fee. The BBC Singers have now been spared the axe and, Jackson assures me, “there is a genuine belief, from the very top of the BBC, in the importance of these groups”. The orchestras will still have to absorb funding cuts – Jackson gives the example of filling vacant posts with freelancers rather than full-time players. It’s hard not to feel depressed by this narrowing, this diminishing – which it is possible to see echoed everywhere in Britain’s increasingly impoverished arts.
At a different moment in his life, Jackson wrote a book called Diary of a Desperate Dad – an upbeat, chatty account of becoming a father. (There’s a remarkable passage about giving his wife a bad pubic haircut when she was heavily pregnant.) Has parenting anything in common with running Radio 3? He laughs uproariously and tells me that I’ve doubled the readership for the book. “Yes! On many levels, yes! You need to make everyone feel that they’re equally loved. That’s really important. Even those people who you may want to do a little bit less for you now – you need to help them understand that, actually, you really love what they do.”
Even if you don’t, I suppose, but maybe I am being overly cynical. Jackson begins to muse on the power of tough love at home and in the office. “So, think about how you communicate with your children, and how you communicate with presenters. I’ve got a son doing GCSEs at the moment. And we had to remind him a few weeks back that he needed to basically pull his finger out and work harder to achieve his potential. And for once it actually went really well. And you know, he’s playing a blinder with his revision at the moment.”
I am sure Radio 3’s presenters will be delighted with this insight into staff relations. Nevertheless, it’s hard not to be affected by Jackson’s charm and optimism. “Your main feeling in this job is you simply don’t want to mess it up for the audience,” he says. “Because you know they care so so strongly about what we do. And if we lose that care and love, then we really don’t have anywhere to go.”
• This article was amended on 28 February 2024. An earlier version said that Composer of the Week would move to the afternoon when in fact it currently starts at 1pm. It will move to 4pm.
