The Third at 80 – a brief history of the unexpected

When the BBC launched a brand new and highly ambitious radio service on Sunday 29th September 1946, it was to a tiny and very selective audience. Yet before long ‘The Third Programme’ was being described as ‘the envy of the world’, lauded for landmark productions such as Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood and its commitment to classical music of the highest quality.

The sheer range and variety of the programmes it broadcast before being reborn as Radio 3 at the end of the 1960s has often been forgotten. So here, to mark what would have been its eightieth birthday, is a brief glimpse of just a few of those less celebrated but extraordinary productions that made the Third so special.

The new service Haley proposed would have no fixed points in the schedule, so that its musical repertoire could breathe and expand. ‘Special regard will be given to those works which, either because of their length or their physical difficulty, are rarely heard’, a BBC manager explained. ‘Most of us know a fugue of Bach,’ he said, ‘few are familiar with the entire forty-eight’. Through series such as Music in Post-War Europe the schedule also turned-out to be boldly international in flavour. In 1947, the Third even arranged for the entire Vienna State Opera Company to visit Britain for an extraordinary series of broadcast concerts.

But the Third was never conceived as being just a classical music station. It always wanted to feature culture in the broader sense – although this usually meant culture of a distinctly rarified kind. In its first few weeks there was Racine’s Phèdra, poetry in French, a six-part dramatization of Faust, new series on European cinema, on sculpture, on science. Later, there’d be big ear-catching productions such as Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood.

Such was the flow of riches – broadcast once and then, in this most ephemeral of media, rarely repeated – that many of the Third’s most significant programmes have drifted from popular memory. Fortunately, many of these ‘forgotten’ masterpieces of radio have survived in the BBC’s own sound archives. So, to celebrate eighty years since the Third’s birth, I’ve plucked eight of them out of the vaults, to give you a tantalising taste of the delights – and the ambition - of those early years…

1951: Vergil’s Aeneid

In September 1951, just as the Festival of Britain was coming to an end, the Third decided to take listeners back two-thousand years for a fresh take on one of the founding texts of Western literature.

It had commissioned the Oxford Professor of Poetry, Cecil Day Lewis, to write a new translation of Vergil’s epic, The Aeneid. The poem, about a refugee, Aeneas, sailing across the perilous Mediterranean Sea to reach the shores of Italy – a story that shaped so powerfully the myth of Rome’s foundation as a great civilization - seemed especially apt in the years of reconstruction following the Second World War.

The production, spread over three months of air-time, was vast in scale. But it presented to listeners the radio equivalent of a bare stage. Unadorned with sound effects, words took precedence in a translation designed to be spoken not read. The result, as one critic put it, was that the Third allowed Vergil to emerge ‘from the stuffy shades of the classroom into blazing sunshine’.

Here, we can hear an extract from episode five, when Aeneas is in Sicily, organizing sporting games as a test of virtue:

1952: The Cretan Tablets

The following summer, listeners heard one of the great archaeological riddles of the twentieth century being solved live on air.

In 1900, while he was excavating the ruins of a palace at Knossos in Crete, Arthur Evans had unearthed clay tablets over three-thousand years old, many of which had a mysterious script scratched into them - so-called ‘Linear B’. Despite the best efforts of scholars, they’d remained unreadable, the language behind them, indeed the whole Minoan civilization they represented, unknowable.

But for years a young British architect with a precocious interest in ancient scripts, Michael Ventris, had been quietly trying to decipher the tablets. And in 1952, he had a breakthrough. It was the kind of discovery that would normally be announced months later in the pages of a learned journal. Luckily for the BBC, a producer from the Third Programme, Prue Smith, happened to be visiting Ventris’s Highgate home at the time.

Ventris had come late to the dinner table, full of apologies for his guest. “I’m terribly sorry to have kept you waiting”, he said to Smith, “but I’ve done it”. He decided that the Third Programme would be where he’d make his announcement.

When he eventually stepped before the microphone, his brief radio talk changed our whole view of Aegean history:

1954: The Private Life of Hilda Tablet

The line between taking culture seriously and being pretentious has always seemed dangerously thin, and the Third Programme knew its own high-mindedness was easy game.

So, in an effort to neutralise criticism, it would periodically poke fun at itself and the cultural life it embodied.

In May 1954, there was The Private Life of Hilda Tablet, one of several satires written for the Third by the hugely talented, though rather troubled and disorganised writer Henry Reed. The production, which was repeated several times over the years, took aim not so much at the Third, but the small but confident coterie of avant-garde composers, writers and critics in post-war Britain – embodied dramatically by the eponymous Hilda Tablet, described as a ‘composeress’.

Reed apparently modelled Tablet on his contemporary, Elisabeth Lutyens. But there was a bit of Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears in there, too. The script prickled with wit. And was carried brilliantly by Mary O’Farrell’s portrayal of the central character - a haughty, earthy, self-obsessed force of nature, possessed of an unhealthy obsession with twelve-tone music:

1957: All That Fall

For a drama to appear on the Third, it had to be pretty distinguished. One of the classics, perhaps, or something complex and challenging. Every now-and-then, however, the Third would make its audience sit up and listen by broadcasting a play that reinvented the whole medium of sound.

In January 1957 it featured a new production that was immediately hailed as ‘the most important piece of pure radio drama’ for years. It was All That Fall, by Samuel Beckett.

Getting the author of Waiting for Godot to offer a new work to the Third rather than the stage was the fruit of persistence and the careful cultivation of trust by key BBC figures: the Third’s head, John Morris, and the script editor, Barbara Bray, to-ing and fro-ing between London and Beckett’s home in Paris. Another producer, Donald McWhinnie, had set about inventing the overall sound. He decided to spurn naturalism for a rather more startling atmosphere: not just electronic evocations of wind and rain and footsteps, but human actors making animal noises.

The plot was deceptively simple. A woman, Maddy, travels to a train station to meet her blind husband, Dan. They meet. They trudge back home – though his train is delayed: a nagging mystery. But of course, this being Beckett, words are also sounds. And so, as one delighted critic put it, All That Fall ended-up containing at least ‘49 types of ambiguity’…

1957: Pierre Boulez

Despite the publicity given to major dramas like All That Fall, classical music was always centre stage on the Third. Inevitably, the vast back-catalogue of the classical canon dominated its schedule. But this was a station that sought constantly to uncover the new and the challenging - in music as much as in any other art form. And in March 1957 it featured for the very first time a piece of music by a composer introduced on air as ‘the leader of the extremist avant-garde’.

It was by Pierre Boulez, just 32 years old but already enjoying a reputation for permitting ‘no compromise, no concession, no half-way’.

The BBC couldn’t claim to have discovered Boulez: he’d been composing for more than a decade. In the early-1950s, those in charge of music at the Third had often dragged their collective feet when it came to the avant-garde. But in 1957, they gave Boulez his British radio debut as a composer.

And in this extract from that first broadcast, where he’s playing alongside Yvonne Loriod, we hear Boulez the pianist for the first time, in a piece described as offering ‘a kind of…. mechanized savagery’:

1961: Parents and Children

In the early-1960s, a big chunk of the Third Programme schedule was still occupied by something called ‘Network Three’, a kind of station-within-a-station which included a whole bunch of magazine-style radio series.

For Third Programme purists, Network Three was a ghastly waste of air-time. The format felt like a betrayal of the ideals set out back in 1946, offering nuggets rather than sustained thinking. It seemed to displace Culture with a capital ‘C’ – the stuff that endured, that mattered, that was part of the Canon – with culture with a small ‘c’ - what the anthropologists and sociologists had said everyone had: the stuff of ordinary everyday life.

But the much-reviled Network Three was at least a space where listeners might catch the kind of voices and perspectives that rarely appeared elsewhere on the Third. And in 1961, broadcasters decided that it was the tastes and attitudes of the nation’s youth that they’d been ignoring for far too long.

One of Network Three’s new series that year was Parents and Children, described in the Radio Times as being all about ‘the difficulties and pleasures of bringing up a family’.

In this extract, a couple of teenagers were being interviewed about the money they spent, the clothes they bought, the lives they led. In their ability to talk frankly and naturally we can perhaps sense the informality that would help define the decade ahead.

1964: The African-American Civil Rights Struggle

During its first two decades, the Third Programme had tended to look eastwards. For understandable reasons. After the isolation of wartime British broadcasters had been keen to connect their listeners with cultural highlights from the rest of Europe. But in the 1960s, producers started looking to the west a little more often.

In the autumn of 1964, as Americans faced a Presidential election and the civil rights struggle reached a climax, a series of talks, documentaries, plays and music programmes focused on the Black American experience. The idea was for the Third to help listeners in Britain better understand the political moment in the United States through exploring African American culture in its myriad forms.

The series was jointly edited by the long-serving BBC documentary-maker Geoffrey Bridson and the African-American poet, and revered elder statesman of the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes. Hughes was an astute choice for the role. He was fully engaged in the civil rights struggle, so he could help the BBC secure the involvement of almost all the relevant cultural figures. The results were impressive. One reviewer later described it as ‘not only the best series of the year’, but ‘possibly the best of all time’.

In December, Langston Hughes arranged an appearance from the elusive James Baldwin, who’d recently returned to the States after nine years in Paris, and was keen to convey his growing frustration at the speed of change in his homeland. The programme was focused on African-American writing. And in this extract we can hear Baldwin responding to Hughes, who’d put to him this deceptively simple question: as a writer, did he feel compelled to observe from the side, or engage fully in the struggle?

1965: Beat Poets at the Albert Hall

In August 1965, the Third Programme was in attendance at the Royal Albert Hall in London. Not for a regular Proms concert, but for an evening of live poetry – poetry that was very much ‘of the moment’.

The event featured, among others, Lawrence Ferlinghetti from San Francisco, and a tape-recording of William Burroughs reading from ‘The Naked Lunch’. There was also Christopher Logue, Pete Brown, Adrian Mitchell. In other words, this was ‘the Beat Generation’ capaciously defined.

The succession of sound poems and discourses on racial discrimination, Vietnam, and free love showed a Third Programme with its finger on the pulse of culture’s deep tectonic plates – and a station confident enough to apply the same critical ear to the Beats as it would to Pope or Donne.

The performer who most of the six-thousand or so gathered inside the Hall had actually turned up for, however, was Allen Ginsberg. The American poet began his star-turn by intoning to a pair of Tibetan prayer cymbals, but the climax of his performance came with his rendition of ‘Be Kind to Yourself’:

David Hendy is the author of The BBC: A People’s History (London: Profile Books, 2022). In 2016 he presented Power of 3, a 70-part series of short features for BBC Radio 3 on the history of the Third Programme and Radio 3.

The Third at 80 – a brief history of the unexpected, contains excerpts and programmes from BBC services at specific moments in time. The material should be viewed in this context and with the understanding that it reflects the attitudes and standards of its time – not those of today.