Radio: The Third’s Fifth

When it began, five years ago, the BBC’s Third Programme was damned with faint praise or jeered at as a “pretentious and high falutin’ present for the esthete and the intellectual snob.” Last week, on its fifth anniversary, the robustly highbrow Third found the critical climate a good deal more cordial. Seated before a microphone in a BBC subbasement studio, Controller Harman Grisewood noted: “Birthday greetings do not usually take the form of congratulations at having survived. Yet. . . five years are long enough for the programme to have died a natural death if it were not wanted.”

Intellectual Caviar. The people who want the highbrow Third Programme have never numbered more than 1,500,000, compared to the 45 million who listen to BBC’s middlebrow Home network and the lowbrow Light Programme. But this small minority can tune in on the best brains, the best music and the best drama Britain can produce. Not all of the Third’s intellectual caviar is equally palatable: it ranges from odd items like “An Ecologist among the Hopi” to Scientist Fred Hoyle’s exciting series of lectures on the universe, which proved so popular that they were rebroadcast on the Home.

Listeners to the Third have heard Thomas Mann speak on George Bernard Shaw; T. S. Eliot on Virgil; Joyce Cary and Henry Green on novels. Stravinsky’s new opera, The Rake’s Progress, was broadcast uncut from Venice, and the Third has won itself a slightly risque reputation by presenting, unabridged and unabashed, the Restoration plays and Chaucer. The Third pays somewhat more attention to time schedules than it used to, but a show will still be broadcast in its entirety even if it means running a few minutes over.

Shelley to Ubangi. Because professors, even in England, cost less than comedians, the Third Programme operates comfortably on a budget of around $2,000,000 a year. And because it broadcasts only in the evening and leans heavily on recordings, the Third can get by with a permanent staff of 15, headed by 45-year-old Harman Grisewood. An Oxford graduate who came up through the BBC ranks as an actor and announcer, Grisewood often acts as his own talent scout. Pipelines to the universities and London literary circles help him find out who is at work on a new critique of Shelley or who is just back from a look at the tribal habits of the Ubangi. Sometimes, the Third goes out and beats the bushes itself, as when it recently persuaded Oxford’s C. Day Lewis to make a new translation of the Aeneid for a broadcast series.

Although the Third Programme is still criticized for a lack of humor, a tendency to dry pedantry and timidity in experiment, its basic idea is now generally accepted in Britain, and is gaining ground overseas. Italy’s radio system has begun its own II Terzo Programma, and the Commonwealth networks make frequent rebroadcasts of Third shows. In the U.S., noncommercial broadcasters would be hard put to it to stay on the air without the help of recorded Third Programme dramas and operas. Only the involved problems of international copyrights prevented the University of Louisville from buying the entire Third Programme for U.S. broadcast.

A Little Knob. Such straws in the wind encourage Grisewood to believe that there is a large minority audience, the world over, which wants only the best and is eager and willing “to put effort into their radio listening and not be content just to let things wash over them.”

Perhaps the handsomest birthday present of all came from Viscount Samuel, writing in the Radio Times: “Anyone at the cost of three farthings a day—cut off, it may be, from all stimulating intercourse, living perhaps in some straightened home or lonely cottage—by turning a little knob, may have brought to him the finest thoughts of the human mind; he may suddenly fill his room with the radiance of genius.”