Even before lockdown the listener figures for BBC Radio 3 were going up. In February 2020 they were up to 2.13 million compared with 1.83 million the previous year. One suspects that the privations of the pandemic will have driven them up even more.
One reason might be that Radio 3 has revamped itself somewhat.
Updating
Though its listenership is still 66% over 65s, the broadcaster has changed. The success of Classic FM must have had something to do with that, but it also reflects changing times. The station is now more eclectic in its output, with bursts of world music or classic jazz (Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, etc.) to be heard fairly frequently amid the Haydn, Bach and Borodin of Petroc Trelawny’s breakfast show. Further, there has been the introduction of young female presenters with musical nous. The 22-year-old super-saxophonist Jess Gillam fronts a Saturday lunchtime show This Classical Life in which she and a guest introduce each other to different recordings and chat about them. Then, former 6 Music presenter Elizabeth Alker’s Saturday morning broadcast tends to indulge the presenter’s wide-ranging taste which includes folk music along with listeners’ Saturday Sounds – natural noises recorded on smartphones, from the voices of birds on a river walk to the clatter of a three-year-old merrily dancing on a wooden kitchen floor. And the success of the extraordinarily talented Kanneh-Mason family has no doubt had an effect in capturing the interest of multi-cultural Britain for classical music.
The re-emergence of heavy shepherds
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