Blah Blah Flowers

I was annoyed at the start of January to hear one of the presenters of Mixing It , the Radio 3 program dedicated to experimental music, mention in an off-hand manner that the show would be finishing a run of sixteen years championing the avant-garde in February. I was surprised on checking the playlist for the last show that it was mainly new items, not one of those retrospective jobbies that you normally get. I noticed, with some disdain, that it was being replaced in the schedules by another jazz show (I'm sorry, I have tried, but I honestly can't tell a difference between someone like Miles Davis and what you get in any comedy sketch that is trying t parody the genre like The Fast Show 's Jazz Club). But what really got my goat was to discover that the show wasn't ending because the presenters had had enough and wanted to move on to new things, but because the show was being axed by the controller of Radio 3. The show was recorded in the presence of a 'Senior Radio 3 Editor', presumably to make sure the presenters didn't make a fuss on air. An argument could be made that a station plays classical music for most of the day and then an experimental music show for an hour each week in the night is an anomaly, but as doctorvee says here, neither Radio 1 or 6 music play any experimental music or have done for a while. It was the only show I listened to Radio 3 for, I remember when they devoted a whole show to Radiohead in their Kid A / Amnesiac period to talk about the construction of the songs on their album, P J Harvey agreed to be interviewed by them only because she felt they were the only people who would want to talk about how she put together her last album. They got me into the Third Eye Foundation, Wilco, the whole Godspeed collective and others that I'm blanking on now because I'm not sitting in front of my music collection.

This is a real shame and yet another example of the BBC moving away from trying to give a little sample of everything to blanket coverage of the banal. No Rock and Roll Fun quotes People Like Us giving the eulogy.

Labels: BBC, Mixing It, music, radio, Radio 3