Opinion

Turning on my old kitchen radio at random one Friday night in June, it was nice to hear the voice of Clare Teal, and I remembered how I used to enjoy her Sunday night big-band show years ago on Radio 2. This time she was singing rather than presenting, on Friday Night Is Music Night, and between numbers chatting happily to broadcaster Petroc Trelawny, who has brilliantly assumed the mantle of the late Robin Boyle.

From 2 to 3

Then came another Friday Night..., with Trelawny rolling out an archetypal mix of light music, popular classics and show tunes: Ketèlbey’s ‘Bells Across The Meadow’ (with real bells), the Polovtsian Dances from Borodin’s Prince Igor, the ‘Seguidilla’ from Carmen with mezzo Kathryn Rudge. Then Vaughan Williams’s Wasps overture, Ron Goodwin’s music from 633 Squadron and Eric Coates’ By The Sleepy Lagoon. At this point I was travelling back in time to a perfect old-time Radio 2 evening. But of course, this was actually Radio 3.

If the revival of Radio 2’s Friday Night Is Music Night was the most shocking of the Radio 3 changes introduced in 2024 (discussed by Peter Quantrill in [HFN Aug ’24), it was more defensible than some detractors claimed. The format is archaic, but it does present some classical music ‘accessibly’, without seeming to copy Classic FM.

The programme had previously lasted for an astonishing 70 years. It was launched in 1953 to feature the BBC Concert Orchestra, just formed as a successor to the BBC Opera Orchestra, and was broadcast live from theatre venues around the country. When lockdown came in 2020, repeats were broadcast on Sunday as Sunday Night Is Music Night. Live shows restarted and continued until the programme was cancelled in October 2023.

Light entertainment

There was now no room in the Radio 2 schedule for old-style light music, classics or pop songs of the pre-Beatles era. Baby boomers can still tune in to Johnny Walker’s Sounds Of The 70s or Tony Blackburn’s Sounds Of The 60s, but seldom get transported any further back than that.

Yet in earlier times, both before and after it became Radio 2 in 1967, the BBC Light Programme had been there to purvey light music and entertainment. And from 1959, Sunday evening listeners could catch a bit of Beethoven too. November that year brought the launch of The Hundred Best Tunes In The World. It was the brainchild of Alan Keith, an actor who’d been heard in innumerable BBC radio plays and seen in the 1941 film Dangerous Moonlight.

Keith selected and presented the music. By February 1960 his list of 100 mainly classical pieces and excerpts had all been played. So more were selected, including listener requests, and the name changed to Your Hundred Best Tunes. Keith would go on to present the show for a total of 44 years.

Pick ’n’ mix

In 1997 a listener poll was run to produce a 100-best list, but by then Classic FM had already begun its annual ‘Hall of Fame’, with listeners voting a Top 300. It’s fascinating to see that of the Top 20 titles in the last ‘Hundred Best Tunes’ chart of 2003, 11 also figure in the Top 20 of this year’s ‘Hall of Fame’. Here are some of them, with their Classic FM positions in brackets: at 2, ‘Nimrod’ from Elgar’s Enigma Variations (5); at 7, Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony (13); at 8, Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No 2 (1); at 10, Vaughan Williams’ ‘The Lark Ascending’ (2); and at 12, the ‘Ode To Joy’ from Beethoven’s Symphony No 9 (8).

So should ‘Your Hundred Best Tunes’ be revived on Radio 3? Or made into ‘Your 300 Best Tunes’? Maybe, or maybe not. But meanwhile, you can hear Clare Teal joyfully presenting the music she loves, not on Radio 2, but on Jazz FM.