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Requiem for a man with the wrong vowels

The ousting of Paul Gambaccini from Radio 3 is a victory for Middle England, writes Fiona Maddocks

Fiona Maddocks
Monday 20 May 1996 23:02 BST
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Yes, I confess it. When Paul Gambaccini took over the 9am slot on Radio 3 last October I was aghast. Had my colleague Nicholas Kenyon (Controller of Radio 3), in all other respects unimpeachable, taken leave of his senses? As a listener, I could discern no logic in replacing solid, serious Composer of the Week, a mainstay of Radio 3's output, with yet another spin-a-CD sequence of music, glued together with dollops of banal chat as it undoubtedly would be. Change, yes. But revolution like this? Surely a bit outre for Radio 3, ratings war or not.

With appalled fascination, I soon became a connoisseur of the Gambaccini style. In the first week, the choice of a daily "Tone Pome" stirred a shudder of disbelief - this, on Radio 3. A Tone Pome! Would no one tell him that in English we spell it Po-em? Alas, poor Lord Reith and all other benchmarks of seriousness, moral decency and what you will. While not quite for hanging or stoning, I was ready to hurl at this beleaguered American disc jockey one of the blancmanges in which he seemed determined we should wallow each morning.

Now, we learn, he is being dropped. In a complete turnabout, I find myself regretting his departure. An impeccable presenter of Kaleidoscope, clever and cultivated, Gambaccini had at first sounded ill- at-ease in his Radio 3 seat. Yet, over the months, his programme has come into its own, helped, it is true, by an increase in music and a decrease in chat. His choice of repertoire is bold and exploratory, with a major work - yesterday a Brahms piano quartet - in each programme. Gone are the cloying personal observations of early days ("I once had a piano ..." lingers in the mind), replaced by pithy, well- written scripts redolent of the days when Radio 3 had a department devoted to such things. Significantly, his production company, Mentorn, consists in part of former Radio 3 staff. But finally, his sweet American tones have proved a turn-off - for everyone but me. He's just not a Radio 3 man.

His demise is heralded as a victory for the voice of Middle England, represented here, atypically, by Gerald Kaufman, and the Save Radio 3 campaign. This campaign's aim, if I understand correctly, is to keep Radio 3 much as it was until that awful Mr Kenyon arrived with all his brash bright ideas in 1992, with a little more Mozart here, a lot less Ligeti there. You see by the woolliness of the goal just how complex is the Controller's task. Forget those elusive new listeners. The old ones are the problem. The traditionalists themselves divide into warring factions: those who want hours of Hindemith and those who just want the presenters to have nice vowel sounds and play plenty of Handel, but not snippets please. Who'd be a Controller of Radio 3?

The sad truth is that Paul Gambaccini has become the scapegoat in Radio 3's alleged plunge downmarket, because his voice doesn't fit and he is thought to lack authority. Yet Mr Gambaccini would never have perpetrated some of the idiocies heard of late on Radio 3. In the past few days I've encountered Ravel's Lure [l'heure] Espagnol, and endured an over-bright presenter, in conversation with "an expert" - a favoured means of jollying up the format - thrice remark, "Ooh, that stopped suddenly", revealing her own ignorance of the music in question.

Yet their voices, in both cases, sounded right for Radio 3, by which we mean all those things we're are supposed to decry: well-modulated, probably Home Counties but definitely not Midlands, or Australian, or, as is now apparent, American. The real problem is how to attract a broader audience, while not promising more than can be delivered. By analogy, if the Independent began putting nudes on page 3, a few new readers might be pleased, but they would find the rest of the paper a trifle dull in comparison and would soon return to the Sun.

Radio 3 is still mainly and yes, if you like, squarely, the serious music network it always has been. There's no escaping that fact. To succeed, a new voice must be accompanied by enthusiasm, knowledge, know-how. The irony of the Gambaccini saga is that he had all those qualities. He was just the wrong voice for the job.

The writer is the editor of 'BBC Music Magazine'.

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