Blurring the boundaries

Music on the radio

Here's a test. Assign the following broadcasts to Radio 2 or Radio 3: a documentary about a half-forgotten tenor, a survey of humorists in classical music, a week's programmes by the BBC Big Band, a nostalgic round-up of hotel orchestras between the wars. Easy?

It was Radio 2 that came up with The Lancashire Caruso, on Tuesday. Tom Burke's name does not appear in the reference books on my desk, but his voice and his story - rags to riches and back, twice over - filled a riveting hour. Down the pit at 14, off to London at 23 with an agent who took 50 per cent, he moved from ballads to opera, with a spell in Italy, and starred in the post-First World War reopening of the Royal Opera House at the insistence of Nellie Melba. Puccini insisted on him, too. Recordings showed a bright, agile voice - "Nessun dorma" sung instead of bellowed - with fine control and a prosaic sense of rhythm.

In 1920 he took off suddenly to the United States, lured by promises of concert work. Unfortunately his promoter billed him as Ireland's Greatest Living Tenor, and the McCormack fanciers rubbished him. He lost his voice for 18 months. The career recovered and he made his fortune, but after he returned to England in 1927 it all fell apart in an orgy of fast living, which climaxed in his appearing drunk at a royal gala. "Where's the King?" he asked the audience. "I'm the king." Even his money went in the Wall Street crash.

A second marriage brought love and financial security, but a budding film career was cut short by war. After five years' touring for Ensa he ended up singing in Lancashire pubs, and his own club was closed for after-hours drinking. Driven back south, he taught and was said by Lord Harewood to be still good in the Fifties. His last recording, from 1961, rang out proudly.

John Waite's documentary suggested that it wasn't the bad behaviour that undermined him so much as a lack of confidence - at the height of his fame he would not show up for engagements, and alcohol was not the cause. But the broadcast didn't touch on social class. How did the Covent Garden ambience affect him? Why was he so quick to escape to America? We needed to hear more about his campaigning for home-grown singers and against producers, which must have made him enemies.

Neil Innes and Nick Yapp's humour series (Tickling the Ivories, Tuesdays) is a Radio 2 retrospective. Everything is here, from Florence Foster Jenkins to the Portsmouth Sinfonia. It doesn't all pass the laughter test. Hoffnung's musical puns and Dudley Moore's German song "Die Flabbergast" neared the top of the chuckle charts. But this week's strongest survivor was Michael Flanders' quick-fire text to the finale of Mozart's Fourth Horn Concerto. The words are not especially hilarious; it's all in the perfect, absurd fit of rhythm, phrasing and timing.

Spending the week with the BBC Big Band was the latest venture of Radio 3's versatile Music Machine. On Wednesday the band's MD, Barry Forgie, shared the secrets of the great arrangers, culminating in Woody Herman's extraordinary addition of riffs and a rhythm section to Fanfare for the Common Man by Aaron Copland which was both respectful and subversive. Forgie's band played Moonlight Serenade as a samba, without a trace of the Glenn Miller Sound. This was all delivered with enthusiasm and confidence.

As for Cocktails, that's simple to place. These odd half-hours on Radio 3 may have a slightly camp air, but this Wednesday's delivered its music from the clubs and restaurants straight, the recordings beautifully cleaned up (they are destined for CD). Some swoopingly harmonised violins in one piece of 20th-century Tafelmusik must have been early Mantovani, before the echo effects got in. Other bands were more American in style but staid in beat - one achieved that contradiction in terms, a sexless tango - with plain London accents from the vocalists. It didn't swing, but it certainly sparkled.

Some listeners deplore the blurring of the boundaries between networks. These ears welcome it. Music is far too compartmentalised as it is, and the BBC always used to be a prime offender. What stays different is the tone. With the same music, Radio 3 would be more distanced and analytical about humour, and Radio 2 would have more fun among the cocktails. If the music has been let out of its compartments, the listeners are left in theirs. The mysteries of English life that stopped Tom Burke in his prime are still with us.