Introduction

Summary

This memoir recalls a vital and formative stage in British broadcasting. The BBC of the 1960s is by now swathed in hearsay; I offer a factual account of how the Music Programmes Department was organized, with character studies of its leading members from William Glock down. Nowadays those men are not so much forgotten as imprecisely remembered, so there is a need for a firsthand, more nuanced, less black-and-white account of them and their time.

One major omission is necessarily the concert series that has been probably the BBC's best-known and best-loved musical offering ever since Glock dragged it out of its committee-bound inertia: the Henry Wood Promenade Concerts. Despite their new lease of life, those concerts remained very much an empire unto themselves, hardly in contact with the departmental producers, something that changed a little under Robert Ponsonby, and more drastically with the advent in the mid-1980s of John Drummond as both Proms planner and Controller, Radio 3. During my twenty-eight BBC years I ‘looked after’ precisely one Prom, to mark the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and even then it was a concert in whose planning I had had no hand.

At the end of the 1950s the BBC still enjoyed its monopoly, but a very limited range of stations had to cater for a wide variety of ‘brows’. Culturally, ever since the end of the war it had led the way with its Third Programme, the first European radio network devoted exclusively to music, drama and ‘the spoken word’. BBC Management, perhaps aware that its musical activities were in something of a rut, went in search of a dynamic, forward-looking new Controller for that output. As for me, I had spent two fraught years trying to prove myself in the strange and worldly business of music publishing, after a too-long five years in Oxford's ivory tower. At the London branch of Universal Edition, Vienna (Alfred A. Kalmus Ltd.), I was feeling as near a nadir as I had with the parent firm in Vienna three years earlier, aware that I was proving ineffective apart from keeping the copyright registrations up to date, and that my social and spiritual lives were going nowhere fast.