This article is taken from the November 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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Mysteries make the world go round, and brighten our lives. Why are so many tourists keen to get into Madame Tussaud’s? Who gave Angela “carrick-ter-chaw” Rayner elocution lessons? Why is Prue Leith in the papers every week?

Now, the biggest puzzle of all: what is Radio 3 for?

The answer ought to be: “it is a station that brings classical music and intelligent discussion to broad-minded listeners”. Some things, its guardians should never be shy of proclaiming, have greater value than others, and it is our pleasure to remind listeners that the views from the peaks are usually grander than those in the valleys.

Which brings us to the centenary “celebration” of the BBC Singers, broadcast from the Barbican Centre, because it summed up everything that has gone wrong. There was something of a mea culpa about the evening as, last year, the corporation planned to shunt this exceptional group into the sidings, to save money that might more easily have been saved by clipping the wings of Gary Lineker. So, fair’s fair. At least they did it.

It wasn’t, alas, much of a show. The hosts, Georgia Mann and the ubiquitous Clive Myrie, sounded as if they were competing for a jester’s hat. Mann, a talented lady, has the brisk manner of a nurse searching for a bedpan. Myrie, comme d’habitude, encouraged us to imagine we were having the most wonderful time.

After Bach, to settle the nerves, the singers gave us some South African wailing and a dreadful piece by an Indian-American lady full of “radical joy”, which Myrie pronounced “truly wonderful”. Your business, he seemed to suggest, is rejoicing. This choral stuff is — hooray! — for everybody.

Anybody who has seen Myrie helm the television coverage of the Proms knows how he loves to speak in capital letters. AmAZing! InCREDible! ICONic! He may never catch up with simpering Katie Derham, but he’s going to have a jolly good crack. He told the singers they were “GAME-changers”, a term more commonly applied to scheming fly halves and nasty fast bowlers.

When Eric Whitacre (a fashionable composer) and Anna Lapwood (organist and BBC house pet) trotted on as special guests, Myrie hailed him as “pheNOMenal” and her as “a SENsation”. Then he muttered something about “singing the unsingable”. This was straight from Play School. Shall we look through the round window today, children?

It was demeaning and oh so predictable. Under Sam Jackson, appointed controller last year, Radio 3 has lurched even further into a squall of mediocrity. As Jackson is now in charge of the Proms, after David Pickard’s decision to leave the bridge (or walk the plank), we may expect more tweaks of the summer festival, to make it more “accessible” for teenagers.

As it was Black History Month, the station promoted an American called Margaret Bonds as composer of the week. A press release justified this by roping in civil rights, racism, segregation and social tension. Fine, she was clearly a noble lady.

But what’s her music like? It turned out to be no better than that of her mentor, Florence Price, whose work pops up at least once a day.

This commitment to a meretricious form of diversity is reflected in references to “the global majority”. What a dishonest phrase, introduced to make the “minority” feel guilty about a cultural inheritance they have nothing to feel guilty about.

The story of orchestral music has, for fairly obvious reasons, been written by dead white European men, from Monteverdi to James MacMillan. One could say something similar about painting, architecture, poetry, drama, gastronomy or winemaking. These are historical facts, beyond dispute.

It doesn’t mean non-Europeans cannot play a part. The new conductors of our superb orchestras in Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester are, as it happens, from Japan, Venezuela and Singapore, and we’re going to see a lot more of that. There’s diversity for you, without a didgeridoo in sight.

Yet the station whose sole purpose is to honour this tradition is ashamed of its riches. Turn on Radio 3 any day, and you will hear the drivelling of presenters who have designs upon us. It is intolerable.

Several, incidentally, speak in a manner that continues to shock. How many sloppy northern or faux-northern voices are necessary? Neither Tom McKinney, nor Linton Stephens, nor Elizabeth Alker would have been allowed near a microphone when the station paid attention to traditional skills like colour, clarity, rhythm and projection.

As for Ian McMillan, presenter of The Verb, there must be a rest home in Barnsley that will feed him three times a day, and tuck him up at night.

It shouldn’t be difficult to speak in clear English. Donald McLeod fights the good fight, and Petroc Trelawny gets the morning off to a sonorous start.

But they’re lonely sentinels. The battalions of relativism are on the march, led by Myrie, who presents a new show, Music on the Front Line, about the things war correspondents listen to when they’re not dodging bullets.

The decline of Radio 3 is more than a puzzle. It’s a tragedy, entirely self-willed.