Why I loathe snobs who sneer at Classic FM

As Britain’s unashamedly middle-brow classical radio station turns 25, QUENTIN LETTS offers this hymn of praise — and declares ...

SNOOTY playwright Alan Bennett and other Establishment grandees will not approve, but Classic FM is about to celebrate its silver jubilee.

Twenty-five Septembers ago, classical music lovers did not have much variety when it came to radio stations. They could listen to the dauntingly high-brow BBC Radio 3 and, er, that was about it.

Classical broadcasting was in the doldrums. It was regarded as the preserve of bow-tied nerds and mad-haired intellectuals.

It was not just unfashionable; it was often actively uncommercial, and seemed to have little future outside the state- subsidised sector and a few Albert Hall knees-ups. Classical music snobs seemed to want to keep it that way, where they could control it.

At 6am on the dank, misty morning of Monday, September 7, 1992, all that changed when the opening strains of Handel’s Zadok the Priest came drifting through the ether from an unassuming studio in London’s Camden Town.

Zadok, a great belter of an anthem, was an inspired if immodest choice. It begins tentatively with rhythmic, methodical strings. They build to a slow crescendo which erupts into a tremendous, startling blast of triumphant noise.

It was quite some statement of intent, particularly given that final financing for the commercial broadcaster (I should declare that the Daily Mail Group was one of the first investors) was nailed down only at the 11th hour.

The station was the brainchild of the TV chef Michael Barry, from BBC2’s Food And Drink, who set out with the determined aim of founding ‘ a popular classical music station, not abstruse or elitist’.

The man who presented that first programme, Nick Bailey, will be on hand on the big day next week to read a news bulletin.

Bailey is one of the few survivors from the early years, when presenters included Stephen Fry, former Radio 1 DJs Mike Read and Simon Bates, and the former newscaster Richard Baker, he of the voicebox as varnished as the decks of the old royal yacht.

One former presenter was dear old Henry Kelly, better known at the time as a TV gameshow host. MuSIC

buffs were appalled — appalled! — that a gameshow host should be turned into a classical music announcer. But that was what Classic FM was about: grabbing the interest of non-traditional listeners and saying: ‘ This is wonderful music, give it a try.’

Kelly, a delightfully quick-witted and well-read man, was a runaway success, and his daily racing tips only created more publicity for the station.

In his diaries, multi-millionaire playwright Alan Bennett described Classic FM listeners as ‘ Saga louts’ (on the inaccurate basis that they were all ancient biddies who went on OAP holidays with Saga). ‘I loathe Classic FM more and more,’ he sighed in 1996, which was, of course, a terrific encouragement for we middlebrow masses to tune in.

Bennett took umbrage at the station’s ‘safety and its wholehearted endorsement of the postThatcher world, with [adverts for] medical insurance and Saga holidays rammed down your throat between every item’.

A correspondent to the Guardian newspaper (wouldn’t you just know it?) agreed, complaining that Classic FM was ‘commodifying great music to sell stuff’.

Others were certain that the newly launched station would be short-lived. They thought listeners would rapidly tire of Classic FM’s format of bite-sized melodies and intimate, sugary presenters.

Those naysayers were soon proved wrong, with the station quickly attracting more than two million listeners.

Since then it has continued to grow steadily. Audience numbers are now over 5.8 million — more than twice that of Radio 3 — and Classic FM is firmly established as a meritocratic, unaffected voice in our culture.

I have been one of those listeners for the past 20 years.

That is not to say that I am not sometimes driven mad by Classic FM, particularly its repeated exhortations that we should all ‘relax’.

One of the daytime presenters, Jane Jones, has a way of saying it that makes the word sound almost sticky. I do wish she wouldn’t.

The more they tell me to relax, in excessively soothing tones, the more I want to yell: ‘I am blinking well relaxed! Or at least I was until you told me to be!’ But no radio station is perfect.

Take the current crop of presenters. Many (John Suchet, Catherine Bott, Alexander Armstrong, Aled Jones) are assured professionals at the top of their game.

Former Tory Cabinet minister David Mellor — he of the sex scandals and imperious manner — presents a Sunday evening show with a quirky range of oftenoverlooked classics.

Mellor may be a pretty awful man in some ways, but I have to admit — darn it — that his Classic FM show is extremely good and he plainly knows his potatoes when it comes to music.

The station’s managing editor, Sam Jackson, explains Classic FM’s philosophy thus: ‘We play what our listeners want to hear, rather than what we “think” they should appreciate.

‘When Classic FM was launched, some people didn’t even know that they liked classical music. It had been inferred to them by the classical music elite that it was not for them. We didn’t follow the self- proclaimed rules of the classical music world.’

Many Classic FM listeners, says Jackson, may have felt when growing up that classical music was something you had to sit down and listen to with great seriousness. The station took a more jaunty approach.

‘Henry Kelly had the common touch, and some people in the classical music world turned their noses up at that. But look at the audience figures and I think you can say that we had the last laugh.’

In loftier circles, it is still akin to heresy to say that you like Classic FM. I have a few friends who take the Alan Bennett line and insist that the station’s playlist is a barbarian imposition, and that its listeners are somehow intellectually inferior to those of Radio 3.

Well, so what if they are? We can’t all be delicate aesthetes.

But after listening to Classic FM for a while, are people not likely to become curious about broadening their knowledge? And is that not, dare one say it, a Reithian ideal?

The great thing about the station is that it welcomes newcomers and does not make them feel ignorant. The station recently received an email from a motorist who said he had had to pull over while listening to a piece Classic FM was playing, he thought it was so extraordinary.

The piece in question was Gregorio Allegri’s 17th- century Miserere. Now, the Miserere is such a well-known piece that many music buffs might snort with derision at the thought of someone who had never heard it. At Classic FM they took a different view: they were delighted to have introduced a new listener to one of the greatest pieces of music ever written.

It remains a challenge to persuade some members of the British public that classical music is not just for toffs in white ties and tails.

But the younger generation seems to be less deferential, less hung-up on the old notion of classical music being somehow only for people who lived in detached houses and drove a Vanden Plas.

One big area for growth in classical music, after all, is on the soundtracks to video games. Classic FM even did a whole series about it.

That doesn’t quite fit in with the Alan Bennett stereotype of Classic listeners just being cardigan-andslippers oldies. THE

tastes of Classic FM listeners have not shifted much over the years — but why would they when much of the music involved is hundreds of years old?

Favourites still include Handel’s Zadok and Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending, but when certain pieces are played too much, the listeners can go on strike ( that happened a few years ago with Nessun Dorma and Greensleeves).

What the listeners do love is film music, whether it be from Titanic — the biggest- selling classical album of the past 25 years — Harry Potter, Out Of Africa or whatever.

I can hear the howls of derision rolling down the snooty avenues of Hampstead, but which of us has not whacked up the volume when John Williams’s Star Wars theme, or those towering strings from ET, have come on the wireless.

So, well done to Classic FM on reaching its silver jubilee. Boohiss to snobbish Alan Bennett & Co.

Shall we all sing a chorus of Happy Birthday? If we do, we’d better make sure it is in tune.