Renowned baritone Roderick Williams picks his top ten highlights from over three centuries of opera in Britain and discovers what our opera story can tell us about British identity.

Britain has often held an ambivalent attitude towards opera. At many points over the last 350 years, sung dramas have spoken to and for a mass audience. At other times we’ve viewed opera as elitist and foreign. In this three-part series we'll see how, throughout that history, the changing place of opera in British culture tells a revealing story about who we are.

In this final episode, Roderick homes in on the 1990s, when the Three Tenors took the sounds of classical opera into the popular mainstream, and he looks at why Benjamin Britten's uneasy tale of a lonely outsider connected so powerfully with British audiences after the Second World War.

With contributions from: musicologist Suzanne Aspden, conductor Sir Mark Elder, sopranos Soraya Mafi and Danielle de Niese, Barbican director Sir Nicholas Kenyon, musicologist Alexandra Wilson, popular culture historian Martin Johnes, baritone Sir Thomas Allen, musicologist Susan Rutherfork, performance historian Eleanor Lybeck, and members of Streetwise Opera.

Produced in Cardiff by Chris Taylor and Amelia Parker Show less