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BBC Radio 3 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced Third Programme.

BBC Radio 3

Radio 3

Words and Music

Drama

Music: Classical

A journey of discovery, weaving music with poetry and prose read by leading actors.

A weekly journey of discovery, weaving together a range of music with poetry and prose read by leading actors.

Words and Music: Head to Toe

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Harriet Walter and Tim McInnerny journey downwards with writers from Sappho to Larkin.

Readers Harriet Walter and Tim McInnerny take a journey over and through the human body in the company of writers from Sappho to Larkin, with music from Beethoven to Chas 'n' Dave.

Join readers Harriet Walter and Tim McInnerny in a journey over and through the length of the human body in the company of writers spanning 25 centuries, with music from Beethoven to Chas 'n' Dave. 

To begin, neurosurgeon Henry Marsh marvels at the grey jelly that is the source of human consciousness. Walter de la Mare strains his ears in a spooky old house and Milton's blindness helps him imagine Samson's blinded eyes. Cyrano de Bergerac's comically huge nose is followed by two 400-year-old self-help books about the tongue, and Fryderyk Chopin's advice on piano fingering includes the hand's relationship with the wrist, forearm and arm. 

At the centre of the journey is the heart. It thumps with John Clare's first love and glows with consummated love in Tennyson's 'Now sleeps the crimson petal'. 'Never give all the heart', warns WB Yeats – too late for broken-hearted Sappho, Emily Dickinson and John Donne. 

The ‘huge stuffed cloak-bag of guts' is the belly of Shakespeare's Falstaff, a cue for Giulia Enders to  remind us that the gut is an integral part of human feeling and being.  

At the gut's end, a 14th-century fart in Chaucer's ‘The Miller’s Tale’ still has the power of a thunderclap and, round the other side, Montaigne bemoans the 'indocile libertie' of the male member which rises to the occasion only at its choosing.

Nearly at journey's end, here are legs and feet. In Tolstoy's 'War and Peace' the aristocratic Natasha delights everyone with her innate ability to dance like a true Russian peasant, something Edward Lear's Pobble would have found difficult.

With Philip Larkin's 'An Arundel Tomb' and the end of life, the human body is represented in stone effigy. Now, 'Only an attitude remains' - and a final, hedged Larkinesque flourish 'to prove/Our almost-instinct almost true:/What will survive of us is love.'

David Papp (producer)

Live music and the arts: broadcasts more live music than any other radio network. Classical music is its core. Genres include world and new music, jazz, speech and drama.

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