Private Passions

Original version

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

BBC Radio 3

Radio 3

Private Passions Podcast

Discussion & Talk

Music: Classical

Guests from all walks of life discuss their musical loves and hates

Guests from all walks of life discuss their musical loves and hates, and talk about the influence music has had on their lives

Private Passions: Kieran Hodgson

Kieran Hodgson

BBC Radio 3 - Private Passions, Kieran Hodgson

Michael Berkeley’s guest is actor and comedian Kieran Hodgson.

Michael Berkeley’s guest is actor and comedian Kieran Hodgson, who turned his lifelong obsession with Mahler, and his own struggle to write a symphony, into comedy gold.

Kieran Hodgson tells Michael Berkeley how he turned his lifelong obsession with Mahler, and his own struggle to write a symphony, into comedy gold. 

Fortunately for us Kieran put aside an early ambition to become a train driver and has instead forged a career as one of our most entertaining actors, writers and comedians. He’s won awards and accolades at Edinburgh for shows on the unlikely subjects of school French exchanges, British politics in the 1970s – and his obsession with late-Romantic music. 

You might know him from his Radio 4 show Earworms – comic introductions to the great composers – and for his television roles in Two Doors Down, Upstart Crow and God’s Own County. And you might also be one of the tens of millions of people who have enjoyed his ‘Bad TV’ parodies on YouTube. 

Music is central to Kieran’s life: he’s been playing the violin in amateur orchestras since childhood and composing since he was in his teens. He chooses an unfairly neglected concerto by Bruch; Schnittke’s breath-taking Choir Concerto; and music by Schoenberg, by Bernstein and – in a first for Private Passions – by the Dutch cabaret artist Wim Sonneveld. 

Producer: Jane Greenwood
A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 3

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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