Words and Music

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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

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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: Betjeman's World

Betjeman's World

BBC Radio 3 - Words and Music, Betjeman's World

Bells, blossoms and railway branch lines in a John Betjeman-inspired playlist.

Readings by Tamsin Greig and archive recordings of former poet laureate John Betjeman, who died 40 years ago, are set alongside music by Butterworth, Grieg and Flanders and Swan.

...Ringers in an oil-lit belfry - Bitton? Kelston? who shall say? -
Smoothly practicing a plain course, caverned out the dying day
As their melancholy music flooded up and ebbed away...

John Betjeman, former poet laureate and much-loved broadcaster, was born in Islington in 1906 and died in St Enedoc, Cornwall 40 years ago this month. Today's Words and Music hears BBC archive recordings of Betjeman performing some of his best-loved poems - A Subaltern's Love Song and Christmas - and excerpts from broadcasts he gave on two of his passions: Victorian Architecture and the regional railway. Tamsin Greig reads more of his poetry, including his tender tribute to his dead father, On a Portrait of a Deaf Man, alongside assessments of the poet from the likes of Alan Bennett and former chair of the Arts Council Lord Goodman. 

The world Betjeman evokes is one in which beauty is prized above all else - not a Romantic ideal of beauty but an everyday kind of beauty: the beauty of a still day at the seaside, the beauty of a peal of bells across a landscape, and yes, the beauty of the women who were frequently his muses. A man of his time, he was simultaneously nostalgic for the past and ahead of the curve in many respects. His acute observation, his wit, and his palpable passions fill his work with a genuineness that brings his subjects to life vividly and directly.

The music we hear ranges from Grace Williams's Welsh seascape to Arnold Bax's dramatic depiction of the Cornish coast, via Anglican hymns, Pink Floyd and Flanders and Swan's comic and moving rendition of The Slow Train. There are musical settings of Betjeman's poetry from Madeleine Dring and Jim Parker, the latter taken from Banana Blush, a niche recording made in the 1970s and featuring Betjeman himself reciting his poetry. And there are bells - lots of bells.

Producer: David Fay, in collaboration with BBC Archives.

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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