The week in audio: Radio 3’s new schedule; Helen Lewis Has Left the Chat; Strike; Wiser Than Me – review

Radio 3: new schedule
Helen Lewis Has Left the Chat (Radio 4) | BBC Sounds
Strike (BBC Cymru Wales) | Radio Wales
Wiser Than Me With Julia Louis-Dreyfus (Lemonada)

Five years after the last Radio 3 relaunch, when controversy raged around experimental show Late Junction being cut from five nights to one, there’s a new guy in town causing a commotion. He has a plum gig, presumably commissioned on the strength of the terrible joke in his show’s title, rather than his sparse interviewing style or deathless addiction to boogie-woogie piano.

“I love classical music like I love the blues and jazz,” says Jools Holland at the start of Earlier… With Jools Holland, sounding like a parent protesting that he doesn’t have a favourite child. His 60 minutes mixes obvious classical bangers (hello, beautiful Bach cello suite) with Nina Simone, Janet Baker and Meredith Monk, but his brief links add little to the mix. He also improvises with guest violinist Anna Phoebe, but his jaunty musical personality is subdued; his native south-east London accent notably dialled down.

Radio 3’s spring rebrand, by new controller Sam Jackson, is oddly backwards-looking, its tone mollifying, wallpapery, posh; a kind of mood music for perusing private school prospectuses in one’s second home. New shows include Radio 2 import Friday Night Is Music Night, which has run since 1953, featuring “an eclectic mix of light music” (its first edition is presented by Proms regular Katie Derham), and Saturday Morning, hosted by the sprightly Tom Service (who although excellent is one of two white middle-aged men, alongside Private Passions’ Michael Berkeley, hosting the only meaty, conversational programmes on the station).

Music Matters was a great weekly 45-minute show of chunky journalism hosted by a mix of male and female presenters, but is now the name for a very different strand of multi-part documentaries. The first involves six hour-long episodes by Times classical critic Richard Morrison on the setlist of the king’s coronation 11 yawning months ago, which apparently tells us something crucial about music right now. Episode one hints tantalisingly at challenging the system. It includes prominent voices of women and people of colour, and Morrison describing the day’s “fabulous feast of pageantry” happening against the cost of living crisis. Brass composer Gavin Higgins, meanwhile, bemoans “still having to scream at politicians” about the importance of music education and funding.

But these statements are placed like impressionistic paint strokes, not even vaguely interrogated. The show loses interest. Here’s 10 minutes of Handel’s Zadok the Priest to console us instead.

Who is this new Radio 3 for? Not eager listeners who want to broaden their horizons, I reckon, but box tickers behind the scenes, keen to poach the Classic FM or Scala crowds who are already well served. As a middle-aged music fan for whom Radio 3 has become an exciting point of entry in recent years, this rankles. I loved Saturday’s airy, expansive Inside Music, where a non-household name musician shared their influences for two brain-nourishing hours, and Corey Mwamba’s excellent Freeness, a show about improvisation that offered leaps into fresh worlds every week. Both are now gone.

So I’ll cling on to Hannah Peel’s mixes on Night Tracks (week nights at 10pm), the sparkling cleverness of Kate Molleson on Composer of the Week (week days, 4pm) and the New Music Show (Saturday, 10.30pm), and Soweto Kinch’s new five-times-a-week jazz show ’Round Midnight, although it’s not exactly a radical fresh offering – Kinch’s previous weeknight show, Jazz Now, was cancelled in 2019. No matter: last week he introduced me to Leeds ensemble Ancient Infinity Orchestra and an amazing track by Oumou Sangaré, chosen by 2021 Mercury Prize nominee Nubya Garcia. But I still sense that, like Jools, Kinch has been schooled to be soothing, not stirring, say little between songs. It’s maddening. Controllers should treat music as a skyrocket to new places, not a sedative.

Over on Radio 4 (where, incidentally, Radio 3’s speech programmes Free Thinking and The Verb have been shunted) is an intriguing new series, Helen Lewis Has Left the Chat. Its premise is lively – an exploration of how the messy worlds of private messaging have shaped our identities and interactions – but this introductory episode feels frothy and scattergun, full of pastiched electronic pop interludes, random anecdotes and Lewis punctuating the tension by saying things such as “uh-oh”, as if we’re overhearing a Teletubbies rerun. Next week’s episode on politics (which I’ve heard on preview) is better, based around an interview with the notorious overlord of WhatsAppery, Dominic Cummings.

I enjoyed some things last week, honestly. There’s Strike, BBC Cymru Wales’ series about the miners in the mid-1980s, a subject already well excavated elsewhere this year, if you’ll pardon the pun. It’s expanded here by Welsh film director Jonny Owen (pop fact: he’s also Mr Vicky McClure), who goes back to his Merthyr Tydfil living room to chat with his mates and mam; his father quit mining after helping to dig out the dead from Aberfan. Interviewing friends and people from his parents’ generation, Owen makes this history feel powerfully recent and explores the terrifying camaraderie of the pit brilliantly, every clank and echo of the coalface ringing in our ears.

A pick-me-up after all that is the glorious first episode of season two of Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s Wiser Than Me (Lemonada). As well as the wonderful story of how she joined Seinfeld and made the masturbation episode, The Contest, she gets her guest Sally Field ranting about crumbling cartilage and misogyny in movies (“every single solitary year was such a goddamn fucking struggle”). Dreyfus is a warm, non-sycophantic host, as brashly funny as her old Seinfeld character, Elaine Benes. I loved her recalling a terrible audition for the 1986 movie About Last Night…, and watching the woman who got the part, Demi Moore, twirling out of the room. “Ah fuck,” she deadpans, “I’m fucked.”