“Radio 3 Presentation Team in 1972. Back row (l to r): Jon Curle, Victor Hallam, Tony Scotland, Donald Price, Cormac Rigby
Front row: part of Tom Crowe, Peter Barker, Patricia Hughes, Robin Holmes, Norman Mcleod“
Sad news: Peter Barker, one of BBC Radio 3’s finest presenters of yesteryear – mellifluous, dignified, confiding – has died at the age of 90.
What a delightful photo…oh Radio Days! Before my life as a recording producer gathered momentum, one of my first jobs when I came to London in 1979, was to work in the Radio 3 Gramophone Department. Christine Hardwick, redoubtable, benevolent, was my boss, still with us and in retirement very active in local amateur music making. My brief, among other things, was to write scripts for concert relays and programmes such as ‘This Week’s Composer’ as it was then called. These were then passed to Cormac Rigby, the mellifluous-voiced Head of Radio 3 Presentation. Neither an ungainly sub clause nor a split infinitive would survive his ruthless blue pencil, and any gushing personal opinion on a performance just heard would be struck out with vigour. ‘Just tell people what they’ve just heard, and who played it’, he once gently admonished me when verbiage in one of my scripts back-announcing a recorded performance threatened to overflow. Need I say more….?
I am very sad to learn that Peter Barker has left us. He was a truly excellent presenter who knew the value of silence, and there is nobody on radio 3 today who can match him, nobody, not even Handley, and certainly not the vacuous Skelly or similar others who regularly give their unwanted half-baked opinions. Kenyon started the radio 3 rot when he sacked Barker and others for trendier types unashamed to spin irritating hype, which a succession of controllers have endorsed culminating with the abysmal Davey. New boss Sam Jackson needs a super-strength blue pencil if he is to restore r3 to some of its former glory and rise above Classic fm, which shouldn’t be difficult.
Yes, those were the days. Why was the announcer thrown overboard in favour of the presenter? Too much vacuous chit-chat these days. The garrulous Tom McKinney takes the palm for actually making me shout ‘For God’s sake shut up and play the music!’ at the radio recently. One could go on. Memories of Peter Barker? He always read the news by saying ‘Here is the News and this is Peter Barker reading it’ (as did Alvar Lidell, in his time) – rather than ‘read by’; and he was adamant that a CD was a ‘cmPACT’ disc (which it is!) and not something you keep for powdering your nose! Incidentally (and I’ve asked this question many times before), in that oft-published photograph, who is the chap front-right called Norman Mcleod – I don’t remember him – and Donald Macleod didn’t look like that? (Incidentally, when I was a rookie librarian at Nottingham Central Library in the mid-1960s, I believe I was meant to be impressed on being told that Peter Barker’s mother was a regular user of Bilborough Branch Library – and I was impressed!)
Very sad to hear the news about Peter Barker. I started to listen to BBC Radio 3 in the 1980s/ 90s and his mellifluous voice still resonates with me! Whatever happened to Susan Sharp? I always enjoyed listening to her, as well.
Sad news. I do so agree with the previous comments. I only met Peter Barker once when I was hurrying across Market Square in Nottingham on my way to get a flight to Lisbon in May (?) 1995 and he and Penny Gore- still with Radio 3 were doing a roadshow on the square.
I’ve been listening to R3 since the mid sixties and miss the fact that the continuity announcers have become semi disc jockeys over the years. Then it really was a music station. Hearing Sean Rafferty play an a clip from an announcement read by Peter Barker from 1978 brought it all back I especially miss Patricia Hughes, Tom Crowe and my favourite Victor Hallam.
I assume the BBC have wiped most of radio 3 tapes if they were even ever recorded. I seem to remember Peter Barker sounding somewhat the ‘worse for wear’ on more than one occasion which always amused me!
I began listening to Radio 3 (as the Third Programme) while still at a state school, I was not the only one either. It was formal of course but we quite liked that and sometimes even mimicked its presenters.
An incomparable variety of live and recorded music was to be heard in the days when records were out of reach for nearly all of us (£65 for a LP or later CD record in today’s money). Do school children still listen to Radio 3 even in its ‘popularised’ form?
A myth that the service was then elitist and exclusive has since grown. Instead, it was like a huge library, a little intimidating at first maybe, but with infinite possibilities and the sense of being a place of discovery and enlightenment. Nobody tried to ‘sell’ a piece of music or drama to us or assumed that we were in need of their personal opinion of it. We felt flattered to be invited to find it ourselves. In comparison, with today’s presenters armed as they are with trendy tones and phrases, we felt the satisfaction of a personal discovery. Talks about music, science or drama did not have to be in the form of conversations.
Yet I read that the service’s listenership then as a proportion of total BBC radio output was much as it is now. Has as much been achieved as one would expect since those days when Radio 3 and it predecessors were run on a financial shoestring?
Just found out about Peter Barker’s death at 90, and suddenly feel terribly sad…. I’ve been listening to Radio 3 since the 1970’s, and his is one of the few names I remember from then, because of the lovely way he opened the News, as Garry has already mentioned, by saying …” and this is Peter Barker reading it”. I’ve thought of that often since then, particularly when irritated by the melodramatic way so many TV presenters read the news these days – as one has just done tonight – and it made me reach for my iPad to Google him, to discover he has just passed away. May he rest in peace. We won’t hear his like again.
I just agree 100 per cent with all the above comments. He was a true professional, will we ever see someone like him?