The mythical genius of Daidalos, the first polymath<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>Despite the best efforts of several generations of scholars, the tablets had remained unreadable \u2013 leaving the language behind them, and the whole Minoan civilisation that they represented, unknowable.<\/p>\n
But, one evening in 1952, a Third Programme producer, Prue Smith, happened to have been visiting the Highgate home of Michael Ventris, a young British architect with a precocious interest in ancient scripts. Ventris, it transpired, had been trying to decipher the Knossos tablets for years. Now, when he came late to the dinner table, he was profusely apologetic. \u201cI\u2019m terribly sorry to have kept you waiting,\u201d he said, \u201cbut I\u2019ve done it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Smith and Ventris agreed between themselves that he would announce his momentous discovery not in an obscure journal or to the national press, but on the radio. When he took to the microphone on Tuesday 1 July, Ventris changed our view of Aegean history at a stroke. He also put a seal on the Third\u2019s reputation for allowing its listeners to be the first to hear new ideas as they entered the public realm.<\/p>\n \n
In focus: how Under Milk Wood<\/em> realised the Third Programme\u2019s potential<\/h4>\nAt 7.25pm on 25 January 1954, the Third Programme aired 90 minutes of radio that would go down in history as one of broadcasting\u2019s creative pinnacles, its opening words destined to be among the most famous lines in British poetry:<\/p>\n
\u201cTo begin at the beginning: it is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobble streets silent and the hunched, courters\u2019- and-rabbits\u2019 wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crow-black, fishingboat-bobbing sea.\u201d<\/p>\n
Under Milk Wood<\/em> went on to treat listeners to a bawdy journey through the night-time dreams and working days of Organ Morgan, Polly Garter, Captain Cat and a multitudinous cast of other characters in the small fictional Welsh village of Llareggub. Its author was the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, who was also due to have been the drama\u2019s narrator but died before what he called his \u201cwretched script\u201d was ready.<\/p>\nThat Under Milk Wood<\/em> got on the air at all was largely down to the BBC\u2019s infinitely patient producer, Douglas Cleverdon, who\u2019d spent half a decade cajoling a script out of Thomas. It was Cleverdon who persuaded the author to abandon an early, over-elaborate story line, when it looked as if Thomas was wearing himself to a thread over the commission.<\/p>\nIt was also Cleverdon\u2019s inspired last-minute decision to cast the film actor Richard Burton as replacement narrator after Thomas\u2019s untimely death.<\/p>\n
Not every critic was impressed by Under Milk Wood<\/em>. Kingsley Amis, for one, regarded Thomas\u2019s work as \u201csentimentalising, ignorant horsepiss\u201d. Most reviewers, however, were thoroughly spellbound by the rhythm and texture of the lines, delivered with gusto by the production\u2019s all-Welsh cast.<\/p>\nBetween them, Thomas and Cleverdon had delivered on one of the Third Programme\u2019s key promises: that as well as sharing with listeners the established highlights of \u201chigh culture\u201d, here was a radio service that would be creating brand new art all of its own.<\/p>\n
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Quality or quantity<\/h3>\n
Music did not yet dominate the Third\u2019s schedule. Yet there were plenty of ear-catching moments that established it as a platform not just for airing the existing canon but for changing what counted as part of the canon to begin with: startling new work from Peter Maxwell-Davies and Benjamin Britten; modern jazz; rediscoveries from the lost early music of the Renaissance; deliberately provocative programming that placed Bach cheek by jowl with Stravinsky.<\/p>\n
There was even, in 1960, the very first performance of Mahler\u2019s 10th Symphony. It had been left uncompleted at the time of the composer\u2019s death in 1911, but the BBC producer Deryck Cooke went back to the original score and did enough \u201cconjectural filling in\u201d to build the foundations of a version still widely used today.<\/p>\n
On the podcast | Susan Tomes discusses some of the most impressive pieces of piano music ever written, and shares the stories of the composers who penned them:\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n