Classic FM’s place within the tradition of UK classical music radio 1992–1995

This article considers whether the UK’s classical music radio station, Classic FM that launched in September 1992, should be regarded as having been during the mid-1990s within the tradition of classical music broadcasting on UK radio established by the BBC. The history of classical music radio in the United Kingdom since 1945 was characterized by a series of efforts to widen the franchise, to attract a continuing middlebrow and middle-class audience alongside more elite programming. The introduction of Classic FM, happening at much the same time as BBC Radio 3 was recast in order to attract a wider audience, comprises the most recent such attempt. Drawing on a new database of programme output, and supported by audience data, the changes introduced by Radio 3 from the beginning of the 1990s are shown to be a deliberate attempt to create a more diverse network, soundly based in the established canonic repertoire of classical music radio, but willing to test of the margins of that repertoire. The history of the arrival of Classic FM shows that it came about in a relatively unplanned way. Far from being a natural progression from the earlier Independent Local Radio services, it arrived almost by chance into the broadcasting ecology. The station’s output was dominated by relatively undemanding sequence programming, but was based on the same central canonic repertoire as Radio 3, with Classic FM striking downwards towards greater popularity, whereas the BBC station ascertained upwards towards presenting this genre of music at times as high art. Nevertheless, the two occupied substantially the same cultural ground, and Classic FM notably displayed programming ambition outside peak times, placing it firmly within the longer tradition of UK radio. The common ground shared by the two stations is further demonstrated by the similarity of their audience profiles, and the extent of shared listening, with one million listeners tuning in to both stations each week in the mid-1990s. Classic FM and Radio 3 between them reawakened the substantial middle-class, middlebrow audience for classical music radio in the United Kingdom. It is correct to locate Classic FM within the continuing tradition of British classical music radio, and to regard it as comprising and extending UK public service radio broadcasting accordingly.