Gardening: Preserve our skinhead

I USED to feel tremendously passionate about Radio 2, but those days are gone. I have transferred my loyalty to Radio 3. I can't remember quite why or how the former love affair began. Ray Moore was an important part of it, though.

There was something about getting up before dawn to write whichever of the books was on the go at the time, and to hear the gravelly voice that sounded so Poujadist and grumpy, and to begin to realise that there was a sweetness in the man. He had an advanced taste for the surreal, which for some reason endeared him to his main audience - which was the newsagents.

When I asked if I might camp in his studio for one of his shows, and to get to know him a bit, it was no great surprise to find that Moore smoked Park Drive and broadcast with his trouser flies undone at the top. But it was a shock to find that he read the Guardian: that didn't seem, somehow, a very Radio 2 thing to do. Anyway, he died, and the station didn't seem quite the same after that.

This last winter, while I have been writing my latest modest number (The Future of the World: Rediscovering Faith in Progress, due to be published by Fourth Estate in September - an upbeat read for Christmas, I should say), I have plugged in to the new skinhead Radio 3, and I'm loving it.

At first, it rather fizzed and crackled as its signal limped over the fields and vales south of here, but a lad from Leominster came out with ladders and poles, and now it usually sounds as though it has been plumbed, rather than beamed, into the house. The aerial bloke said it would be no trouble to plug in Red Hot Dutch and the Adult Channel while he was at it, but I didn't think I had done quite enough to deserve those treats yet.

I have become almost incredibly grand in my musical tastes. After the early shock of finding that the new management of R3 didn't baulk at putting on Sondheim as composer of the week - one might as well have been listening to R2, really - I have settled to enjoying almost everything I hear; including, of course, the Sondheim. Hindemith, Berg, Bartok, Nielsen; concertos for french horn and motorbikes; they can't shock me.

But I have been nurturing contradictory thoughts about the station. No better chance to explore these than at the meet-the-people sessions that R3 is running at the moment. When musical Midlanders met in the Pebble Mill television studio in Birmingham, it felt deliciously like the proper BBC.

Somehow, I don't think its ethos - projected as much by the receptionists and security people as by the broadcasters - can survive privatisation, or whatver fate the corporation fears. Perhaps it doesn't matter: you can't live on ethos; yet what will be left when we've frittered it all away?

Into the arts forum session. Oh God, the moaning that Nicholas Kenyon has to put up with. One twerp, who said that he was a composer, asked why there wasn't any modern music on the station. Kenyon replied that in the past year music by 260 living British composers had been played, which must have taken care of the best of them with a good deal of room for error.

The composer came back and said he had to go to work in the morning, and the modern stuff went out too late, like the best foreign films on television. It wasn't my place to point out that there are tape recorders and videos for just such occasions.

Indeed, I am not sure what future serious music broadcasting has when the technology of narrowcasting really gets going. Cable and satellite apparently already offer sound channels devoted to specific music programming. So perhaps R3's role as a patron of live broadcasts, and as an interpretive and instructive companion in one's home, will be enhanced.

This sounds like a plea not to dilute the BBC's regional music patronage, doesn't it? But they had better watch it: R3 is already in danger of becoming a sight too chummy. I want to learn and I enjoy the companionship of radio, but that doesn't mean I want it to be my jolly little pal.

We turn to classy music because we are tired of seductive tripe, and we are jealous of R3's tone of voice because it seems like a refuge that preserves a robust Anglo-Saxon, no-waffle respect for the language and people's brains. If people want arts-twaddle, they can always tune into Kaleidoscope.