BBC SCHEDULES
SIR,—I have rarely read an article whkh gave mote satisfaction than Henry Fairlie's in a recent issue taking to pieces the BBC. Hundreds of gallons of ink have been used in deploring or defending cuts in the Third Programme; Mr. Fairlie is one of the very few who have looked at the Third Programme as it actually is before starting to pontificate. Only those with astigmatic, myopic or otherwise impaired vision can differ from his verdict which is that as conducted hitherto it has been in the main a thing of quirks and gimmicks, the private playground (as he admirablY puts it) for the 'esoteric sport of one-dimensional dons' having virtually no impact on the cultural life of the nation. It constitutes, he might have added, the greatest and most wanton waste of an opportunitY in democratic cultural history. It is grotesque that alterations to it of any kind should have been con- templated, let alone decided on, without a change of Controller being apparently so much as considered. The right man would be a combination of C. B. Cochran and Albert Mansbridge, i.e. educational zeal plus the highest flair for presentation and talent spotting. The mishandling of the Third is only one facet of the monumental lack of intelligence that leaps oftt at one from every page of the Radio Times. On the day on which I write, for instance, the only two items which 90 per cent. of BBC customers of anY intelligence wish to take in- (Robert Reid's Russia,: Journey, selected for discussion by The Critics, and the first of the resumed Panoramas) are carefully . synchronised. BBC surely stands for British Bumbling
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