Sunday nights don't mean Music Night any more

After 70 years BBC Radio's longest running programme - a showcase for the BBC Concert Orchestra - is coming to an end.

An article by Simon'O'Hagan in The i Newspaper
(25th November 2023)

Friday Night Is Music Night – latterly Sunday Night Is Music Night – is BBC radio’s longest-running live music show, the last surviving link to the era of the Light Programme (which became Radio 2 in 1967) and shows like The Goon Show and Round the Horne. It began all the way back in 1953 – but in 2023, after 70 years, is Sunday Night itself heading into the night?

Numerous elements have combined to make the show special. It’s two hours live, and it’s performed in front of packed audiences in theatres and concert halls across the land. The music is hugely varied, from pop to classical to film themes to showtunes. No piece lasts longer than three or four minutes, and there’s the fun of never knowing what’s coming next. And throughout its history, it has been a showcase for the most versatile of all the BBC’s performing groups – the BBC Concert Orchestra.

"It's our ability to switch between styles in an instant which I think is the orchestra's defining quality", long-time orchestra member Alasdair Malloy says. "And Friday Night was where we got to show off that quality. As a player, you become quite addicted to it. If you think of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, they're playing symphonies and other things from the classical repertoire all the time. I think there are one or two members of it who are quite envious of the Concert Orchestra – the way we'll go from Rachmaninov to Rogers and Hammerstein all in the same evening."

A recent schedule change has had a big impact on Sunday Night Is Music Night, and therefore on the Concert Orchestra’s opportunity to do what it does best.

That change came about when, in October, Paul Gambaccini departed the presenter's chair on Radio 2's Pick of the Pops on a Saturday lunchtime, making way for Steve Wright. Gambo, as he is known within the industry, has been a voice on BBC radio for 50 years. He's a legend. Nobody wanted him to disappear, and so he acquired a slot on Sunday evenings on Radio 2 – The Paul Gambaccini Collection.

Something had to give, and that something was Sunday Night Is Music Night. "We are all feeling the loss," Malloy, who is a percussionist, says.

Radio 2 are at pains to point out that it is not the end of the show. Specials like the recent Doctor Who -themed edition will continue to appear in the schedules. In the run-up to Christmas, there’ll be Trevor Nelson’s Soul Christmas featuring the BBC Concert Orchestra.

"The show is in the spirit of Sunday Night Is Music Night, but broadcast on a Thursday night," a spokesperson says.

Nonetheless, for the Sunday Night Is Music Night listener, and before that, Friday Night, it’s beginning to feel like the end of an era – one that stretches all the way back to when the host was required to wear black tie, and the BBC had a connection to the regions that it subsequently lost and is now trying to regain.

From Hastings to Blackpool, and Watford to Cardiff, Music Night reached out to where the audiences were, and those audiences enjoyed the kind of light music that has all but disappeared from the schedules — Viennese waltzes, Nelson Riddle arrangements, cinema organ favourites, and the work of such composers as Eric Coates, creator of the Desert Island Discs theme tune "Sleepy Lagoon".

"It was really an old-fashioned variety show that somehow survived", one former Friday Night insider says. "It was very tight, very slick, but even as a vehicle for the kind of pop star who wants to work with an orchestra, its time seems to have come. That type of audience isn’t being served any more. And maybe with changing work and leisure patterns, Friday nights and now Sunday nights don’t mean the same as what they once did."

The dwindling of the show also comes at a cost to musical talent. It gave opportunities to young and lesser-known performers who might well go on to much bigger things. The conductor John Wilson – now one of the most in-demand in the world – learnt much of his craft on Friday Night Is Music Night.

Other performers for whom Friday Night was either a stepping stone or a showcase include Michael Bublé, Glen Campbell, the operatic tenor Nicky Spence, the harpist Catrin Finch, the singer and multi-instrumentalist Julie Fowlis, and the operatic soprano Aylish Tynan.

Spence embodies the essence of Friday Night – his opera roles embrace Benjamin Britten, Richard Wagner and Leos Janacek. At the same time he is one of the singers who have just combined to release an album of Noel Coward songs.

Whenever this kind of change happens, the question of the bottom line will never be far from the picture. Paul Gambaccini's new Sunday night show will be costing a fraction of what it takes to put on an edition of Sunday Night Is Music Night, with not just soloists and conductors to pay for but the whole panoply of logistics involved in getting the 56 members of the BBC Concert Orchestra, and often a choir, ready and in position, perhaps many miles from their London base.

"It was one of the most complicated things I've ever worked on", another former member of the Friday Night team says. "There were so many different constituencies involved – the Outside Broadcast team, Radio 2 editorial, the orchestra's own management, and so on. But the way it all came together was beautiful". Budget cuts is how the reduction in Sunday Nights has been explained to the Concert Orchestra members.

The orchestra remains much in demand and still has a full diary. Its BBC commitments include recording TV theme music, and they are a regular fixture on the Piano Room, part of Vernon Kay’s weekday morning Radio 2 show. There's also work they do for outside promoters, which is an earner for the Corporation. But for Alasdair Malloy, the memories of Friday Night Is Music Night are very special.

His favourite takes him back to a show in Bexhill-on-Sea when he came up with the wheeze of having smoke come out of his xylophone during a particularly frenetic piece. "The producer loved the idea and the pyrotechnics crew were on board. But what nobody had reckoned with was how long the smoke would fill the stage. The presenter was the great Robin Boyle who was always the supreme professional but he tried to introduce the next number and just fell about laughing. People listening at home must have wondered what was going on!"

For Music Night’s devoted audiences, as well as the countless musicians who've graced its stages, the hope must be that there is still breath in a show like no other.