Speed limit | 19 October 2017

Slow radio is popping up everywhere at the moment — programmes that have no outward form but just meander through the schedule, and often, but not always, are played out live in real time. In spite of their spontaneous feel and free flow these programmes have usually been carefully orchestrated, and that’s part of slow radio’s appeal: crafted to sound like life itself, impressionistic, en plein air, long-running. It’s not to everyone’s taste — too slow, too redolent of nostalgia for a mystical past where there was once time and space to think. Who wants to follow Horatio Clare’s every footfall as he tramps for ten miles along Offa’s Dyke (as happened on Radio 3 in the spring)? What possible benefit can be had from listening to others experiencing that precious peace we feel ourselves to be without?

In fact, there’s nothing particularly new about slow radio apart from the recognition that such a genre exists. Words and Music, Radio 3’s seamless sequence of carefully blended tunes and readings, has been on air every Sunday evening for at least ten years. At first there were grumbles (some not so quiet) from those who could not bear the tension of not being able to identify the music, let alone the readings, and suspected it was just an economy drive, dispensing with the business of programme-making. Now, though, it has become a much-loved part of the schedule, precisely because it allows for serendipitous connection through form and structure. And perhaps that’s the key to what makes slow radio different from those overnight sequences of music that have long been essential to the radio schedules. It’s all about intelligent design.