It’s the oddest place to find a profound meditation on the death of Christ, but there it is on Radio 2 every year on the night of Good Friday, on the ‘light music’ station, and not on Radio 3 or Radio 4, where you might expect to find it. This year At the Foot of the Cross was sandwiched between Desmond Carrington — All Time Great and Sara Cox’s disco beats, the uncompromising reflections on the nature of belief adding a certain bite to the evening. Diane Louise Jordan and her host of guests at the Watford Colosseum (including the Bach Choir and the tenor Wynne Evans) created a sequence of words and music designed to encourage us to think about the grief of the disciples, the tyranny of Rome, the agony of Christ as he walked towards Golgotha.
This syncretism, the serendipity within the station schedules, goes back to the BBC’s roots in the 1920s when there was less division between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art, culture and entertainment, the schools of science and the creative arts.
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