Who needs drugs when you have Radio 3?

I’m willing to bet it’s only on the BBC’s Radio 3 that you’ll find yourself listening to a programme quite like Words and Music (Sunday evenings). You might want to disagree. Surely, it’s just a few bits of music stuck together with some poems and other readings on a random theme dreamt up by the production team? How easy must that be to pull off? Seventy-five minutes (or sometimes even longer) of dirt-cheap radio, quick to make, very few overheads, involving just a few hours per programme of research (nowadays so easy on Google) and a dead-simple edit job splicing everything together. But name another station anywhere that could make it work week-by-week with quite the same style, panache and sheer brio of the team at Radio 3.

It’s not just the selection of items that matters; although that in itself is mighty impressive, taking us in seconds from Chaucer to Austen, Forster and Jerome K.