this one goes out to radio's disappeared
Did you ever wake up one morning to discover that your favourite radio show had gone missing? Did you go straight to the authorities to seek information about your missing friend? Were you met with blank looks and told there was no record of their ever having existing? Did you think you’d ever wake up from that nightmare?
Well I don’t think I’ve been dreaming since 1991 when Radio 3’s Mixing It first started broadcasting interesting, mainly new, sometimes difficult music intelligently presented by muso odd-couple Mark Russell and Robert Sandall. Since then it has been a important source of new music and generally a beacon of creativity and esoterica.
A few weeks ago I was shocked to learn from Mark Pilkington’s Strange Attractor that the show had been axed. So I went to the Radio 3 website to learn more. And I found … nothing. The show’s web pages had been “disappeared”, there was absolutely no reference anywhere to the show, let alone an explanation of the rationale for taking it off air.
Luckily Strange Attractor had heard that Resonance104.4fm the “radio art station” of the London Musician’s Collective had given the show a new home. It is going out now on 104.FM at 11pm on Wednesdays under the name “Where’s the Skill in That?”, a catchphrase of the presenters, and is available over the internet also.
You can read a statement by Mark Russell here published before they found their new home at Resonance. Here’s a flavour:
Last November Roger Wright (Controller Of Radio 3) took Robert & I into the DG’s office at Broadcasting House in London for a short meeting (5 minutes max). His exact words were, and i remember them vividly because they puzzled me briefly, ‘I’m giving Mixing It a break and I have no plans to bring it back’. He offered no explanation other than to say it didn’t fit into his new schedule. He said he wanted Mixing It to fade away quietly – no publicity or big fanfares – he wanted his new schedule to get all that.
Nice way to treat people?