The Greenwich Chorus

1978

The events on the night of its first broadcast were unusual, to say the least. It’s difficult to say exactly how many calls it took in 1978 to jam the BBC switchboard, but jammed it was. Having at times worked with BBC Radio 3, I know only too well the small number of communications required to constitute a ‘flood of letters from listeners’, so I treat this all with caution. Apparently though, so many viewers of ‘The Body in Question’ were fascinated by the mysterious ‘singing’ in The Greenwich Chorus that their calls caused a massive telephonic log jam. They’d rung because they thought they had heard a human voice but weren’t sure, and the mystery needed clearing up as soon as possible. We are all programmed like that. We’ll recognise the shape of a face in the middle of a complicated jumble of visual information, and similarly we are pre-programmed to decipher anything that might be a voice telling us something we need to hear. The message hidden in this music was unintelligible, it was never intended to be anything else, but they didn’t know that. This goes to the heart of what interested people in our output in the first place. The fascination with the unknown and the original. Delia’s Doctor Who title music had awakened a thirst in the audience to hear really new things and to try to make sense of them, and although this piece had started its life as a nod towards Purcell, it had finished somewhere else entirely….

Radiophonic Times

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