When it began, five years ago, the BBC's Third Programme was damned with faint praise or jeered at as a "pretentious and high falutin' present for the esthete and the intellectual snob." Last week, on its fifth anniversary, the robustly highbrow Third found the critical climate a good deal more cordial. Seated before a microphone in a BBC subbasement studio, Controller Harman Grisewood noted: "Birthday greetings do not usually take the form of congratulations at having survived. Yet. . . five years are long enough for the programme to have died a natural...
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