I like to be able to turn on the radio and have clas­si­cal music be there. With the dis­ap­pear­ance of clas­si­cal radio in gen­eral around the U.S. I was lis­ten­ing to radio less and less. Then came XM satel­lite and for awhile we really enjoyed clas­si­cal in the car, although the main announcer, Mar­tin Gold­smith, had a way of say­ing his own name in a weird way — Golllld-smith — about 500 times a day and after awhile you were won­der­ing if it was worth it just to hear a lit­tle Mendelssohn, whose quar­tets Mar­tin Golllld-smith played a lot.

So much so that we can­celled XM.

And then came BBC Radio 3 on the web. BBC Radio 3 is what I would also want in Par­adise if I could some­how get my record fudged. The BBC has unlim­ited funds with which to do great things (raised through a tax on TVs and the lot­tery) so unlike our pub­lic radio and TV there is no spon­sor­ship, no pledge weeks, no end­less non-commercials from Exxon and the local law firm. And very, very lit­tle self-promotion about what you just heard what you’re going to hear later and how all this was brought to you by peo­ple just like you who, if they knew bet­ter, would prob­a­bly be lis­ten­ing to the BBC.

Strangely, as I write this on Sat­ur­day morn­ing, the BBC is play­ing the live feed from the Met in New York. We could lis­ten to the Met directly over our local col­lege sta­tion that also feeds it, but the sta­tion puts out a poor qual­ity sig­nal. So the Met sounds bet­ter com­ing from New York via Lon­don to San Fran­cisco via the web. Amazing.

It was too good to last, this clas­si­cal music par­adise. You know how it is with lit­tle per­fec­tions, that bak­ery shop around the cor­ner with their dreamy cream puffs and one day the door doesn’t open and the coun­ters are gone. And you notice the ‘Retired’ sign in the win­dow. Two weeks ago, the BBC sig­nal sud­denly turned into a par­ody of itself — a dig­i­tal hash with echoes and a rapid chop­ping effect. You could tell what they were broad­cast­ing, but it was unlis­ten­able. No clas­si­cal radio when I was shav­ing. No clas­si­cal radio Sun­day morn­ing. No clas­si­cal radio dur­ing din­ner. Every few hours I would try the feed again, hop­ing against hope that it was some tech­ni­cal error that some­one had over­looked. But that seemed absurd. How could the mighty, per­fec­tion­ist BBC, the great­est insti­tu­tion in the his­tory of broad­cast­ing not know that some­thing was wrong with the sin­gle great­est source of cul­ture avail­able in the entire uni­verse? Impossible.

So I searched the BBC’s tech­ni­cal web­sites to see why they were scram­bling our sig­nal. Maybe they had changed pol­icy and weren’t going to let the rest of the world free­load on the British tax­pay­ers. Seemed rea­son­able, but sad if true. But I could find no state­ment, no press release, no men­tion of an intent to scram­ble their feed to outsiders.

I found a BBC tech­ni­cal web­site that seemed pre­oc­cu­pied with the event sur­round­ing the fact that some depart­ment was mov­ing across the street. I wrote that my sig­nal had been screwed up for days and won­dered if that were inten­tional. I explained I had tried on sev­eral dif­fer­ent com­put­ers. I also men­tioned that rebroad­casts of BBC Radio 3 pro­grams were stream­ing just fine.

Imag­ine my sur­prise when I got a Google alert this morn­ing from the BBC web­site. Some­one read me, checked out my con­cern, and dis­cov­ered that the BBC sig­nal to the entire world had indeed been unlis­ten­able for weeks. And they fixed it.

I am pleased to announce that as of this morn­ing, BBC Radio 3 is back on the web.

Shows you some­thing about the lever­age of the social media. A sin­gle radio lis­tener can save par­adise for the whole world. With just a few keystrokes.