Radio 3’s Petroc Trelawny: The Cornwall of my youth has disappeared

The presenter talks about the future of the BBC, his mother’s death when he was a child and the challenges facing his home county

If ever there were an appropriate place to meet Petroc Trelawny, host for the past 13 years of Radio 3’s Breakfast and presenter of the Proms for a quarter of a century, it would be the Royal Albert Hall. A quiet chat over a coffee in the café perhaps, where you might hear a tinkling harp, or maybe a snippet of Schubert. Surprisingly, though, the booming bass and thump of a disco beat drive us out.
Not that Trelawny seems that irritated. He has been up since 4.45 am for his early morning show and cycled through London traffic to be here, yet he still appears cool and dapper, dressed in a linen jacket with a silk square in the top pocket. Very much the metropolitan man, he now lives in Camden Town and is a far cry from the gauche Cornish schoolboy depicted in his new memoir, Trelawny’s Cornwall: A Journey through Western Lands. 
To some, Trelawny, 53, is proof that the BBC still produces quality programmes, with authoritative, knowledgeable presenters. Others complained, he admits, that when he arrived at Radio 3 26 years ago, he represented the “Classic-FM-ification” of the station. 
But he has never presented orthodox music choices. His recent Breakfast shows hosted live from the North East included tracks from Northumberland bagpipes and Sting. At this year’s BBC Proms, the programme has included orchestral versions of disco hits like Le Freak, Boogie Nights and Disco Inferno. Critics might have accused the BBC of “cultural cringe”, but first-day ticket sales were up 36 per cent on last year.
The Proms are no stranger to controversy. The Last Night traditionally features Rule Britannia, but cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason – of Antiguan and Sierra Leone heritage – recently said the song “makes people feel uncomfortable”. Then there was the rumpus between rival Prommers over Brexit, which Trelawny remembers well. “It’s felt a little edgy post-Brexit, where there have been these flag-offs between EU flags and Union flags. I hope we’re past it now and we can enjoy the night as a gala of great music-making.”
The disputes over how traditional the Proms should be are not dissimilar to the arguments that surround Radio 3. Last year there was uproar over the axing of the BBC Singers, the broadcaster’s in-house choir – later halted after public protest – and more recently, over the decision for Trelawny to replace In Tune presenter Sean Rafferty next year. And then there’s the move of some of Radio 3’s highbrow programmes to Radio 4. Is Radio 3 dumbing down? Or is it still as elitist as some claim?
“I don’t think it’s either highbrow or elitist,” says Trelawny. “It’s a radio station for people who are passionate about music. There are going to be programmes that are challenging and others that are accessible.” 
He’s keen to explain to critics who want longer, serious music, why his Breakfast programme is, in essence, a drivetime show.
“At Breakfast we provide relatively short pieces of music because most people listen on average for 20 minutes,” he says. “In the evening we broadcast complete concerts.”
For plenty of listeners, the Trelawny formula is working. As composer Roxanna Panufnik puts it: “His voice holds great warmth. And he’s so well informed – completely knows what he’s talking about.”
Those qualities have led some to switch from Radio 4’s Today programme, and its constant political debate, to the soothing tones of Trelawny. At the start of 2024, official figures revealed that Radio 4 lost about one million listeners, while Radio 3’s audience for March was nudging two million, up 12 per cent in three months.
Trelawny reckons this began during lockdown. “People found the need for a refuge from the news. It became dominated by one subject. Some people find that relentless – they want something that is more inspiring and fulfilling at breakfast”.
One reason why Trelawny appeals to so many listeners is because he understands their position: he is a passionate classical music fan and radio devotee rather than a professional musician. He learnt the piano as a child, and enjoyed a full-time music department at his state comprehensive. 
Today he worries about the future of music in schools: “Those in the private sector ‘get’ how music education can enhance life. It seems horribly cruel that many of those in the state sector no longer get the same chances”. 
Trelawny grew up on Cornwall’s Lizard peninsula. His army officer father Richard rose to major, working for the Ministry of Defence in London before returning with his family to his native county. Trelawny was the youngest, by 10 years, of five boys. Two of them later followed their father into the services. 
It was a traditional upbringing, his mother Jennifer devoting herself to the home and the family. “Music was part of our family world”, he says. They did not have a TV because “my parents thought it was a distraction, but we listened to the radio a lot, to The Archers while we had our supper every night, then we’d switch over to a concert on Radio 3, which included the Proms during the summer.
“My mother used to spin wool and I have vivid memories of her at a spinning wheel and me at her feet with the radio announcer saying ‘Welcome to the Albert Hall’.
“It felt very exciting – this glorious opportunity to be part of this big music festival miles away in London”.
His memoir describes an idyllic childhood full of freedom, spending time in the woods around Helford near home, and on the beaches at Coverack, where his retired GP grandparents lived.
But the idyll came to a sudden end in 1983 when Jennifer died aged 52 from breast cancer. Trelawny was just 12 years old. His book records little of how he managed that devastating time, only that his mother died hundreds of miles away from home in a military hospital in London.  
“She went up to London for treatment and never came back. My dad thought the right thing for me was to go to the funeral in our local church but be taken away before she was buried. I missed that moment of the coffin going into the ground.
“My brothers were much older and carried the coffin. For me there was a lack of finality – not getting a chance to see her in hospital, and not getting a chance to see her laid to rest.”
Looking back, he can now see that “my world was turned upside down. I must have been suffering from depression. Most of those around me probably thought, ‘best not talk about it… he’ll get over it more quickly if he moves on’. I probably should have had some counselling. I bottled it all up, became disruptive at school and neglected my studies.”  
At 18, he says: “I couldn’t wait to leave home, I was desperate to get away to the bright lights of a city, and find my way in the world”. 
His escape route was broadcasting because “the idea of technology linking the world excited me, sharing knowledge and bringing people together”.
He joined BBC Radio Devon, moving to Hong Kong for British Forces Radio, then returning to Britain and joining Classic FM at its launch in 1992. After a few years of local news presenting in London and Manchester, he arrived at Radio 3 in 1998, initially as an afternoon broadcaster. Becoming a music presenter, he says, was a “happy accident”.
He was viewed very much as an outsider. Trelawny was not an Oxbridge graduate, but a comprehensive schoolboy from the furthermost bit of Britain.
“There was the legacy of the general trainee scheme of the 60s and 70s with exclusively Oxbridge graduates,” he recalls, “but 3 had started to change when I arrived, although I was associated with Classic FM”. 
Within a few years he was identified as a BBC man – particularly in headlines over his incarceration in Zimbabwe in 2012, when he was arrested presenting at a charity music festival, accused of lying in a visa application. Six days later he was released, after lawyers proved he was volunteering at the show, rather than being paid. 
Today Cornwall is very much his second home (he broadcasts Breakfast from Truro for 10 weeks a year). But it wasn’t until his father’s sudden death 11 years ago that he felt he was able to establish his own relationship with the place. 
In his book he discusses the Cornish word hireth, which means “a melancholic yearning for place”. To Trelawny, the word means “Crossing the [river] Tamar on the train, walking through the woods at Helford on a wet afternoon or a beach when the waves are crashing in – it’s so evocative,” he explains.
Perhaps hireth is also shaped by his mother’s early death? Trelawny agrees.
“Every time I go to Cornwall there’s the thought of her and how she is resting in the graveyard in St Martin.” His father, his eldest brother, William who died of cancer in 2004, and many villagers from his youth are buried there too. “As I walk through the graves it’s like looking at a map of my youth.” 
The Cornwall of his childhood, he worries, is fast disappearing, replaced by what he describes “as pretty coastal villages where a house sells for £1 million and you can get five sorts of white burgundy in the village shop”.
Trelawny recognises the economic importance of tourism – after all, he used to spend his boyhood Saturdays cleaning out the holiday flat carved out of his grandparents’ home. But now he fears for Cornwall.
“It used to feel balanced. The tourists existed alongside fishermen, farmers, people doing other jobs, the school, the church and chapel thrived – a real sense of community we are in danger of losing.
“The balance is tilting between somewhere that works with tourism as one element of the economy, to somewhere where it takes over.” He is evidently a proud Cornishman, and “very moved” by Cornwall’s six MPs swearing their parliamentary oath in Cornish for the first time ever. 
With the new parliament has also come Sir Keir Starmer’s confirmation that he would retain the BBC licence fee until at least 2027. Yet Trelawny believes it won’t last. 
“But I don’t think we’ve found the right replacement for it yet. Until we find that, we should stick to it so that we ensure all the public benefits from what the BBC offers. The BBC is one of those things that would never be invented now. If we were to lose it, we would hugely regret its demise.”
The BBC faces competition as never before, with people able to download classical music stations from across the globe or access it via Spotify and other streaming services. So what makes Radio 3 unique today?
“We’re not an algorithm,” says Trelawny. “We are presenting music carefully chosen by human beings. This isn’t a collection of music based on what you previously listened to. We are still the great patron of classical music, commissioning new music. We still support five orchestras.”
He is looking forward to taking over presenting duties next year on In Tune, admitting: “Breakfast isn’t something I necessarily want to carry on doing forever.
“I was in my late 30s when I started, now I’m in my early 50s and I’m beginning to find it just a bit more exhausting,” he says, referencing his early starts. 
Since 2017 Trelawny’s distinctive voice has been heard at major occasions from Trooping the Colour to the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday, while he was also part of the BBC’s commentary team at Elizabeth II’s funeral and the Coronation. With the Dimblebys gone and the defenestration of Huw Edwards, there’s a glaring vacancy at the heart of public life in this country. The outsider from Cornwall is in a prime position to fill it.
Trelawny’s Cornwall: A Journey through Western Lands by Petroc Trelawny is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson on 15 August 2024 in hardback £22, eBook £12.99, audio £24.99
The Proms continue until September 14 at the Royal Albert Hall and on Radio 3.