There is something else happening here that I'm struggling to understand.

It's clear that a lot of people simply don't see any merit in some of the singers who appeared on that programme.

I might have suggested that this was because those singers are an acquired taste, but this is plainly not the case - because their success in terms of album sales and bums on seats at bookings proves incontrovertibly that they are in fact very fine singers and that huge numbers of people get that straight away (numbers which massively outweigh those who don't like them, as it happens).

But I also have accept that loads of people here on Mudcat and across the folk world disagree, and I have to respect that view too.

So are we seeing some paradigm shift in the concept of what constitutes great singing?

Let's be a bit simplistic and create a generic dissenter who we'll call Moz.

If the artists who Moz thinks should be getting the breaks which our BBC4 singers are getting DID get those breaks - would they be as successful in that marketplace in this era as the BBC4s? We don't know.

Could it be that the BBC4s are in fact somehow 'right' for this arena, in ways that other singers are not - and that they are vocalising some 21st century folk zeitgeist that Moz is just not attuned to?

I don't know, but I do love to find beauty in unexpected places, and I find it easily in the voices we heard on this programme.

Maybe they're not actually bad - just different.

Tom

Or this the breaks actually float by at some point and actually they did not come up to the mark.