The BBC Third Programme was a national radio network broadcast by the BBC. The network first went on air on 29 September 1946 and became one of the leading cultural and intellectual forces in Britain, playing a crucial role in disseminating the arts. It was the third national radio network broadcast by the BBC, founded in 1946 and finally incorporated into BBC Radio 3 in April 1970. The other two were the Home Service (mainly speech based) and the Light Programme, principally devoted to light entertainment and music, usually cover versions of popular music of the day played by the BBC's own orchestras. The Home Service is now known as Radio 4 and the Light Programme is Radio 2.

When it started in 1946, the Third Programme broadcast for six hours each evening, from 6.00 pm to midnight, although its output was cut to just 24 hours a week from October 1957, with the early part of weekday evenings being given over to educational programming (known as "Network 3"). This situation continued until the launch, on 22 March 1965, of the BBC Music Programme, which began regular daily broadcasts of classical music between 7.00 am and 6.30 pm daily (with some interruptions for live sports coverage) on the Network 3 / Third Programme frequencies. The Third Programme itself continued as a distinct evening service, and this continued to be the case for a short while after the inception of Radio 3 in 1967 until all the elements of the BBC's "third network" were finally absorbed into Radio 3 in April 1970.

Hans Keller (11 March 1919 – 6 November 1985) was an influential Austrian-born British musician and writer who made significant contributions to musicology and music criticism, as well as being an insightful commentator on such disparate fields as psychoanalysis and football. In the late 1950s he invented the method of 'Wordless Functional Analysis', in which a musical composition is analysed in musical sound alone, without any words being heard or read.

Keller was born into a wealthy and culturally well-connected Jewish family in Vienna, and as a boy was taught by the same Oskar Adler who had, decades earlier, been Arnold Schoenberg's boyhood friend and first teacher. He also came to know the composer and performer Franz Schmidt, but was never a formal pupil. In 1938 the Anschluss forced Keller to flee to London (where he had relatives), and in the years that followed he became a prominent and influential figure in the UK's musical and music-critical life. Initially active as a violinist and violist, he soon found his niche as a highly prolific and provocative writer on music as well as an influential teacher, lecturer, broadcaster and coach.

Piotr Zak is the name of a fictional Polish composer whose alleged composition Mobile for Tape and Percussion was broadcast twice on the BBC Third Programme on June 5, 1961 in a performance supposedly played by 'Claude Tessier' and 'Anton Schmidt'.

The broadcast of the work was preceded by alleged biographical information about Zak as well as a programme note supposedly written by Schmidt. The text read by the announcer (Alvar Liddell) was as follows:

The work was duly reviewed in newspapers and journals, receiving approving notices from two leading music critics^{[citation needed]} and lukewarm or condemnatory reactions from others.

Though the BBC initially denied rumours that the work was a hoax, eventually it was revealed that Zak did not exist, and that the piece had been produced by Hans Keller and Susan Bradshaw at the BBC. By striking randomly and with deliberate senselessness at a collection of percussion instruments, the two had produced a strenuously meaningless twelve-minute 'work' of superficially 'avant-garde' character; this was completed by the addition of a selection of human whistling sounds (evidently meant to represent the 'tape'), and with the resulting chaos being edited into some kind of whole by BBC technicians.

Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRS (18 May 1872 – 2 February 1970) was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, and social critic. At various points in his life he considered himself a liberal, a socialist, and a pacifist, but he also admitted that he had never been any of these in any profound sense. He was born in Monmouthshire, into one of the most prominent aristocratic families in Britain.

Russell led the British "revolt against idealism" in the early 20th century. He is considered one of the founders of analytic philosophy along with his predecessor Gottlob Frege and his friend Ludwig Wittgenstein, and is widely held to be one of the 20th century's premier logicians. He co-authored, with A. N. Whitehead, Principia Mathematica, an attempt to ground mathematics on logic. His philosophical essay "On Denoting" has been considered a "paradigm of philosophy." His work has had a considerable influence on logic, mathematics, set theory, linguistics, computer science (see type theory and type system), and philosophy, especially philosophy of language, epistemology, and metaphysics.

Peter Handke (born 6 December 1942, in Griffen, Austria) is an avant-garde Austrian novelist and playwright.

Handke and his mother (a Carinthian Slovene whose suicide in 1971 is the subject of Handke's A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, a reflection on her life) lived in the Soviet-occupied Pankow district of Berlin from 1944 to 1948 before resettling in Griffen. According to some of his biographers, his stepfather Bruno's alcoholism and the limited cultural life of the small town contributed to Handke's antipathy to habit and restrictiveness.

In 1954 Handke was sent to the Catholic Marianum boys' boarding school at Tanzenberg Castle in Sankt Veit an der Glan, Carinthia. Here, he published his first writing in the school newspaper, Fackel. In 1959, he moved to Klagenfurt, where he went to high school. In 1961, he commenced law studies at the University of Graz.

While studying, Handke established himself as a writer, linking up with the Grazer Gruppe (the Graz Authors' Assembly), an association of young writers. The group published the literary digest manuskripte. Its members included Elfriede Jelinek and Barbara Frischmuth.