Edith Bowman opens up about replacing Sound of Cinema legend Matthew Sweet: "I hope that it does bring people to Radio 3"

This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine.

Sound of Cinema has a new voice. After 12 years, presenter Matthew Sweet, who devised the show and established it as a bastion of quirky enquiry, has left to be replaced by Edith Bowman.

On the evidence of her first few shows, Bowman is less likely to wander down alleyways than Sweet. New features like Harmonising Hollywood and a playlist that, so far, prioritises music like the pulsing electro-scapes of Oppenheimer’s Ludwig Göransson, feel like a turn to the mainstream.

“No, I don’t think that’s the case at all,” she objects vigorously. “It’s not a case of dumbing down something, if that’s what you’re implying. It’s about really showing the breadth of what’s out there. And that’s not always necessarily something classical. It can be much more contemporary.”

Bowman has fronted Cinematic Sound-tracks at Radio 3 Unwind since 2024 and presents Soundtracking, a film and music podcast that attracts big names, like Steven Spielberg. After talking to him, Bowman says, “I burst into tears and went, ‘I’ve just spoken to Steven Spielberg!’”

Now 50, Bowman was brought up in Anstruther on the Fife coast, where her parents had a hotel and, like many people, she discovered scored orchestral music through film. “My dad bought a projector and he ran this little film club on a Saturday morning,” she says. “I would sit with him, be his little assistant and make membership cards for people. He showed things like Bugsy Malone, but the John Williams suites for Star Wars, ET and Raiders of the Lost Ark are the ones that I really remember.”

She went on to work at MTV, C4, Virgin Radio, Radio 1, Radio 2, 5Live and Radio 6 Music, her resilience overcoming several setbacks. “We can’t put someone with an accent like yours on the radio,” someone told her during work experience at Radio Forth. “I was swallowing back tears,” she says. “But then with each of these things you build a thicker skin.” Later, Bowman would be disappointed again when she was let go from her 6 Music show in 2013. Undaunted, she used the moment to start Soundtracking, which launched in 2016 with Hans Zimmer as the first guest.

There are no reports of Sweet being pushed out, but does Bowman, who was approached by station controller Sam Jackson, feel some sympathy towards her predecessor, leaving a show that he had very much made his own? “One of the first things that I said to Radio 3 was that I’d really like to reach out to Matthew and just drop him a message,” she says. “Whether he reads it or not, we’re all humans and we all have connections to things. I’ve been in that position. It’s not nice.”

Few presenters come with Sweet’s intellectual credentials, but Bowman thinks her relative lack of classical knowledge is actually a strength. “I can only talk about music from a place of emotion and how it makes me feel, rather than talking about quavers and semi- quavers and timings.”

So, is this iteration of Sound of Cinema a gateway show for people who don’t know much about classical music but, given the opportunity, might be open to discovering it? “Yeah. And how amazing would that be? I mean, that’s how I got into it. From talking about film on Radio 1 back in the day, I really started to get the chance to speak to people about the creative process behind the music and how involved it was in the storytelling.”

New elements like Pick of the Flicks allow Bowman to get mainstream stars like Emma Thompson and Graham Norton on the show, talking about the film scores that have stayed with them. This tendency to see film music as biographical, as much a soundtrack to lives as movies, is another departure from the previous show.

Dumbing down? As Norton proved when he chose Ryuichi Sakamoto’s evocative electronica Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence music, mainstream can be very interesting. “I have a genuine interest in this art form,” says Bowman. “I hope that it does bring people to Radio 3, brings them into this world and makes them feel part of it.”

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