Café culture at the Beeb - but what would Lord Reith have said?

London’s café society now extends into Portland Place, where people can sip a cappuccino in the Media Café at Broadcasting House and look down on BBC toilers hard at work in the vast newsroom.

From today the café will also be used for programmes — the first one, to mark Comic Relief, is on Radio 3 early this evening. The live performance of Bach’s Coffee Cantata and similar works is called Baroque-around-the-Clock. But what would Lord Reith have made of it? He was not too keen on red noses.