Tonight, Radio 3 starts a month-long season celebrating the 400th anniversary of the birth of John Milton. Its centrepiece will be an unabridged reading (the first in the BBC’s history, it seems) of Paradise Lost, which is to poetry what Everest is to mountains. Dictated when he was blind, the epic account of the fall of man begins the week after next. It will run for 12 days and go out at 5pm on weekdays (9.30pm at the weekend). Thus Radio 3 will have its own PM slot to rival that of Radio 4 — except that the letters will stand not for post meridiem but prime Milton.

Other programmes come before that. Tonight’s profile, much of it made in the City of London where he was born, died and lies buried, senses the man. Robert Glenister reads key poems at breakfast, at 2pm and at drivetime from today. Starting tomorrow, five editions of The Essay survey Milton’s often surprisingly modern views on divorce, education and political liberty. There is an outstanding production (directed by John Tydeman, a former head of BBC radio drama) of Samson Agonistes, about the ordeal of another blind man, next Sunday. Even The Early Music Show will be joining in, at Ludlow Castle, on Saturday. All this should make the British Library hang its head in shame: it may have on display a copy of Areopagitica, Milton’s impassioned defence of press freedom (as part of another exhibition), but it is not marking the quadricentennial at all.

It is a bleak sign of how the BBC chooses to spend its licence fee, however, that Radio 3 has not been able to make its own version of Paradise Lost. Instead, we will hear a recording that is commercially available on the Naxos label. It has been on sale for three years, with Anton Lesser as the reader. When BBC radio last mounted Paradise Lost, apart from later extracts in one-off programmes, it was (abridged) on Radio 4 longwave in 1992-93 with Denis Quilley and a cast of seven playing Satan, Beelzebub, Adam, Eve and so on. The BBC argues that it is having to make cuts across all its services because the last licence fee settlement was lower than expected. This cuts little ice with those who observe the obscenely bloated amounts paid to Jonathan Ross and others.

As with everything else, it is a question of priority. I happen to think that Paradise Lost is exactly what BBC radio should be doing: its descriptive power alone — war in heaven, sulphurous pit, infernal serpent, forbidden fruit, brandished sword and faltering steps out of Eden and into human history — places it at the zenith of human achievement, quite apart from its themes of innocence, temptation, rebellion, weakness, desire for knowledge and eternal consequence. But at least Radio 3 is doing it, even if it has simply popped down to the record shop in Wigmore Street and spent £30 on the CDs.

Roger Wright, the station’s controller for just over 10 years, has made scheduling mistakes but also taken the high ground. Radio 3 has broadcast the complete works of Beethoven and Bach (2005) and of Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky (2007), as well as illuminating programmes last year and this on Homer and Virgil. Next year it will offer the complete cycle of Haydn’s 104 symphonies (two a week, starting in early January) and Handel’s 40-plus operas. It is sad so many of these things go virtually unadvertised and unpublicised. Radio 3 is precious, “the inmost womb” of the true BBC.

paul.donovan@sunday-times.co.uk

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010