Radio 3 will confound history tomorrow when it is crowned UK Station of the Year for the first time in the Sony Radio Academy Awards at the annual gala attended by 1,000 people in Park Lane. Of course, that is just a prediction, and I may be wrong. Nobody is infallible (as a BBC spokesman famously remarked in 1980, when explaining why a play by Pope John Paul II, going out on Radio 3, had been edited before transmission). But that is the word on the street.

If I am right, and my crystal ball has not been clouded by wishful thinking, then this will indeed be a belated but welcome acknowledgement of the excellence of so much of Radio 3’s output. Not only has it never won before, this is only the second time it has even been nominated. (I described the situation last year as “clearly absurd”, and lambasted it as long ago as 2002, when I said that Radio 3 should win a new category called Most Ignored Station.) By comparison, Radio 2 has won the prestigious trophy five times, Classic FM four times, Radio 4 three times, Radio 5 Live twice and Radio 1 once.

So why are the panjandrums of British radio all set to hand the coveted Perspex slab to a station that does not fulfil the usual criteria of igniting the ratings or hitting the headlines? Perhaps they did no more than survey Radio 3’s output last year. Among the jewels were the whole of Paradise Lost, Samson Agonistes (which, quite unaccountably, failed to make the drama shortlist), Carmina Burana, all the works of Chopin, all Vaughan Williams’s symphonies, Othello, with Chiwetel Ejiofor, big programmes on Francis Bacon and Ezra Pound, Mozart live from the Met, a David Oistrakh celebration and so on. And all this on top of the usual live recitals from the Wigmore Hall on Monday lunchtimes, operas, new commissions, festival extracts, jazz, world music, analysis, criticism and the Proms.

But Radio 3 is much like that every year — as it should be, with a guaranteed income and a £37m budget. Indeed, the only key differences last year were one big personal triumph for its controller, Roger Wright (his first Prom season), and one small personal defeat (having to move Choral Evensong back to Wednesdays after an unhappy 20 months of origination on Sundays). Wright, who has been running Radio 3 for more than 10 years and will doubtless have a gracious speech ready, knows that his network might equally well have become UK Station of the Year in 2006, after broadcasting the complete works of Bach and Beethoven in the previous year, or 2008, after the similarly intricate Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky season.

In those years, however, the BBC was not so tarnished. Nor was the medium in general. Last year was a squalid one for British radio, with Ofcom fining the BBC £400,000 and commercial stations £1.1m for deceit and cheating, then the sordid Jonathan Ross/Russell Brand disaster at Radio 2 that forced the resignation of its controller.

Radio 3 is in sharp contrast to all that sleaze and tawdry commercialism. Its gong tomorrow will send out a signal to all and sundry that what it does is as important as putting bums on seats and selling airtime. Its output this week ranges from A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the Mendelssohn Weekend to a lament for the loss of wildlife round Fair Isle.

It deserves to be far more advertised, written about and listened to than it is.

paul.donovan@sunday-times.co.uk

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