'For all you know, I might have a tremendous burning talent,' warns the heroine of Brief Encounter, as the camera pans on to a serenading lady cellist in a teashop trio. 'Oh dear, no,' comes the reply, 'you're too sane and uncomplicated.' For a place where talent rarely falls below combustion point, the Royal College of Music is good at not encouraging the cinema stereotype of what it means to be an artist. In fact, the college is too close to the profession it serves to be anything but a breeding ground of serious hard work: there's not time, and very little room for temperament. The proof of industry is quite audible on weekdays during term, when the whole building generates a comfortable din of uncoordinated noise, as pervasive as the English academic smell of polished and cooked cabbage that haunts the corridors. The overall impression is that the college has outgrown its premises as well as its sound-proofing, even though the building in Prince Consort Road has been extended twice. A hundred years ago, when the Royal College came into official existence, it was on a much smaller scale and housed in what is now the Royal College of Organists--a florid piece of 19th-century fantasy beside the Altert Hall. Most students come here straight from school, which is often at a younger age than the current director, Sir David Willcocks, would like, 'Singers in particular we encourage to come later, because the voice doesn't really develop until 20 -23. But in practice we accept people before then, rather than see them go elsewhere. If you tell someone to come back in three years time, and he goes off and gets a good job, why should he then risk giving it up to become a student?' Willcocks likes to keep his students for as long as possible, and one of the major policy decisions taken since he came to the college in 1974 has been to increase the length of the basic performers course by a fourth year. 'The only ones who could properly go into the profession after three years are wind players, because their standards are astonishingly high these days. Other- wise, my advice is usually to stay here for four years and then perhaps take a specialist course abroad. The most critical recommendation of all—for a student to abandon the idea of a professional performing career—is one that Willcocks rarely has to make. It's in the nature of a conservatoire that progress, or lack of it, is public knowledge and, given some sensitivity to the competition, most students find their own level without having to be told, 'You know when you' ye done well,' said one battle-scarred soprano, 'because nobody speaks to you.' In fact the great majority do carry on with music after they leave the college, but not necessarily in the form. they had expected. Conductors may end up repetiteurs in provincial opera houses solo singers may be swept into the chorus some are absorbed by arts administration or the BBC, and many become teachers. In all cases, even those who give up music altogether, Willcocks is insistent that they haven't failed: 'Music is a discipline in itself, a training of the mind.' The speaker in Brief Encounter did not believe the heroine could be an artist because she was not______.