XCity SomethingToBraggAbout (PDF)

Photograph: David Levene

Something
to Bragg
about
The man under Britain’s best barnet talks indie
media, In Our Time and Game of Thrones
WORDS: THOMAS HOWELLS

I

’m attempting to grill Melvyn
(Lord) Bragg on whether he has
any interest in “low culture”.
Trashy novels? Internet memes?
A favourite soap? It’s not proving
fruitful. As a broadcaster who’s built
his career around towering intellect,
he’s unsurprisingly reticent. With old
age pressing, he explains he simply
doesn’t have time for anything other
than work, the occasional walk and his
parallel career as a fiction writer. Not a
thing? A steely glare.
“Oh!” He bangs on the table so hard
his water jumps. “I’m completely swept
aboard with Game of Thrones! On Friday
and Saturday night till 2.30am in the
morning, my wife and I were watching it,
drinking more and more red wine, saying:
‘We’ve got to go to bed! We’ve got people
coming tomorrow!’” He cackles. “Just one
more! Just one more!” More table banging,
bemoaning the death of Sean Bean.
Tucked up a side street close to
Oxford Circus in central London, Bragg’s
production company office is a temple
to glories past and present. Dotting the
walls are valedictory certificates and
awards ceremony photos. A caricature
of Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam
– Melvyn drawn as God – looms across
the room. A shelf overflows with books
– some of Bragg’s own, a dog-eared
Chekhov paperback, ballet programmes,
New Testament Psalms. A conspicuous
display of intellect, plus 25 Years of Viz.
Half a dozen staff sit silently, researching
God knows what.
I hear Bragg before I see him – that voice,
an instantly recognisable mix of Cumbrian
burr and Received Pronunciation drifting
into the meeting room I’ve been directed
to. Rounding the door, he’s ebullient and
smartly dressed, in a dark tweed suit and
cardigan – a dapper amalgam of rakish
farmer and urbane academic. Though 75,
he looks 10 years younger. His hair – “my

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effing hair”, he has said in the past, in
reference to the attention it attracts from
journalists – is undeniably luxuriant.
As one of the UK’s best-loved and
longest-serving custodians of quality
cultural programming, Bragg occupies
an idiosyncratic space in contemporary
broadcast media. He works primarily on
radio and TV, for the BBC and Sky Arts
(he’s just launched a fourth series of the
rebooted The South Bank Show for the
channel). His serious, in-depth explorations
on topics across the spectrums of art and
history are a world apart from the quick
ingestion and lurid clickbait of teenage
vloggers, YouTube, and upstart empires
like Vice and Buzzfeed. That he’s retained
his status as a cultural pioneer in the face
of such adversity is impressive. But does
he think there’s a future for serious arts
programming?
Unsurprisingly, the answer is yes –
Bragg’s commitment to the arts is one he’s
held since he was a schoolboy. He was
born in Carlisle, Cumbria in 1939, an only
child – a fact that instigated the solitary love
of reading and “swotting” that took him from
grammar school in Wigton to study modern
history at Oxford. He joined the BBC in 1961
and began working on the landmark arts
programme Monitor soon after.
The ensuing half-century has seen
Bragg editing Radio 4’s Read All About It
and presenting Start the Week, as well as
developing myriad documentaries – but
his career has been particularly marked by
those evergreen bastions, ITV’s The South
Bank Show and Radio 4’s In Our Time.
Bragg’s 50-year career means he
has witnessed the media’s transition
from single network to sprawling, multiplatform cultural broadcast. Just how has
this affected his corner of the industry?
“Radically,” he says.
“Channel 4 [launched in 1982] bred an
indie sector that is probably a bigger force
than any institution,” he explains. “When

‘’

The internet is
supposed to kill
television –
it won’t

1965 – Bragg’s debut novel, For Want of a Nail is published – the first of 19.
1978 – The South Bank Show launches in January with a profile of Paul McCartney.
Incredulity unites culture critics across the UK (it’s since run to over 730 episodes).
1993 – Awarded Literary Review’s inaugural Bad Sex in Fiction award for A Time to Dance.
1998 – Receives a Labour peerage to the House of Lords – becomes Baron Bragg of
Wigton. In Our Time launches in October – the first of over 660 broadcasts to date.
2012 – Credited with bringing the phrase “mass intelligentsia” to public parlance, via the
BBC series Melvyn Bragg On Class and Culture.

layered cultural society. People can listen
to heavy metal and Stravinsky and read
Harry Potter and Milan Kundera and have
no problem with it. But whether there will be
programmes trying to bring this to as wide
and as interested an audience as possible? I
think we’ve got a fight on our hands.”
Bragg’s appeal lies not just in his
polymath ability to retain information on
dense subjects, but in his keen willingness
to impart it to his public. (At the time of
writing, In Our Time has seen over 660
episodes, The South Bank Show a mindboggling 736.) His champions rush to praise
his egalitarian take on the arts; detractors
bemoan his dragging up of low culture
and softly-softly approach to his weightier
subjects, as well as a supposed intellectual
smugness in his more esoteric work.
The South Bank Show’s subjects –
from 1978’s inaugural profile on Paul
McCartney, to Francis Bacon, Iain Banks,
saxophonist John Zorn et al, through
to The Darkness and Little Britain –
exemplify Bragg’s keen inclusive streak,
a direct attack on the cultural hierarchy
drummed into him as a young man: that
“at the top was opera and ballet, maybe
poetry. And then at the bottom there was
pop music and comedy.”
“I just thought, no – it isn’t like that. We

Photograph: Eamonn

you look at all the prizes now being won,
it’s the independent sector picking them
up. It changes the nature of the institutional
beast; the BBC is now outsourcing a lot of
its production.” The institutions, then, are
fighting a battle to keep control, and not
one that they’re necessarily winning.
“[Cultural broadcast] is having to fight
for its place harder than before. I think it’s
in trouble. Under Tony Hall the BBC has
recognized that. I think ITV, sadly, has sort
of given up. And Channel 4 does Grayson
Perry and he’s wonderful. But it’s really got
to fight for it. The only way that occurs with
marginal programmes is with people in
there who don’t mind if they’re pushed out
of main viewing times, as long as they’re
on the air. Especially now we’re
downloading everything.”
On whether or not the internet and
24-hour journalism could be the death of
TV and radio, he is adamant.
“I don’t think it’ll be the death of them
for a minute. When the cinema came it
was going to kill the theatre; it didn’t. When
television came in it was going to kill the
radio; it didn’t. The internet is supposed
to kill television; it won’t. Everything was
supposed to kill the book, and it hasn’t. So
it doesn’t work like that.
“We seem to be capable of having a

In His Time – Melvyn’s greatest hits

Lust for life: Melvyn Bragg goes head-to-head with Iggy Pop on The South Bank Show, 2004

should go for quality wherever we find it.
That was why I wanted to start an arts
programme. I’ve kind of defied the notion
of low culture [with The South Bank Show].
I put Billy Connolly there; at one stage he
would have been thought of as a sort of
pub jester! The way he uses language and
the way he tells stories – these are the
stories of people that T. S. Eliot loved.”
In Our Time took the opposite approach.
After being fired from Radio 4’s Start The
Week for receiving a Labour peerage in
1998 – “I honestly didn’t complain” – the
BBC soon invited Bragg back to develop a
new show for the ratings void of Thursday
morning. “I said: ‘Yes, and I know exactly
what I want to do.’ I wanted one subject,
three academics and no plugging of any
books whatsoever on air.”
The weekly hour is an anomaly in
mainstream broadcast: a dense, academic
exploration of cultural, historical and
scientific topics with no allowances made
for such fussy requirements as broad
accessibility or populism. Its episodes are
devised and researched by Bragg’s team
and given to him in note form to learn less
than a week before each live broadcast.
He seems awestruck when discussing
the intellect of the panels, and aligns
the show’s success with the expertise of
his guests. “It takes your breath away. I
feel that! And our listeners feel that and
they love it.”
Only very rarely, over 600-plus episodes,
has a topic proved too esoteric. “We have
burnt our fingers sometimes,” he says. “I
don’t know whether phenomenology got us
very far. It didn’t get me very far!”
I ask whether he feels either of these
shows would have been commissioned –
or embraced – without his involvement. He
interjects immediately. “No, I never think
that. I’m a producer, basically; I always
have been. I’m the editor in the cutting
room. That’s what I do.”
With this, he rises and walks me through
the office; we have to wrap up as he’s off
to see Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman
at the National Theatre, all three and a
half hours of it. He doesn’t seem overly
pleased. He has In Our Time first thing in
the morning and should be cramming, he
explains. Tomorrow it’s on eunuchs. He
sighs, straightens his cardigan and grins.
“Why do I do it to myself?”

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