Melvyn Bragg at 80: Highbrow culture for the masses
Melvyn Bragg, 2019 (Shutterstock)
Born a month into the Second World War, Melvyn Bragg celebrates his 80th birthday this weekend. He has had an extraordinary career. TV producer then presenter, novelist and radio presenter, lifelong Labour supporter and peer, he is undeniably one of the great figures of British post-war culture.
Bragg was one of that extraordinary generation of northern grammar school boys who have had such an impact since the war, along with Alan Bennett, David Starkey, Gerald Kaufman and many more. He studied at Oxford in the late 1950s and early ‘60s and joined the BBC, becoming a producer on Huw Wheldon’s Monitor before presenting Read All About It. His real breakthrough came with editing and presenting The South Bank Show, which began in 1978 and is still going more than forty years later. Part of a golden age of TV arts programmes, it made his name, mixing great names from popular and high culture. Everyone will have their own favourite South Bank Show programmes. My own would include David Hinton’s films about Alan Bennett, Francis Bacon and Michael Powell, David Thomas’s award-winning interview with Dennis Potter, as he spoke about facing death, Ken Russell on Vaughan Williams and Tony Palmer on Britten.
Bragg combined this with his successful radio career, presenting (and transforming) Start the Week (1988-98) and subsequently the highly acclaimed, In Our Time (1998 to the present). Again, the range of subjects is typical. On Start the Week, guests included household names like David Attenborough and David Hockney, but also there was a terrific programme with the philosopher Bernard Williams and the Harvard historian Robert Darnton. On one programme, Hockney appeared with the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips and the opera director Peter Sellars and the three sparked off each other.
On In Our Time, possibly the most uncompromisingly highbrow programme ever to appear on Radio 4 at peak-time, this week’s programme was about the scientist Dorothy Hodgkin and next week’s will be about Rousseau on Education. One of the most popular programmes on In Our Time was called, 1816, The Year Without a Summer. Others in the top 10 of listeners’ favourites were The Epic of Gilgamesh and the Gin Craze of the early 18th century. Perhaps more surprising entries were Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem and Hildegard of Bingen. Bragg’s huge curiosity drives these programmes. Of course, he has terrific back-up from his producers and researchers, but listeners respond to his desire to know about these subjects, literature and the arts, of course, but also science, history and philosophy. Nothing makes him more irascible than when he senses that a contributor is patronising the audience.
In addition to his career as a broadcaster, Bragg has been enormously prolific as a writer. He has written more than a dozen nonfiction books, on big subjects from Olivier and Richard Burton to William Tyndale and the English language. And since 1965 he has written more than twenty novels, including The Cumbrian Trilogy (1969-80) and the Soldier’s Return Quartet (1999-2008).
What has been most distinctive about Bragg’s career has been his commitment to introducing large TV and radio audiences to the arts and ideas. The reason for his success as a communicator is that he cares about the subjects, never talks down to his audience and aims high. He was part of a generation – along with Jeremy Isaacs, Bryan Magee and David Attenborough – who believed in public service broadcasting. The arts and ideas were not for an elite. They shouldn’t be shut away on minority channels. In 1996, writing about a BFI season celebrating twenty years of The South Bank Show, Bragg wrote, “I hope they illuminate the arts for many, many people.”
Not many novelists or broadcasters became famous household names, earning the ultimate accolade of a Spitting Image puppet. Fewer still appeared in the original series and are still well enough known to make it into the new planned series. Eighty on Sunday, he is still writing, still broadcasting, still fighting passionately for the causes the matter to him.
