Melvyn Bragg eats academics for breakfast. He’s formed a career out of
scholarly sparring with the best minds of his generation, touching knuckles with Norman Mailer, getting Gore Vidal on the ropes, flooring Francis Bacon (whilst both steaming drunk). He’s an intellectual heavyweight champion and I am worried that I’ll get the full In Our Time treatment. I spend the interview apprehensively awaiting a trademark, “Let me just pick you up on your last point…”
He proves, however, to be scrupulously charming, chatting to me about his own experiences on Cherwell during his Oxford days – “I managed to spend a long time as their film reviewer without ever once meeting the editor. I think his name was Peter. Not sure.” – and comparing Cowley living-out experiences. Listening to an inordinate amount of Radio 4 for someone thirty years younger than its target generation, his buttery northern accent is disconcertingly familiar.
He is the man Adrian Mole dreamt of becoming – not only a leading arts broadcaster, but the person who, for years, defined what ‘the arts’ encompassed. Over the course of the South Bank show’s 800 episodes, Bragg was intrinsic to re-moulding boundaries of what passed as culturally important, the pop and the pulp alongside the classical and establishment.
It was a conscious manifesto to “treat McCartney with as much importance as Mailer”, and in in 1978 the South Bank show’s agenda proved a controversial one. “We got hammered by the press. Absolutely hammered. The Telegraph was saying ‘Melvyn Bragg has started a new arts program but he doesn’t seem to know what the arts are about’.”
It’s now commonplace to find graphic novels in the Guardian Review and hear Lady Gaga on Front Row. Macca played the London Olympics opening ceremony, alongside both the London Symphony Orchestra and Mike Oldfield. We, as a nation, have learnt to take the contemporary seriously. But back in the seventies, Bragg conjectures, the change came as a relief to the British population. “People thought, I like listening to Eric Clapton as well as Michael Tippet – why should one have a free pass as ‘Art’?”.
After a brief hiatus and a move from ITV to Sky Arts, the South Bank show is still running, as is its engaging seriousness and unapologetic intellectualism.
They are, furthermore, qualities Bragg brought with him to his other most celebrated brainchild, the unashamedly academic In Our Time, which each week features Bragg in conversation with three university professors on a topic cultural, historical, philosophical or scientific.
He explains how, at first, the program was relegated to ‘The Death Slot’ – the Thursday morning show with the lowest weekday audience. But within six months it was getting twice the South Bank show’s audience.
“It worked because at the centre of all discussion programs is a game. Whether it’s Reunion or it’s Eddie Mair or it’s Today – it’s a game, and
you’ve got to know how to play. And, because they’re really clever people, these academics worked out what to do. They had to deliver very fast, to do their top job against equals whom they slightly disagree with but always respect. They couldn’t just reel out the first seven paragraphs of something they wrote in 1957.”
It is clear Bragg enjoys making these programs. He talks of “rubbing the magic lamp” when deciding who to interview for the next series of the South Bank show on Sky Arts, since very few artists, musicians or writers are churlish enough to reject the seal of cultural approval an interview with Bragg entails. In Our Time brings with it “the pleasure of talking to three clever people on a Thursday morning. I love it.”
But it is in talking about his fiction, however, that he becomes most animated. Since 1965 he has published twenty-two novels, two of which have been longlisted for the Booker and one of which won the Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction Award in 1993, which I refrain from asking about.
His latest work, Grace and Mary, was released earlier this summer. Like many of Bragg’s books, it returns to the Cumbrian landscape of his youth, telling a semi-autobiographical story of his mother and grandmother. The writing of it was sparked by a sudden, five-o-clock in the morning apparition. He found himself inexplicably faced with the image of a woman in old-fashioned, Victorian dress wandering the lanes near his cottage in Cumbria. This woman was his grandmother, who had given birth to his mother illegitimately and whom he’d seen only twice “in little smudges of meeting”.
Bragg is careful not to present this vision as anything especially otherworldly, and looks me matter-of-factly in the eye whilst describing
it. It was, he says, a product of “the incredibly capacity of the mind to retain this stuff, this 95% we’re supposed not to use, where lines are crossed, memories invent themselves and misremembering occurs more than remembering.”
I ask where this line between reality, memory and imagination is drawn in writing autobiographical fiction, and Bragg’s response is satisfyingly Radio 4, citing an obscure fragment of scientific history as an appropriate analogy. “On one of the first islands Darwin visited in the Galapagos, he collected a type of finch. Well, the biologist Steve Jones thinks it was a parakeet, and there is an argument there, but let’s stick with finch. And on the next island, hundreds of miles away, he found another one that was a little bit diff erent. The same on the next island, and the next, until he reached the seventh or eighth island where he found a finch directly related to the first finch, but so diff erent they couldn’t even mate. It’s the same with autobiographical fiction. By the time you’ve reimagined it and written it and cut it – it’s a completely different finch.”
It is a perfect demonstration of Bragg’s unparalleled ability to make intellectual connections – between art, science and history on In
Our Time; between high and low culture on the South Bank show; between the fallible humans he interviews and the genius they show in their work; between finch sex and autobiography. He cites D H Lawrence and Thomas Hardy as favourite authors, and their influence on his writing is clear. The novels of each repeatedly revisit working-class roots and imbue their stories with a sense of what Bragg refers to as “carpentry”.
His link with them derives in “coming from a background which didn’t have opportunities, and then realising that [with writing] we’re all on equal territory. That when you’re writing it doesn’t matter where you’re born, if
you have that cast of mind – you can take them all on.”
In 1998, Bragg was appointed to the House of Lords as a Labour peer, and is about to release two BBC4 documentaries on the political radicals Thomas Paine and John Ball. “It’s the process you see. How difficult it is to get legislation through, and how to respect those difficulties. It’s cumbersome, but probably as good a way of doing it as any.”
I try to probe him on the matter of the Unions – is Miliband right to reform the donation system? He answers cagily. “I feel the Unions are to be respected. They’re good people and we must be careful. I think we’ve
got to remember that that’s where we came from.”
He tells me about the twin pulls of London and Cumbria – his life at his home in London, and in his cottage in Cumbria. “There’s a tension
there, but I’d rather have it than not have it… When you look at the biographies of writers’ they encompass so many contradictions, since there is no ‘one way’ to write. I know several writers who left to write full time and their writing’s got worse. Or they’ve got drunk. Or they’ve become conference groupies, which is worse.”
Maybe the two are linked, I suggest. You can only survive as a conference groupie by embracing alcohol. Bragg laughs and agrees with me. It’s evident he has no plans towards either.
