Melvyn Bragg on the demise of The South Bank Show | TV | The Observer | Culture | The Guardian Share on Messenger Close When The South Bank Show first started back in 1978, the prime minister at the time was a former chancellor who had inherited the post without fighting an election, and a battle-weary Labour government was struggling through its last year in power. Abroad, there were student protests in Tehran, a leadership dispute in Afghanistan, and Pakistan, where a Bhutto had been sentenced to death, was in turmoil. How times change, at least in television. In 1978 there were only three TV channels in Britain; of these, ITV, which screened TSBS, was the most-watched network in Europe. Nowadays there are hundreds of TV channels and ITV is waging a rearguard action against financial meltdown. Perhaps the most high-profile victim of ITV's belt-tightening is TSBS, which for four decades has managed the daunting feat of taking the arts and artists as seriously as they take themselves.

In the process it has become a kind of venerable national institution with its jauntily beckoning signature tune, its careful profiles and, most of all, its guiding voice and presenter, Melvyn Bragg . Less than two years ago, Michael Grade, who commissioned the first showand is the current executive chairman of ITV, said of Bragg: "He's untouchable at ITV. His position here is more secure than mine as chairman." Yet earlier this year it was announced that the new series of TSBS would be the last. The top brass at ITV had presented Bragg with what was the fait accompli of a decimated budget. "They made an offer for this department that I couldn't accept," he says, in his new scaled-down office on the South Bank, demoted from a more lavish space on the top floor. "I talked to creative heads and it was undo-able in any possible way. And maybe that was the idea." It would be wrong to say that since the decision was made, Bragg has come round to the management's way of thinking.

Instead he characterises the absurdity of the rationale trotted out by bosses in countless post-recession businesses as: "'We've lost millions of pounds: you have to go.' You wish there was a wonderful satire about this lot that wasn't just funny, it made people laughing stocks." Bragg will be 70 next month, but he possesses the vitality, appetite and, of course, hair of a much younger man. After all, TSBS is just one part of what must be the most expansive portfolio in, or out of, the arts. He is the author of 20 novels, 12 works of non-fiction and two children's books, as well as four screenplays. He is the presenter of In Our Time, the chasteningly intelligent Radio 4 programme that has helped transform popular understanding of the sciences. He's chair or president or governor of various campaigns, charities and universities. And he's also Baron Bragg, an active Labour peer in the Lords. It's not as if he's going to have a lot of spare time on his hands. Bragg insists that his protest is not about him.

TSBS is ITV's flagship arts programme and its demise spells the end of designated arts coverage on the channel, and thus drastically reduces arts programming on terrestrial television. Still, as implausibly youthful as he looks, even he couldn't go on forever. One of TSBS's team of producer/directors, Susan Shaw, suggested not long ago that without Bragg TSBS would be a "hollow construct" and a "brand that no longer exists". Bragg disagrees. The show, he maintains, could have continued with someone else in charge. "They'd have done a different programme," he says. "Good. They might have changed the title music. Good." Good it may be but Shaw is right, it wouldn't be TSBS. The show is as inseparable from Bragg as Opportunity Knocks was from Hughie Green or Bayreuth from Wagner. In any case, it seems clear that ITV don't want a programme like TSBS, regardless of what it's called or who presents it. "Peter Fincham [ITV's director of television]," says Bragg, "thinks asking people to go round and look at paintings in country houses is an arts programme, and it is. Fine.

But what is important on television, if it's going to maintain its relationship with the British public, who expect a lot and should be getting a lot, is that it delivers living artists as seriously as it can across the board." In recent years, with TSBS shunted around the schedules like an unwanted orphan, that public has shrunk to around a million viewers – a perfectly respectable number for an arts show but not a ratings triumph. During its heyday in the 80s and 90s, two million viewers routinely watched, sometimes many more. It's highest-ever viewing figure was 8.9m for a 1997 film on… Michael Flatley. At times Bragg has led viewers on a merry dance through high and popular culture, but the list of major artists who have not appeared is impressively short. His very first subject was Paul McCartney, a deliberate statement of his commitment to popular art, given that he could have run with a completed film on Herbert von Karajan. Not all of his choices at the pop end of arts have been quite as successful. UB40 and the Darkness are two whose absence TSBS could comfortably have survived. Bragg is philosophical about programmes that haven't worked.

In the course of 32 years, there's bound to be a few bum notes. What really bothers him, however, are the ones that got away. "I'm in mourning for William Trevor," he says with genuine self-recrimination. "I've been farting around William Trevor for years because I think he's such a good writer. If I realised this was going to be the endgame, I would have gone for it. I really feel I let myself down, I let him down, I let the viewers down. Why didn't I do William Trevor?" If he's hard on himself, he can also be tough with his colleagues. After a degree at Oxford, he became a BBC trainee in 1961 and, following various radio jobs, he joined Huw Wheldon's much-lauded Monitor arts series. Wheldon is often recalled with sentimental affection, but he was a demanding taskmaster. "One of his strong points," says Bragg, "was his brilliant ability to divorce the work from the person. He'd say terrible things about your films, the most awful bloody things, and then he'd go for a cup of tea with you.

Sometimes he was wrong and he didn't know what the fuck he was talking about, but he'd say them and you'd have to fight for your life." Has that been your attitude, too? "Yes, absolutely. In cutting rooms I can be quite fierce. I'll rip the entire thing out and shoot the whole thing again. It continues now. I've got very strong ideas about how things should look. So all the bad bits are my fault," he laughs, and does that furrowing of his eyebrows that, along with the sinusitis voice, grimacing smile and the luxuriant bouffant, have formed an irresistible attraction for impersonators, satirists and countless female viewers. Bragg ran a strict regime based on the conviction that the subject of the film was the artist not the director. "I came out of the time in the 70s when the BBC was full of self-indulgent directors. They'd all copied Ken Russell and most of them had done it very badly. Although Arena [the arts series that began around the same time] was a different animal. They did very good things." Once he'd established the format, he began bringing in outside directors like Tony Palmer, Ken Russell, James Ivory and Ken Loach.

Bragg himself also grew more confident in front of camera and more willing to allow unpredictability intrude on his interviews and profiles. More often than not these formal detours were inspired by large amounts of alcohol. Subjects like John Osborne, Eric Clapton, Dennis Potter and Peter O'Toole were intimate with the bottle, and Bragg, no stranger himself, had the good manners to join them. The most memorable example was an epic drinking-bout of an interview with Francis Bacon that began with a bottle of champagne at 9am and continued with Bragg and Bacon slurring their way through a hilarious disquisition on the nature of reality. I tell him that that kind of looseness, or loucheness, seems to have been consigned to another era. "I'm not so sure it has," he says, but then seems to contradict himself. "I think this generation are much more aware of their public reputation. I mean, Francis didn't give a shit. Peter O'Toole didn't give a shit. Clapton back then didn't give a damn. And also in the back of their minds there was a belief that artists were alcohol-fuelled and that was OK.

When I did the Dennis Potter interview he was drinking, smoking and taking drugs at the same time. That was part of what he did." But if the show was drenched in booze, its appreciation of its subjects remained earnestly sober. Inhibitions may sometimes have been lost but never respect for the artist, however drunk he might have been. One of the recurring criticisms that Bragg has faced over the years is that his interviews are unchallenging, taking the artist at his or her own worth. It's a fair point but not a straightforward issue. Bragg's argument is that with so few slots it makes no sense to profile someone you don't rate. "That's why I liked it when The Late Show was on. They had all the space to do good, bad and indifferent. The BBC were mad to kill it. It was a smashing programme." In many ways, TSBS has been an admirable bulwark against the ever-rising tide of celebrity culture. Bragg acknowledges that he's received pressure to make the interviews more personal, less work-based. "I've ignored it," says Bragg.

"I just haven't given in." One obvious reason why he has been able to draw so many established artists is because they know they won't face a grilling. Yet every now and then a little more prodding, and a tad less restraint, would have made for more compelling television as well as a better understanding of the artist. He still wonders whether he should have asked William Golding about his depression. He didn't. This circumspection caused some critics to view Bragg as smug and complacent. For a time, he was the target of some spiteful media attacks. "I got a hammering," he recalls without bitterness. "It was hurtful some of the time because you think, 'Why me? I'm not a serial killer. I'm just doing a job.' But then worse things happen at sea. People have rotten jobs, so what am I going to fuss about?" He used to fire off angry letters to critics but he says age has mellowed him. And while he's unhappy about the end of TSBS, he is full of optimism for the arts in Britain. "We have the highest-yield creative industry per capita of any country in the world," he says.

Nonetheless he's worried about this government's incursions into arts Lottery funding and Labour's weakness for quangos. "We're diseased with bureaucracy in this country," he says. "I mean, comparisons between Gordon Brown and Philip II of Spain's sclerotic state would provide quite interesting results." Which is no small criticism from a Labour man. He's also a fan of a lot of arts programmes, in particular on BBC4. "I haven't got a single complaint against it. But I still think the mission is to put art on the big channels, so that you've got a chance of people picking it up. That's been ITV's mission from the start. Even when Lew Grade was in terrible trouble, he kept Tempo, edited by Kenneth Tynan, going, and Aquarius under Humphrey [Burton], when ITV was skidding all over the bloody place. We've been through very bad times here, so what's the problem?" He laughs again and then it's back to work. He can't wait to see the first cut of a new TSBS film. It's on the indie rock band Elbow. We won't realise how much we've got out of Bragg's enthusiasm until it's gone.

Melvyn Bragg picks some personal highlights: Paul McCartney, 1978 Paul McCartney. Photograph: ITV / Rex Features It took an enormous amount of negotiation to get him there, though when he was there he was as friendly and as amiable as you could wish. He did arrive several hours late - I hadn't got used to the world of superstars at that time and he kept us waiting at Abbey Road, but I had things to read so I didn't mind. I agree with Bob Dylan – I think he's a marvellous songwriter. He turned to the piano and played a song about me and a cup of tea on the spot - then said, "It doesn't quite work but I could work on it," and added, " now if your name had been Melvyn Rigby…" Perhaps he's been working on it ever since. Francis Bacon, 1985 Francis Bacon. Photograph: ITV / Rex Features This was in the big room at the Tate where he said that if he wanted to be really depressed he'd look at the Rothkos.

Then he said: "Actually, it's probably best if you go to a carpet factory." I think we sourced his images very well and he talked very vividly about how he painted and why he painted. We got a lot right in all sorts of ways and then we got plastered. I had to make a decision in the cutting room whether we used it but in the course of being plastered he said an immense amount that was core Francis – some massively truthful things. So I thought, well, I'll get egg on my face but we're going to show it. It made me laugh when I watched it back, still does. Laurence Olivier, 1982 Laurence Olivier. Photograph: Rex Features I was nervous ahead of interviewing him but partly for him: we did the filming over nine months and he was very ill. So it was a difficult film to shoot in that I wanted to press him but not be taxing. He was quite an astonishing man. Harold Pinter, 1978 Harold Pinter. Photograph: ITV / Rex Features The first interview we did was very tricky, he just didn't want to answer.

But I thought if I kept putting questions to him that he wouldn't answer it might be the best bit of the interview. I just let him smoke his black Sobranie and sit looking very actorly. We had two more interviews and in one of them he was excellent. He'd just written a poem and in a wonderful flush of shyness said, "would you like me to read it?" It was a wonderful poem about him going for a walk with his teacher on Hackney Marshes. He could be difficult but he could also be marvellous. Barbara Cartland, 1995 Dame Barbara Cartland. Photograph: ITV / Rex Features She's at such a strange end of the market, this romance end, so I took a deep breath and thought what the hell, let's see what happens here. I thought she was a gallant old lady, very charming. She wore full evening dress, though, and insisted that I did [he changed after this photo was taken]. I spent the whole time suppressing tears of laughter. She was quite deaf and I had to speak very loudly, so there I was in a dinner jacket yelling at this old lady. Ron Howard, 2000 Ron Howard.

Photograph: ITV / Rex Features God that bloody gold shirt, Jesus Christ it looks like a Russian peasant's blouson! What I like about Ron Howard is that he's surmounted being a child star and then a teenage star without turning out a damaged freak. He made movies which – curiously, considering his childhood – were all about the guys who did the real work. I had a lot of time for his storytelling, and also his technological mastery of film. Tracey Emin, 2001 Tracey Emin with Melvyn Bragg. Photograph: ITV / Rex Features Tracey was smashing. She's a serious artist and people don't realise she knows what she's doing. She knows that publicity is damaging for her and what she's done is turn it into the sort of artist she is. The end of that film is so wonderful when she says she'll end up a lonely old woman alone in a hotel and nobody will know about her work but the walls will be covered with her press cuttings. I've got a lot of time for Tracey. I was touched when she said she'd wanted to be on the show since she was 10. It's curious how the show feeds people.

You just feel "oh good" when that happens. The South Bank Show: Melvyn is left with nothing to Bragg about - Telegraph TV and Radio The South Bank Show: Melvyn is left with nothing to Bragg about The end of the South Bank Show has been blamed on dumbing down and the recession – but did Melvyn Bragg contribute to its demise, asks William Langley. Film-maker Steven Spielberg talks to Melvyn Bragg in an edition of the ITV1 arts programme, The South Bank Show, in 1982. Photo: ITV By William Langley Melvyn Bragg: You ask the questions | The Independent Profiles Melvyn Bragg: You ask the questions (Such as what do you think UK television will be like in 10 years? And will you ever change The South Bank Show's theme tune?) Thursday 15 January 2004 00:00 BST Click to follow The Independent Online The writer and broadcaster Melvyn Bragg was born in 1939 in Cumbria, where his parents ran a pub.

After reading Modern History at Oxford he joined the BBC as a trainee, and wrote his first novel, For Want of a Nail, four years later. He has written some 20 other books - the past three of which are loosely based on his early life. In 1978, he started ITV's flagship arts programme, The South Bank Show. In 1998, Bragg was made a Labour peer. He is married with three children and divides his time between London and Cumbria. Do you ever wish that you had decided to work in the family pub instead of going to university? Eleanor Kirby, London No. Working in a pub is bloody hard work. If I hadn't gone to university, I'm sure I would have found a way to get into teaching and been every bit as happy as I am now. There have been claims in the press that you are a member of that new social group, the metrosexuals (heterosexual men who are in touch with their feminine side). Are you? Janis Lusby, Liverpool Oh God. All I can say is that, having had it explained what a metrosexual is, I have no problem with the description!

What do you think UK television will be like 10 years from now? Will reality TV have strangled everything else? Katy Lowe, London I don't think it will be that different. Reality TV is having its heyday, but it's a question of the pendulum. People will get tired of it. What will be constant in British television is well-written drama about everyday lives. That's what the British public have wanted since television began and there's no reason why they'll stop wanting it. What's your favourite regional English word? Hannah Smith, by e-mail I quite like the word "laik", which means "to play", and "gangen", which means "to go". They're both Scandinavian words used in Cumbria where I grew up. I spoke a very strong Cumbrian dialect until I was 13 or 14 and I still can, but I never do because I'd feel very self-conscious. It's a little embalmed thing somewhere in the back of my mind, moldering away. Which South Bank Show interview do you consider the most revealing? Charlotte Smith, Peterborough Francis Bacon.

I'd known him for over 20 years and when he eventually agreed to do the interview, he was prepared to give everything. Both of us got what can only be described as rather drunk, and he revealed himself in a way that was wonderful. I, emphatically, don't mean that he revealed his homosexual life - which was totally beside the point and taken for granted - but rather that he revealed himself as an "optimist about nothing", as he put it. He was a nihilist who despised almost every work of art in the world and who had a totally unyielding tunnel-vision about his painting. Do you think our use of punctuation has gone down the tubes? Harry Richards, London Not really. The thing about punctuation - and our language as a whole - is that we know it will change. Text messaging will change language - when enough people know what these abbreviated words mean, they will start to infiltrate the language and enter dictionaries. However, I am a bit of an apostrophe person myself. I'm not going to go to any party that says, "Farewell to the apostrophe." Do you have any heroes?

Ron McCarthy, New Mexico Heroes are for children, I think, and mine were the cricketer and footballer, Dennis Compton, and Alf Tupper, a comic book character. Tupper was a runner who wore a mouldy vest with a wolf's head on it, but ran the first four-minute mile. He was a working-class lad who just got on with it, and he was obviously written well enough for his adventures to stay in my head. How useful is alcohol as an aid to the interviewer? Jemima Green, Manchester Very useful in the case of Francis Bacon, but basically I'm an alcohol-free interviewer. You need all your wits about you. To what extent are your past three novels an autobiography in disguise? Paula Nethersell, Birmingham I think they are best described as fiction disguised as autobiography. There's no doubt that the line of life of the main characters - Joe and his father and mother - follows my line of life and that of my parents. I was born just before the Second World War; my father was away in the war for several years; I went to a grammar school; I had an intense relationship with a girl when I was between 16 and 18 years old and so on.

Yet everything about these books is fiction. Joe becomes increasingly unlike me as the books progress. Two or three things are the same - I had very painful troubles with out-of-body experiences in my early adolescence. They lasted for two years or more so I share that with him. But I think I was a lot cockier than Joe is. I can see things in Joe that are slightly nicer than me. Joe is a fictional creation because whenever I try to remember accurately what happened to me in those years I seem to get it wrong more than I get it right. For instance, the girl who I talk about in Crossing the Lines rang up recently, and said about one of the scenes: "You got that wrong. It wasn't like that at all." I thought, "Good - thank God for that. I made it up!" You have said that you regret having published The Silken Net, which you wrote following the suicide of your first wife. Do you now keep a greater distance between your life and your writings? Jon Norton, Uckfield It's an interesting question, but a very difficult one to answer. I think there's a bit more distance now, but whether that's a good thing, I don't know.

Everything you write comes out of yourself, but your experiences are only one strand. Other things happen to you: imagination, other people's experiences, the lives you didn't live... Do you agree that the House of Lords should be entirely appointed? Will it have any credibility unless they are, to some extent, democratically elected? Benjamin Rodriguez, Southampton The House of Lords should be 100 per cent elected. Of course it is contradictory to accept a life peerage, yet wish for an elected chamber, but the fact is that the constitution we have just wouldn't work without the second house. We work harder than the Commons, even though we're unpaid. With the Communications Bill, about a dozen of us amended 133 clauses, changing the Bill radically and in great detail. It would have been a far, far worse Bill otherwise. This happens again and again. Would you consider changing the theme tune for the South Bank Show? The current one, by Andrew Lloyd-Webber, has been used for years! Lola Harris, Barking No, I think it's a damn good tune: it's a late 20th-century re-working of a classical theme by Paganini.

It does its job extremely well and holds up 20 years on. Why change it? You're not going to change the name of The Independent, are you? 'The Adventure of English 500AD-2000AD', by Melvyn Bragg, is published by Hodder & Stoughton (£20) Profile: A time to dance back to Cumbria?: Melvyn Bragg, cultural supremo in a crisis | The Independent Profile: A time to dance back to Cumbria?: Melvyn Bragg, cultural supremo in a crisis Saturday 27 November 1993 00:02 BST Click to follow The Independent Online WHAT has come over that nice Melvyn Bragg? Why has the nation's most powerful - but least challenging - cultural impresario suddenly started to come on strong? Is Melvyn finally showing his true colours, or is it just a passing phase - and if so, what's rattling his cage?

Twelve days ago, on Radio 4's Start the Week, which Bragg has chaired for the past five years, he suddenly laid into Michael Dobbs, author of the book To Play the King, from which the acclaimed BBC television series had been adapted. The bone of contention was the supposedly unfair manner in which the series portrayed a Prince Charles-type monarch. This week, following an article about To Play the King that Bragg wrote in the Evening Standard, Mr Dobbs instructed his lawyers to issue a libel writ. On previous Start the Week programmmes, Bragg has had angry exchanges with other authors, including Kathy Lette and Bill Cash. To be fair, Bragg has received his own fair share of criticism for years. On the right are those who dislike millionaire media stars preaching socialism and the need for subsidies for the arts, the BBC - and for independent television. On the left are those who sneer at the stock options and the 'golden handcuffs' from London Weekend Television that have made him rich. He finds it hard to cope with Labour friends who ask why he wants to be a member of the Garrick Club, a Lloyd's name, or to send his children to prestigious private schools.

But, on Tuesday, things became more unpleasant. The Daily Mail devoted a full page to the work of two reporters who had gathered comments from the (relatively) great and good, slagging off the cultural superstar. They appeared under the headline 'Pompous, dreary, arrogant. And now Melvyn Bragg is turning nasty, too'. On the same day, the Literary Review pilloried him for the sexual purple prose in his novel A Time To Dance. The Mail's purported aim was to explain why Bragg, at 54, has suddenly developed such an abrasive style. Predictably it was Germaine Greer who blamed the male menopause. Milton Shulman picked on the arrogance of new wealth. Others identified the ambition of the new producer of Start the Week, Mary Sharp, or the smugness generated by Bragg's supposedly unparalleled power of patronage. Melvyn Bragg was an only child, born in 1939 and raised in Wigton, Cumbria, a part of the country to which he remains deeply attached. There his working-class parents kept a modest public house, the Black-a-moor.

Superficially, his was a happy, meritocratic, upwardly-mobile childhood. He passed his 11-plus examination, won a scholarship to the local grammar school, played rugby, sang in the church choir - he was then deeply religious - and read avidly. It all came together in a further scholarship to Wadham College, Oxford, where he read History. After graduating in 1961, he took up a BBC traineeship. Yet Bragg was a more insecure and tortured soul than he appeared. There was always what Winston Churchill, himself a depressive, described as a black dog snapping at his heels. Bragg's black dog was not, he insists, depression. But (as he told Lynn Barber in a now notorious interview with the Independent on Sunday in 1990) for three teenage years he suffered 'a sort of nervous breakdown . . . private, locked-in desperation'. Among other horrors his condition involved out-of-body experiences during which he hovered in a corner of the bedroom watching himself shrink.

These returned to haunt him 15 years later when his brilliant but mentally unstable first wife, the novelist Lisa Roche, committed suicide in 1971 after a prolonged struggle with a number of afflictions, physical and mental. Bragg had resigned from the BBC to nurse her. They had both gone into psychoanalysis and exacerbated each other's neuroses. During his two periods of 'desperation', Bragg discovered that grinding busy-ness was the only way to keep the black dog at bay. If he worked himself to exhaustion, he was more likely to fall asleep at night rather than - literally - to go out of his mind. Since then he has never stopped running. Two years after Lisa's death, Bragg married his present wife, Cate Haste, herself a television personality and author. They have two children and live in some style in Hampstead and, more modestly, in Cumbria. Bragg returned to the BBC in 1973 and - while continuing to churn out novels - headed two innovativearts programmes, 2nd House and Read All About It. The young Nigel Williams was one of his directors at that time.

'The wonderful thing was that here was this well-regarded writer who took books seriously and he really wanted to communicate his excitement,' he said. 'I was a pretty chippy youngster but he treated me with affection and concern and showed respect for what one thought.' Since leaving the BBC, for the second time, in 1978, Bragg has presented and edited The South Bank Show. The worst you can say of the programme is that it is relatively undemanding, uncritical and middlebrow. But it is serious, worthy and attracts audiences of up to 3 million. It remains ITV's flagship arts programme. In addition, he has become Controller of Arts for London Weekend Television and an active chairman of Border Television. He serves on the Arts Council and has chaired its literature panel. He is an active member of the National Campaign for the Arts and a tireless performer of little noticed cultural good deeds. This week, for example, he travelled to Leeds to open a small art gallery. All in all, it is a formidable as well as honourable record. Less driven men might have rested on it. But Bragg had hoped for more.

He was widely tipped to be Heritage Secretary had his friend Neil Kinnock come to power in last year's general election. He is one of the original Luvvies for Labour. It did not happen and now he is left frustrated. It is crucial to any understanding of Bragg that the most painful event of this week for him was the discovery that the Literary Review had awarded him its Grand Booby Prize for Bad Sex in Fiction. It was given for steamy, button-bursting, zip-tugging prose in A Time to Dance. For he takes his written oeuvre, which includes plays and film scripts, 15 novels and a best-selling biography of Richard Burton, particularly seriously. He has said that he strives to emulate the works of Dickens, Hardy and Updike. And, in his Who's Who entry, he starts by describing himself baldly as a 'writer', before outlining his distinguished broadcasting career. So it took a great effort on Bragg's part to play along as he did with the Literary Review's trashing of his prose style.

Indeed, Auberon Waugh, editor of the journal, claims that he had to threaten Bragg with 'a hate Melvyn rally' before he would agree to appear in person at an Academy Club dinner to receive the award - a revolting statuette symbolising bad sex. After the meal, Waugh says, 'Melvyn accepted the award with the statutory modest remarks about how the prize had gone to the wrong chap and there were much more deserving recipients.' The award is supposedly made to the writer who has collected most nominations from the review's readership. But, as the shameless Waugh admitted later, 'The real reason we picked on him was that he was the most famous (literary) man we could think of, so it was good publicity to go for him.' This remark will feed the conviction Bragg shares with his many friends that he is an outstandingly good writer who for ignoble reasons is picked on rather than taken seriously. There is a degree of truth in this. In the mid-Eighties the Sunday Telegraph called him 'quite simply one of the best writers we have', while the Times said 'he has the same quality as J B Priestley at his best'.

Today Bryan Appleyard talks in glowing terms about some of his novels but adds that he is 'an easy target to take the piss out of' because he is 'so ridiculously spiky about criticism'. Nigel Williams adds, 'The fact that he is a media celeb works against him as a writer. But at his best, as in Crystal Rooms (1992), he really does produce big, Dickensian works with a strong narrative line and powerful characters.' However, not everyone agrees. The reviewer Craig Brown says, 'I pioneered being critical of him about 10 years ago. I was flabbergasted to discover that really awful works like Kingdom Come (1980) were being favourably reviewed by critics who can only have been sucking up to him. Do you know that about seven of Bragg's books start with somebody waking up and thinking about the state of things? That is a sign of sheer laziness. And they are full of people going to the top of hills and having global insights about the state of things.' The truth is that Bragg can be good, when he takes the time.

Long-standing friends, including Phillip Whitehead, the television producer, and Neil Lyndon, the author, have for years been pressing him to devote more time - and less talk - to his writing. Lyndon says, 'He could write really serious novels, but if he wants to do so he has to find the time'. This echoes a remark of Whitehead's made more than a decade ago. 'Personally I don't think he can write decent books by jotting down chapter headings on a transatlantic jet.' According to Lyndon, Bragg's recent tetchiness is not just the symptom of a bad mood, nor a personality change. 'What you are seeing and hearing now in public is the real Melvyn. In private he has always been combative and won't let go of a subject until he has worried his way through it. He is a rather old- fashioned, serious sort of person.' Other friends agree that he is letting the mask slip, because he is bored and unsettled after two decades as a rather bland yet successful television and radio frontman. He wants to move on, but where? The answer might be to his study.

Bragg is wealthy enough now to retire from the studios and the boardroom, to settle down in his beloved Cumbria and devote himself to writing. But to do so he would have to abandon the power and the patronage, the glamour and the glitz. Perhaps that's what's Bragg's mid- life crisis is about. More about: Melvyn Bragg: Academy Fellow in 2010 | BAFTA Home Television Television Melvyn Bragg: Academy Fellow in 2010 Melvyn Bragg: Academy Fellow in 2010 Share 28 December 2011 BAFTA/Steve Butler Melvyn Bragg was awarded the BAFTA Fellowship at the 2010 British Academy Television Awards, in recognition of his career as a respected presenter and commentator on the arts. Watch Bragg Accept the Award presented by Lenny Henry Chromeless One player. + Powered by brightcove (587 x 330) Watch Bragg Speaking Backstage at the Television Awards Chromeless One player.

+ Powered by brightcove (587 x 330) Melvyn Bragg, A Worthy Career BAFTA/Steve ButlerWords by Quentin Falk Melvyn (Lord) Bragg has been a respected presenter and commentator on the arts for so long now, it’s perhaps rather easy to forget his own more direct contribution to the creative industries. Since the age of 25, he’s authored 21 novels, as well as non-fiction and children’s books, not to mention screenplays—Jesus Christ Superstar, Isadora, Play Dirty and The Music Lovers among them. But it’s ITV’s The South Bank Show which, after Lord Bragg’s more than 40 years in and around television and radio, will probably remain his most enduring legacy. Now 70, he estimates that the flagship arts programme, which first set sail as a series on the small screen in 1978, has generated around 800 films on the arts and artists, with himself as editor and presenter.

Since its unfortunate cancellation last year, the programme has, however, just completed a valedictory run of ten programmes in which Lord Bragg revisited some of the show’s greatest names—including Judi Dench, David Hockney and Andrew Lloyd Webber — with a riveting mixture of new and archive footage. The South Bank Show — as well as some other of Lord Bragg’s TV work, like a memorable portrait of Laurence Olivier in 1982 — has been a regular recipient of BAFTA recognition down the years, with more than 30 nominations and nine wins in categories ranging from Best Arts Programme to Graphics and Sound. BAFTA is a very good organisation. Just to know it’s there is a great thing, like an unwritten constitution. BAFTA/Richard KendalIn receiving the BAFTA Fellowship, he joins a handful of esteemed TV names on the Academy’s prestigious honours board , including Sir Huw Weldon, one of his old mentors from the BBC’s Monitor days. It was in Weldon’s name that Lord Bragg received a BAFTA for that unforgettable interview with a dying Dennis Potter for C4’s WithoutWalls series in 1994.

As for the Fellowship, Lord Bragg, ennobled in 1998, is “really delighted. BAFTA is a very good organisation. Just to know it’s there is a great thing, like an unwritten constitution. It’s always around, is reliable and feels very supportive. “It’s what our industry needs: a place of assembly, of celebration, where work can be shown. There’s something about it that’s almost an emotional underpinning, a unifying thing, for our industry.” Though it was clearly a blow to Lord Bragg when the axe fell on The South Bank Show, it was in fact the axeman, ITV’s Peter Fincham, who came up with the idea of ten more shows. Explains Lord Bragg: “The first thought was repeats but I thought that’d be a bit dull. Then I had this idea about re-visits. Everybody, including me, usually has one good idea most days but most of them don’t work at all: I did wonder if this thought could follow through.

I think one could say that it has worked out pretty well and I must admit I’ve been fascinated by it just as a viewer.” Before The South Bank Show began its lap of honour this year, Lord Bragg was presented with an Outstanding Achievement award at its last ever annual Awards. Among various testimonials was one from Prince Charles, who described the show’s demise as “a sad loss.” He then added it was “the very end of one of the most important beacons of the arts this country has been lucky enough to enjoy. The South Bank Show has been much admired, along with Melvyn Bragg’s steadfast determination to force so many serious artists and their work into the midst of the popular agenda.” So is this really the end of The South Bank Show? It’s surely a brand that could run and run...? “Well, that’s a possibility,” suggests Lord Bragg, enigmatically. “I think it might be a good question—without being aggressive—to ask Peter Fincham. I’ve been much encouraged by the revisits and am going to open talks.

I’m going to have a good look around.” Share Baron Bragg | Britain | ZoomInfo.com Baron Bragg Novelist, Screenwriter, Broadcaster and One Britain + Get 10 Free Contacts a Month Please agree to the terms and conditions I agree to the Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . I understand that I will receive a subscription to ZoomInfo Grow at no charge in exchange for downloading and installing the ZoomInfo Contact Contributor utility which, among other features, involves sharing my business contacts as well as headers and signature blocks from emails that I receive. Web References (22 Total References) Melvyn Bragg (Baron Bragg of Wigton) ... [cached] Melvyn Bragg (Baron Bragg of Wigton) is a novelist, screenwriter, broadcaster and one of Britain's most celebrated media personalities. Booktrust: > show > feature > preview > Sunday Times EFG Award [cached] Melvyn Bragg (Baron Bragg of Wigton) is a novelist, screenwriter, broadcaster and one of Britain's most celebrated media personalities.

Booktrust: > Prizes and awards > Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Award [cached] Melvyn Bragg (Baron Bragg of Wigton) is a novelist, screenwriter, broadcaster and one of Britain's most celebrated media personalities. Booktrust: > show > feature > Home > Sunday Times EFG Award [cached] Melvyn Bragg (Baron Bragg of Wigton) is a novelist, screenwriter, broadcaster and one of Britain's most celebrated media personalities. Starting career as a runner for the BBC, he went on to present The South Bank Show for more than 30 years and to present many programmes for Radio 4, including Start the Week, The Routes of English and, currently, In Our Time. He will host The South Bank Sky Arts Awards on Sky Arts 1 HD in early 2011. He is President of the National Academy of Writing and Chairman of the Arts Council Literature Panel and holds 13 honorary doctorates from British universities. A S Byatt is internationally renowned as a novelist and short-story writer. She won the Booker Prize in 1990 for her latest, The Children's Book, was shortlisted in 2009.

She has herself been a judge for both the Booker Prize and the Betty Trask Award. Educated at York and Newnham College, Cambridge, she was Senior Lecturer in English at University College London before becoming a full-time writer in 1983. She was appointed CBE in 1990 and DBE in 1999. Umbrella people [cached] Bragg was appointed to the House of Lords in 1998 as a Labour life peer, under the title Baron Bragg, of Wigton in the County of Cumbria. In June 1989 Bragg was awarded an Honorary Degree from the Open University as Doctor of the University. In 1999 Bragg was appointed Chancellor of the University of Leeds. He is also President of the National Campaign for the Arts (since 1986), President of the mental health charity Mind, and a Governor of the London School of Economics (since 1997).

He was made Domus Fellow, St Catherine's College, Oxford, in 1990, he received an Honorary Fellowship from Wadham College, Oxford, in 1995 and he holds 13 honorary doctorates. He became a member of the Arts Council Literature Panel in 1969 and has since become Chairman. Similar Profiles The South Bank Show: the curtain comes down on after 30 years - Telegraph TV and Radio The South Bank Show: the curtain comes down on after 30 years Former ITV executive Gillian Greenwood mourns the passing of the channel’s arts programme, presented by Melvyn Bragg. Film-maker Steven Spielberg talks to Melvyn Bragg in an edition of the ITV1 arts programme, The South Bank Show, in 1982. Photo: ITV 4:58PM GMT 22 Dec 2009 Next Monday night I, along with a small but diverse section of the television audience, will be watching the last ever South Bank Show.

As viewer, researcher, producer and executive it has been a part of my life ever since it started in 1978, when I began to watch, seduced by the magic of hearing the cultural icons of our age talking about what they did so well. So seductive did I find it that in 1984 I joined the show as a researcher. As a viewer, I had been transfixed by the likes of the elusive Ingmar Bergman succumbing to his desire to be in charge (clearly directing the South Bank Show over Melvyn Bragg’s head). Now I was admitted to the inner workings. What I encountered felt like a fantasy world. We made programme after programme with the great names of the period for whom the attention we lavished on them was still novel. Artists were not businessmen yet. Stephen Spender was happy to hang around waiting for the sun to set for a shot across the Serpentine. He whiled away the hour gossiping about Princess Michael of Kent before delivering his observations on WH Auden. I had also entered a fantasy world in a second sense. The story of the South Bank Show in some ways reflects the story of ITV.

My early days coincided with the last glorious moments of the Closed Shop: the unions ruled. Provisions were lavish. On my very first day we went to interview Steven Spielberg, a generous interviewee who left to go shopping in a convoy of limousines. After the filming I was surprised to learn we had to take our crew to a rather expensive Chinese restaurant. And all air fares were Club Class, even short flights to Europe, as I discovered on my first foreign trip to meet Gore Vidal in Rome. Vidal gave me an erudite tour of the Forum accompanied by wicked asides about the filming of Ben Hur. In 1988 I began producing myself. Programmes with Martin Amis, Vivienne Westwood and a then fugitive Salman Rushdie followed (1990). Under Special Branch protection, Rushdie led a house arrest existence. This was his first public appearance. Men with guns were everywhere. Locations were secret, code names were used. And for once, we were news as well as art.

Despite the unions’ practices and the obligatory extravagance, which were both soon to come to a welcome end (though it would be hypocritical to say that we hadn’t enjoyed it), money was still flowing into ITV’s coffers. Spoilt as we were, there was still cash for wonderful programmes. Excess on screen, as well as off, sometimes paid dividends, as in the prolonged, bibulous (an understatement) lunch between Melvyn Bragg and Francis Bacon in 1985 which yielded gold. Bacon might have had trouble standing when he rose from the table but he could still speak and what he said told us more about how he saw the world than any more formal encounter. In 1992 I left the South Bank Show to go to the BBC for a few years, returning as Melvyn Bragg’s deputy just in time for the millennium. Though the programme was still in very good shape, on the business side of ITV there had been buyouts and takeovers and it was clear the money supply was drying up. It wasn’t an abrupt cessation, but a slow, painful squeeze, and one which has since speeded up, accelerated by the forces of regulation and advancing technology.

Over the last decade, the energy if not the life has drained from ITV. I have seen Melvyn Bragg use every political trick (politics is a game he plays well) and all the clout he can bring to bear, to keep the South Bank Show up to standard, on air and decently funded. It’s hard to convey quite what a heroic act of will that has taken in the face of a commercial entity under real threat and anxious to unload its obligations. And yet despite the cloth cutting, the South Bank Show, last bastion of public service on ITV has still fallen, pushed, it seems, by the final offer from a stricken company of a budget that could not stretch to produce the series, let alone make any of the old magic. But despite its passing, there remains the fact of the programmes. There have been over 800 films, with the most remarkable artists of the last 50 years or so. What a fine achievement that surely is (an achievement that belongs without any doubt to Melvyn Bragg), and what a marvellous archive the South Bank Show has left to posterity.

Gillian Greenwood was Deputy Controller of Arts and Features at ITV from 1998 to 2007; the final South Bank Show is on Monday 28 December at 10.45pm on ITV1; not STV Creator Melvyn Bragg on why The South Bank Show must go on... | Daily Mail Online comments When John Lennon and Paul McCartney fell out many years ago, Lennon lashed out at his former friend and collaborator. ‘The only thing you did was Yesterday!’ he jeered – which was grossly unfair. I remember the first South Bank Show I made, 34 years ago, in which we led with an interview with McCartney after some years of wounded silence. He confessed how much Lennon had hurt him but revealed how he fought back with what he did best – composing and singing songs which were, and still are, as good as any around. I felt rather like that when ITV shrugged off The South Bank Show a couple of years ago after 32 years of programmes, more than 730 editions and 120 awards, the consistently highest audience for an arts programme in the UK and an almost unrivalled cast list. Funny thing to do.

It was one of ITV’s unique home-grown programmes. Historic show: Melvyn Bragg with Paul McCartney when he appeared on the South Bank Show in 1978 and revealed his hurt over his spat with John Lennon An advertising slump pressed the panic button. No matter. Their loss. No bones broken. Now Sky Arts has seized the opportunity and thanks to them we’re back on the beat with a new series. RELATED ARTICLES Share this article Share Some people have asked, ‘Why come back?’ My response has been, ‘Why ever not? Would you leave a job you loved, making programmes about some of the greatest artists of our time?’ To me it’s not so much a programme, more a way of life. I’ve been making arts programmes for almost 50 years, and every day I can’t believe my luck. Too old at 72? Careful. Ageism is out. We’ll have the law on you! I’ll never forget my interview with Barry Humphries – one of the oddest I’ve ever done. He insisted that for half the time he appeared as Dame Edna.

So I interviewed the real Barry Humphries in a suit and tie, and then I interviewed Edna in full fig in her dressing room, where she criticised Barry mercilessly. Perhaps my most memorable moment in the show’s history was at the end of many months of film-making with Laurence Olivier in the 1980s. We’d had to stop for a long time because of his cancer, but he battled on most movingly and cheerfully. All very English. We went into the garden outside his Sussex house. The weather was beautiful. We chatted a little more, then he said, ‘You’ve caught me on a good day.’ It was a wonderful end to the film. He died soon afterwards. Oddest interview: Melvyn once interviewed Barry Humphries one minute and then his alter ego Dame Edna the next Then there was an interview I did with the artist Francis Bacon. We breakfasted on champagne, then moved to his favourite restaurant for a seriously liquid lunch. The restaurant was then cleared so the interview could be shot and we had another lunch just to make it seem real. Unfortunately, the inevitable consequence was two plastered people on screen.

I rang him up and explained that I nevertheless thought he was terrific, and could I run it? ‘Do what you want, darling,’ he said, ‘I don’t care.’ The current crop of South Bank Shows will stand with any I’ve made since 1978. So, as Paul McCartney sings, ‘Here we go again’. McCartney was important to the South Bank Show project from the start. I was always determined to pay as much respect to the popular arts as to the traditional ones – not an idea given much house room by the Arts Establishment of the time. A major reviewer once wrote, ‘I draw the line at Lennon/McCartney in an arts programme.’ Well, old chum, you were wrong. What other music from that time has survived so well? The best of pop in our country is among the best of the arts that we do. And Britain does the arts as well as, and sometimes better than, anybody else on the planet.

Meeting an art icon: With Laurence Olivier at his Sussex home shortly before he died The South Bank Show has put the classical music of William Walton alongside Eric Clapton, the work of Laurence Olivier alongside that of Billy Connolly, the stage plays of Harold Pinter alongside the television plays of Dennis Potter, the writing of William Golding alongside that of Victoria Wood, and the brilliance of Margot Fonteyn alongside the originality of experimental dance group DV8. And we’re doing it again now. It’s been fun trying to display the range of the show in six episodes. We’ve featured Nicholas Hytner, Director of the National Theatre, and Pat Barker, Booker Prize winner for her unmatched fiction on the First World War, both of whom have never before been fully profiled on British TV. Diverse subjects: The new series will include profiles on Nicholas Hytner, director of London's National Theatre, left, and rapper Dizzee Rascal Then there’s Nicola Benedetti, from adolescent triumphs to supreme violinist; a programme on the male dancer, featuring Mikhail Baryshnikov and Carlos Acosta; and one on female singer-songwriters with Joan Armatrading, Annie Lennox and Suzanne Vega.

Tomorrow night it’s British urban music phenomenon Grime. These young singer/songwriters from the depressed area of Bow in east London found their own music and became as obsessed with it as McCartney and Lennon did. We profile Dizzee Rascal, who has had four UK Number One singles yet could have followed, as he says, ‘a path of crime and drugs and violence’. But he won the Mercury Music Prize aged 19 and is now the UK’s biggest male vocal star. That’s what The South Bank Show is still about, making films about the best of what’s out there in the arts to reach out to as many of you as possible. The South Bank Show, tomorrow, 10pm, Sky Arts 1

Question: What is the name of the arts programme made for British television from 1978 that is identified with Melvyn Bragg?
Answer: The South Bank Show