In profile: Melvyn Bragg

IN THE memorable title sequence of The South Bank Show, a detail from Michelangelo’s The Creation Of Adam becomes animated. The implied spark of life jumping from the finger of God to Adam is recast as a writhing electrical current, representing inspiration, the power of art or something equally ineffable.

Last week, The South Bank Show received a similarly defibrillating jolt, when Sky Arts agreed to revive the long-running arts programme for six hour-long episodes in 2012.

For Melvyn Bragg, the show’s producer, editor and leonine figurehead, the new deal was an opportunity to raise a finger of his own to ITV, the channel that scuttled its flagship arts strand after 32 years and almost 800 episodes. Though dismayed at the decision, Bragg stayed on-message when the cancellation was announced in 2009, though he left ITV soon after. He perhaps detected the chill wind two years earlier, when ITV’s then chairman Michael Grade insisted Bragg’s job at the corporation was safer than his own. But while co-opting The South Bank Show is a coup for a minority channel such as Sky Arts, what’s in it for 72-year-old Lord Bragg?

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Bragg was born in Carlisle in 1939, and raised in Wigton, a small Cumbrian market town. His mother, Mary Ethel, was a tailor. His father, Stanley, was a factory stock keeper before being called up to fight in Burma during the Second World War. When his father returned, the family took over a local public house. As well as helping out in the pub, Bragg held down a paper round. Reading was an early obsession. “I was an only child, and I started to read when I was four and I took to it. It was my addiction,” he said last year. After passing his 11-plus, Bragg attended the local Nelson Thomlinson grammar school.

Signifiers in Bragg’s early life can be gleaned from his semi-autobiographical novels – in 2001’s A Son Of War, deeply religious young Wigton lad “Joe Richardson” pores over Hemingway under the covers, listens to Beethoven on the wireless and hovers at the top of the stairs while his parents attempt to reconnect after the war. Joe has a minor breakdown in his teens, and Bragg has spoken of his own problems at that age. “I grew up at a time when you didn’t let your feelings go,” he said in 2009. “When you are of that mould, you become quite good at ‘fortressing’ yourself.”

The timely intervention of a history master helped the 17-year-old Bragg recover his equilibrium, and he won a scholarship to read modern history at Oxford’s Wadham College.

In his final year at Oxford, Bragg met the artist Lisa Roche, and was smitten by the mysterious Frenchwoman five years his senior. After a short courtship, they married in 1961 – Bragg was 21 – and soon after had a daughter, Marie-Elsa. After graduating, Bragg won one of only three BBC trainee scholarships, and joined Huw Wheldon’s respected arts programme Monitor. In two years, he rose to the rank of producer, and was making headway with his first novel, For Want Of A Nail, published in 1965. During the late-60s, Bragg was better known as an author than a broadcaster, balancing his BBC commitments with furious bouts of writing. But in 1971, Roche committed suicide. She had a history of mental illness, which she had partly concealed. For his part, Bragg had been having an affair with another writer, Cate Haste, who would go on to become his second wife.

In his 2007 novel Remember Me, Bragg details the decade-long relationship between Joe Richardson and “Natasha”, a mentally fragile French artist. Suffused with tragedy and remorse, the novel is dedicated to his eldest daughter, now an Anglican preacher in North London. And while Bragg, the author of more than 30 books, has published non-fiction since Remember Me – notably a 2011 survey of the King James Bible – he hasn’t yet returned to fiction.

Bragg spent the 70s shuttling between jobs at the BBC and ITV, but it was with London Weekend Television’s The South Bank Show that he truly made his mark. The catchy theme – classic Paganini jazzily reworked by Andrew Lloyd-Webber – doubled as a mission statement. From the outset, Bragg was keen to mix high and low culture. “I wrote a manifesto arguing that the singing of Elvis Presley was as interesting as the singing of Pavarotti,” he once said. The first episode in 1978 featured Paul McCartney, Germaine Greer and Gerald Scarfe.

In 1982, Bragg became head of arts at LWT, working closely with a group of executives who would go on to define British television, including John Birt, Greg Dyke and Michael Grade. While remaining loyal to ITV for 30 years, Bragg maintained a working relationship with the BBC. He began hosting Radio 4’s discussion show Start The Week in 1988, and ended up at the helm for a decade. It could have been longer, but, in 1998, he was made a Labour life peer: Lord Bragg of Wigton. Considering his pride in his working-class roots, it’s perhaps unsurprising Bragg has been a long-term Labour supporter. A friend of Neil Kinnock, there was a persistent rumour that Bragg would be given a heritage role in government if Labour came to power in 1992. He has also been close to Tony Blair, although there was a minor media kerfuffle in 2004 when Bragg told ITV News that the then prime minister had considered quitting due to personal reasons.

Entering the House of Lords meant surrendering the reins of the topical Start The Week, but Bragg almost immediately launched In Our Time on Radio 4, a discussion of ideas that invited lecturing academics to go deep on esoteric history and culture. Already famous and influential as an arts maven, In Our Time recast Bragg as a popular educator. He was appointed an honorary fellow of the Royal Society in 2010, and In Our Time broadcast its 500th episode in May this year.

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Would it have been so enduring if Bragg didn’t sound genuinely keen to expand his own knowledge base? Most 72-year-olds are understandably set in their ways, but Bragg gives the impression of retaining an intellectual flexibility as limber as his famous bouffant. Last week, he hinted that he had also compiled a list of subjects that could keep The South Bank Show ticking over for another seven years. Thanks to Sky’s jump-start, it looks likely to continue for as long as he does.

The facts of life

• With Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd-Webber, Bragg was a co-writer on Norman Jewison’s 1973 film adaptation of Jesus Christ Superstar.

• On the value of arts programming: “You don’t have to have been to university to watch an arts programme. You don’t have to dress up and go to the opera house. You just turn on the box.”

• On the genesis of In Our Time: “I wanted a programme that stuck to one subject, that was about ideas and not the reviewing or promoting of books or plays, as intelligent as I could cope with and as eclectic as we could dare to be.”

• On ITV, The South Bank Show regularly drew audiences of 2 million. The highest-rated edition, with 8.9 million viewers, was a 1997 profile of Riverdance star Michael Flatley.

• Bragg was the inaugural winner of the Literary Review’s Bad Sex In Fiction Award for A Time To Dance (1993). Later recipients include Norman Mailer and Giles Coren.

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