Melvyn Bragg's departure marks the end of a golden age of British public intellectuals

[Colin Howard]

By David Herman, 3 September 2025

Greetings,

I often listened to In Our Time and earlier, Start the Week, I always found
Bragg interesting and able to keep my interest, no matter what the subject,
even if as sometimes happened, I started to listen not expecting much, but
often found myself unable to stop, even subjects in which I did not expect
to be interesting for me, turned out to be at least worth my spending time.

The news, Melvyn Bragg is stepping down as the presenter of In Our Time on
Radio 4 marks the end of an era in British broadcasting, a golden age of
intellectual discussion on British television and radio.

The presenters included people like Bragg, Bryan Magee and Michael
Ignatieff. In 1978 Magee presented a series of interviews with leading
British and American philosophers, called Men of Ideas. This was a series
that, according to The Daily Telegraph, "achieved the near-impossible feat
of presenting to a mass audience recondite issues of philosophy without
compromising intellectual integrity or losing ratings".

Magee interviewed distinguished philosophers such as Sir Isaiah Berlin and
AJ Ayer and followed this with another series of interviews on BBC2, The
Great Philosophers (1987), in which he interviewed leading philosophers
about great thinkers from Plato to Nietzsche and Wittgenstein.

The new Channel 4 commissioned their own intellectual discussion programme,
Voices. Its best-known presenter was the Canadian writer and intellectual,
Michael Ignatieff. Voices was more topical. And instead of British and
American academic philosophers, it featured psychoanalysts, writers like
Saul Bellow and Gunter Grass, and literary critics and social thinkers.

Ignatieff became one of the presenters of The Late Show on BBC2 from
1989-1995, chairing topical discussions starting with the Fall of the Wall,
broadcast live from Berlin, in 1989, and a programme on the fatwa against
Salman Rushdie. There was also the familiar mix of writers, intellectuals
and scientists, including Ian McEwan and Susan Sontag, Margaret Atwood and
Czeslaw Milosz; thinkers such as EJ Hobsbawm; and filmmakers like Marcel
Ophuls, Wim Wenders and Volker Schlöndorff.

But the best-known presenter of all was Bragg. He started out presenting the
BBC books programme, Read All About It, but then famously presented and
edited ITV's weekly arts programme, The South Bank Show. It ran from
1978-2010 before moving to Sky Arts. It mixed household names like Paul
McCartney, Ken Dodd and Sir Alec Guinness with iconic cultural figures like
Francis Bacon and Ingmar Bergman.

In 1988 Bragg began presenting Start the Week, where we first started
working together. Two things stood out. First, the astonishing quality of
the conversation. Second, there was Bragg himself, his passionate range of
interests, his commitment to high-quality broadcasting and his refusal to
compromise or to patronise the listener. Under Bragg, the programme gained a
new seriousness and also a larger audience - which by 1996 was at one to one
and a half million.

When Bragg became a life peer he left Start The Week but soon started
presenting In Our Time, one of the most extraordinary programmes ever made
by Radio 4. There have been over 1,000 episodes, featuring academic
specialists discussing subjects ranging from Demosthenes and Vincent Van
Gogh to John Maynard Keynes and Emile Zola's Germinal.

These kinds of programmes have almost entirely disappeared and In Our Time
and The Life Scientific are almost the last vestiges of intellectual
discussion on the BBC.

Why has this happened? First, think of the people who run British
television. Executives in the 1980s and 1990s - like Jeremy Isaacs and
Michael Kustow at Channel 4, Alan Yentob and Michael Jackson at BBC2, Bragg
at LWT - were cultured and hugely ambitious. Their successors are not. That
leaves BBC Radio. A second problem is the disappearance of presenters like
Magee, Ignatieff and now Bragg.

But crucially they no longer draw the same audiences. This is a product of a
larger cultural change. The audiences who read The Listener and watched
intellectual discussion programmes and interviews late into the evening on
BBC2 and Channel 4 seem to have abandoned terrestrial TV and intellectual
weekly magazines.

But this should be a moment of celebration. Bragg has had the most
astonishing career, on television and radio. He brought a passion for the
arts and for ideas, a refusal to compromise or dumb down and a belief that
there would always be an audience for the best broadcasting could offer.

David Herman worked with Melvyn Bragg at Radio 4 and LWT during the 1990s

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/09/03/melvyn-braggs-departure-marks-the-end-of-a-golden-age/





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Colin Howard, Southern England.

[harring...@gmail.com]

Hi All,

I found his programmes very interesting on the rare occasions when I listened. I have also read several of his novels.

Richard H.

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