Over the course of an incredible 60-year broadcasting career, Melvyn Bragg has unfailingly championed the arts on television. More than this, he has revolutionised the way the arts are presented and perceived on the small screen, harnessing the power of ITV to reach a wider and more diverse audience. In treating popular culture with the same weight and attention as more established artistic practices, he has broken down barriers and provided immense insight into all spheres of the arts for a wide and highly appreciative audience. Illustrated with clips from across a unique career, this interview with Lord Bragg celebrates his enormous influence and rich legacy.
Melvyn Bragg was born in Wigton, Cumbria, and was educated there and at Wadham College, Oxford.
His broadcasting career began at the BBC in 1961 and soon afterwards he published his first novel. He worked on the arts programme Monitor with Huw Wheldon in the mid-1960s; during this time he began writing novels, set mostly in his native Cumbria. He collaborated with Ken Russell and wrote the 1970 film about Tchaikovsky, The Music Lovers. He also wrote Isadora, directed by Karel Reisz, Play Dirty starring Michael Caine, worked with David Lean, and with Howard Goodall wrote the musical version of his novel The Hired Man which was first published in 1969.
In 1977 Melvyn started LWT’s long-running Arts programme, the multiple award-winning South Bank Show, making about 800 editions as well as other documentaries. The programme was de-commissioned in 2010, when he took the programme across to Sky Arts. ‘The South Bank Show lives again’, he said at the time. As well as The South Bank Show, Sky Arts now does 30 editions a year of The South Bank Show Originals.
In the meantime Melvyn has expanded his range, presenting arts and science programmes and marshalling discussion shows on BBC Radio (on In Our Time), and writing non-fiction books including The Adventure of English and The Impact of The King James Bible as well as On Giants’ Shoulders, a series about the history of science. He has also written several award-winning novels – The Soldier’s Return, The Maid of Buttermere, Remember Me, Now Is the Time (Parliamentary Book Award 2016) – and most recently Back in the Day.
He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society and of The British Academy. He was given a Peerage in 1998 and a Companion of Honour in 2017. He is a member of Chelsea Arts Club and The Garrick.
Award winning journalist and broadcaster Samira Ahmed presents Front Row on Radio 4 and Newswatch on BBC1. She was named British Broadcasting Press Guild audio presenter of the year in 2020. Her acclaimed three-part BBC4 documentary series Art of Persia (2020) was one of the first major Western TV series to be filmed in Iran for 40 years. She was previously a news anchor and correspondent for Channel 4 News, where she won the Stonewall Broadcast of the Year award, and for BBC News, where she covered the OJ Simpson case while LA Correspondent. In April 2023 Samira made headlines around the world after uncovering the earliest complete concert recording of the Beatles in Britain, at Stowe School in 1963. Her many documentaries explore the intersection of popular culture, science, politics, and social change. They include Radio 4’s Disgusted, Mary Whitehouse, for which she spent months studying the diaries of the famous morality campaigner. Samira is a trustee of the Centre for Women’s Justice, Humanists UK and on the advisory board of the National Science and Media Museum in Bradford and national Blue Plaques panel for Historic England. She is an honorary fellow of St Edmund Hall, University of Oxford.
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Programme notes and credits compiled by Sight and Sound and the BFI Documentation Unit
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