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 In conversation with jazz musician, Humphrey Lyttleton |
Modest Melvyn has good reason to brag
Gerald Isaaman speaks to Melvyn Bragg about his career, his ongoing search for perfection and the future of ITV
MELVYN Bragg has no doubt about it. “There is a maelstrom going on in television – and it is very difficult to steer through a maelstrom,” he insists.
As we sit in the House of Lords tearoom, he adds: “You suddenly wake up and there’s 400 channels operating instead of just four, it’s almost like that.”
The fragmentation of television, the introduction of the internet allowing downloading news, views, blogs, music and personal programmes galore have created an unparalleled communications revolution.
It is a long way back since Bragg, immaculate champion of the arts, set out to be a novelist while reading modern history at Oxford, became a BBC trainee, more or less by a fluke, and found himself in a new world he immediately loved, first in radio, then in TV and, subsequently, as master of the ITV’s South Bank Show, now celebrating its 30th season.
They have been troubled and triumphant prize-winning years, though the ignorant criticism he found early on still rankles. “They were going to have a go at me because they thought I earned loads of dosh when I didn’t, just £1,000 more than at the BBC,” he recalls.“That’s the way of the world, but you don’t realise that when you’re young. And it hurt.”
Now, at 67, Bragg, otherwise the life peer Baron Bragg of Wigton, who declares himself a socialist supporter – and friend — of Tony Blair, is the ultimate professional, the working class lad from Cumbria whose good looks and flashing smile, intellect and quietly sympathetic skills always heralds the best of the arts on the box.
While he remains modest, his record is one worth bragging about, from in-depth interviews and films involving the most talented of truly great talkers, from Arthur Miller, William Golding, Harold Pinter, Alan Bennett, and Paul McCartney, to name a handful, to, more recently, the comedian and writer Victoria Wood, Humphrey Lyttelton, and, coming up, novelist Isabel Allende filmed in her native Chile.
Yet he is self-critical, always seeking to improve the end results. He spent nine months working on two fascinating, hour-long programmes featuring Sir Laurence Olivier, and his documentary on Francis Bacon has become a cult film in art colleges round the world.
“Francis turned me down at first and then did a film with a young American,” Bragg, a friend of the artist, reveals. “I had to call him and say, ‘You know what, that was one of the crappiest films I’ve ever seen. Total rubbish in my view.”
He got the point and ended up giving us total access to him and his studios.
“We had a riotous time. We started the day with champagne at nine o’clock in the morning, then we went to his studio, then we had a big lunch with lots of red wine. We later cleared the restaurant to reconstruct the lunch to film it.”
Everyone thinks it’s a jet-setting lifestyle to be envied but he drives himself hard. He will leave his home in Hampstead Hill Gardens just after five in the morning, to be at the BBC in time for a live trailer for his In Our Time radio programme. His trips abroad rarely last a day or two, the secret being advance research, planning and strict financial discipline.
“Like a lot of socialists, I find I quite like managing other people’s money,” he declares with a grin. “We run a very, very tight ship.”
Indeed, he is full of admiration for his ITV crew and its young, dashing directors and cameramen. “I’ve got one of the best teams I’ve ever had,” he insists.
Outside of all that he has just completed a new novel, partly set in Hampstead, the details of which are at present under wraps, and he maintains a 70 per cent attendance record in the House of Lords. “You shouldn’t be here if you’re not a working peer,” he declares.
He worries over the decline of the main political parties and the decline in voting and believes the media has become so powerful because the Tories failed to offer opposition to the huge majority of Tony Blair.
“If it wasn’t going to happen in the Palace of Westminster then it was going to happen in Fleet Street that was, on radio and TV,” he says.
“They became the opposition. They saw themselves as that but they’re not of course because they’re not elected.”
However, he believes in the tradition of a sceptical press critical of grandiose claims and damaging bureaucracy, seeing it as a healthy sign.
And what future for energetic Melvyn, who has declined the idea of champagne receptions to mark his 30 years of South Bank success and the cultural stimulation he gives the nation?
His basic contract lasts to 2010 and the current South Bank programmes are guaranteed for another two years. “You can’t look beyond that unless your crackers,” he says. “If I had the idea that if I go the South Bank Show goes too, that would be silly.
“There might be people waiting for me to go, so it can carry on. They might be saying good riddance to the old bugger – he’s been there long enough. I very much want to hand over an arts programme in good running order to the next person.” |
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