Did you know that America was discovered by accident because of a solar eclipse? That Frankenstein was written because of a volcanic eruption in Indonesia? Or that Seneca and Jean-Paul Marat both died in the bath? For 25 years, one place has been a font of far-reaching facts, a stage for the sharpest of minds, a university course for the masses – a live radio show devoted to subjects from every conceivable field of knowledge with one steadfast voice at the helm.
I’m shepherded up an elevator and down several corridors before reaching an anonymous, tiny, soundproof room. There to discuss BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time on the eve of its 1,000th episode is its host, Melvyn Bragg, the 83-year-old veteran broadcaster with improbably dense hair.
True to form, he wastes no time. It all began in the summer of 1998. “They offered me the death slot and I thought, ‘Well, I can do what I want.’ I’d been fired once; it didn’t hurt that much.” Bragg was sacked from Radio 4’s Start the Week after receiving a peerage from the Blair government, which wished to bolster arts representation on the benches of the House of Lords. The “death slot”, so called for its stubbornly low audience figures and the fact that numerous careers had floundered in it, was on Thursdays at 9am. Bragg saw an opportunity.
“There were two or three things I wanted to do,” he says, tapping the table emphatically. “First of all, I’d noticed on Start the Week that when we invited scientists and historians and philosophers on, which was very rare in those days – it was mainly showbiz – it worked. People liked it. I wanted to do more of that.” Instead of bouncing around the guests’ fields of expertise, In Our Time would focus on one subject. “It wasn’t going to be a talkshow. It was going to be an investigation … an inquiry,” he adds.
Giving Bragg the death slot was a savvy move. He had form in starting things from scratch, such as BBC One’s Read All About It! and ITV’s The South Bank Show; both of which attracted big guest names and redefined the arts show genre. He took his Start the Week producer Olivia Seligman with him and, on 15 October 1998, In Our Time was born.
The room really is tiny, and the table between us is even tinier. I’ve settled into a cross-legged, chin-rest contortion. I tell Bragg I have been relistening to early episodes; 30-minute, two-guest programmes with towering public intellectuals. The atmosphere was often adversarial. In episode two, Politics in the 20th Century, a blustering Gore Vidal makes claims about a corporate conspiracy to sabotage Bill Clinton’s healthcare bill, an allegation that fellow guest Alan Clark vehemently shoots down. Vidal goes on to describe the then secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, as a “flappy wet hen” and laments the end of proper public political discourse, which has been “overtaken by personality and sex”.
In episode 15, Bragg abandons his post as chair, and helps Will Self give Roger Scruton a 30-minute drubbing over his dismissal of pop and non-white culture in his book Modern Culture. It is a thrilling display of intellectual blood sport. “You say a multicultural education can never teach true religion,” says Self, “but it certainly can teach good rhythm.” Scruton spends the entire show against the ropes. It is hard not to feel sorry for him. Other household names from the early days include Germaine Greer, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan and Richard Dawkins.
What does Bragg remember about those nascent episodes? He laughs, then says: “You’re bringing it back to me … We were breaking in.” When the programme was granted a further 15 minutes of airtime in 2000, everything changed. “I couldn’t really make it work for half an hour, but three-quarters of an hour is a three-acter. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis … Structure is everything.” With the longer format, Bragg was determined to sharpen the show’s focus; from now on, guests would be teaching academics and with this the showmanship ended. “The confrontational business leaked out of it. It became a collegiate enterprise. That’s when it started to really take off.”
Bragg had converted the death slot into radio primetime, attracting two million weekly listeners. In 2004, the show became the BBC’s first ever podcast and, he says, scanning a fact sheet, “the BBC’s most downloaded weekly podcast globally. I’m proud of that. It’s odd being the most of something.”
I estimate that I’ve listened to about 950 of the 999 episodes. There are some I have listened to several times; my favourite guests include Mary Beard and Angie Hobbs, who Bragg tells me has been a guest 30 times, on classics; Simon Schaffer on science history; and Don Paterson on Shakespeare’s sonnets.
With such a weighty back catalogue, I have to wonder, how is Bragg’s information retention? He laughs again. “We used to call it memory … I have trouble with that. I remember some things better than others. But that’s not the point for me. While I’m doing it, I’m enjoying it very much. It’s the doing of it.”
He tells of being passionate about the presentness of the experience, which he compares to singing in a choir. In a book commemorating the show’s 20th anniversary, he wrote: “For me there are golden moments, as when I was discovering string theory in the company of scholars to whom it was as easy as pi, and, yes, I understood it! On that Thursday morning, I was a string theorist for a full 20 minutes.”
When Bragg was 13, he had a severe breakdown, which was never officially diagnosed. He alludes to what sounds like dissociation – “seeing an image of myself on the wall and it’s not me”. His performance plummeted at school. “I discovered that reading difficult stuff was a way to stop me thinking about what this thing was. That drove me through.”
In Our Time seems to be a continuation of this escapism through learning. I quote a line he wrote about using the “good offices of the BBC to further an education, and in doing so, getting paid for it”. He could not agree more. “Absolutely! You’ve got it.” A sudden peal of laughter, one I’ve heard a thousand times before. “This is my staying on at university for another year or two,” he says.
But there are some subjects where Bragg has skin in the game and others where he is akin to the layperson. He has written 25 novels and studied modern history at Oxford, so it is no surprise that he knows more about Wuthering Heights than he does about dark matter. But, as he writes, “Science is a particular pleasure because I know so little about it.” He also delights in scheduling disparate subjects on consecutive weeks. You can almost hear the glee in his voice when at the end of an episode on the siege of Paris, he announces: “Next week, we’ll be discussing solar wind.”
A through-line of Bragg’s work is his determination to make culture – high and low – accessible to all. In the 1970s, with his book show Read all About It!, he chose to focus on paperback rather than hardback releases, so that listeners would have had the time and money to read them. With The South Bank Show, he tells me, “I was fed up with the old pyramid of arts programmes” – classical music at the top and popular music at the bottom. When episode one featured Paul McCartney, there was uproar. “The Daily Telegraph said: ‘We’re glad that ITV is continuing to do arts programmes, but we draw the line at Paul McCartney.’” Finally, with In Our Time, he says: “It’s a pleasure getting to people … You don’t have to be rich. You don’t have to be well educated. You just need a wireless, and to press a button. That’s as near democracy of information as you’re going to get.”
Bragg reveals that the subject of episode 1,000 will be one of his favourite films, Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. I ask what is in store for the next 1,000 episodes. “As long as I can do it well, I want to keep doing it. And as long as the BBC wants me to keep doing it … but I’d rather push off than be pushed off,” he says.
