Melvyn Bragg is to step down from the South Bank Show after 45 years, according to reports.
The broadcaster and Labour life peer told the Sunday Times the role was “hard work”, adding that “there are other things I want to do and I think it’s about time”.
A final series of the longstanding arts and culture programme will be broadcast on Sky Arts this month, focused on fellow octogenarian and artist David Hockney.
Bragg, 83, launched the arts and culture programme in 1978 with an interview with Sir Paul McCartney.
At the time, the choice was controversial among a “stuffy” art world, according to Bragg.
“I made a clear decision to change the way arts programmes were made, and what they called the arts were going to change,” he told the Sunday Times. “To prove I was serious, I started with Paul McCartney.”
In the more than 40 years since, some of the world’s leading cultural figures have been the subject of episodes.
They include the film director Francis Ford Coppola, the painter Francis Bacon, the broadcaster Sir David Attenborough, the singer Björk and the Rolling Stones’ guitarist Ronnie Wood.
The series has also produced numerous insights into artists’ inner lives, not all of them favourable. In 2007, Eric Clapton told Bragg that he was not racist, but found comments by Enoch Powell on immigration to be “relevant”.
The show, which Bragg owns the rights to, was aired on ITV until being axed by the channel in 2010. It was relaunched in 2012 by Sky Arts. The channel’s director, Philip Edgar-Jones, told the Sunday Times that Bragg was “irreplaceable”.
“It is the end of the South Bank Show for Melvyn but not the end of Melvyn on Sky Arts,” he added. “As long as I’m clinging on to the channel, Melvyn will have a place on it.”
While it is not yet known what form Bragg’s next outing on the channel will take, retirement is unlikely to be on the cards. He told the paper he will continue to present the BBC Radio 4 history programme In Our Time.
