This article is taken from the December/January 2023 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

Let us garlands bring. It is sixty-one years since a young man from Wigton skipped along the yellow brick road from the city of dreaming spires to Broadcasting House, to serve as apprentice stoker at the BBC’s cultural furnace. He’s still there, seeking to stretch our minds. How well you have played your hand, Melvyn Bragg.

The Cumbrian is one of life’s optimists, choosing to see bouquets where others spy only dead flowers. He’s had to be cheerful, given the gusts of philistinism that have swept the land. In his middle years he presented a programme on primetime telly, where he discussed proper books with proper writers. Now the BBC fobs off viewers with some superficial guff designed by and for dim teenagers.

The Cumbrian is one of life’s optimists, choosing to see bouquets where others spy only dead flowers.

Six decades: that’s quite an innings. For the last twenty-four years Bragg has chaired In Our Time, which goes out on Radio 4 at 9am on Thursdays. “Worth the licence fee by itself,” is a common response of regular listeners. Whether it is or not, the programme is always revealing, and frequently outstanding.

It took some courage back in 1998 for a friendly producer to suggest a weekly seminar with experts, the more high-minded the better. It has paid off, though. More than two million people tune in each week to hear Bragg’s guests talk about subjects well-known and obscure. Plato, Herodotus and Hegel jostle with Christian martyrdom, seismology and the gold standard. You don’t know what is coming next.

Wilfred Owen, the war poet, was a recent topic. Was there much that was new? Not really. Owen, like Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves, has been written about so frequently in the century since the Great War that he has become part of the British cultural landscape.

Yet each generation comes afresh to things their elders absorbed decades back. And there is never a bad time to return to the poetry of those remarkable men, if only to be reminded they were brave officers, not skulking bolshies. Another good reason, perhaps, to go back to Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy.

It is sometimes forgotten, in the wash of his stellar career, that he is, first and foremost, a novelist

Bragg has written a wartime quartet, seen from the perspective of those who survived. It is sometimes forgotten, in the wash of his stellar career, that he is, first and foremost, a novelist, as well as a biographer and social historian. He has written or edited more than forty books. Talk about filling the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds worth of distance run.

Kipling’s famous words suit him like a three-piece. Bragg has known tragedy, and has suffered at various stages of his life from depression. In his ninth decade he carries the baggage of a long and vivid life lightly. In Our Time is his triumph, and one of the BBC’s great achievements. Each week it shows what programme-makers can do when they take listeners seriously.

Desert Island Discs is another of the corporation’s plums, even if its best years lie in the past. Too stuffy under Roy
Plomley, its founder, who seemed to catch his guests after an agreeable lunch at the Athenaeum, it is now too sloppy. Lauren Laverne, who took over from Kirsty Young, is as wooden as Pinocchio’s nose. Her voice is dull. In fact she sounds common, a word we are not encouraged to use these days.

It isn’t just the Sunderland housewife’s drone that has robbed the show of its vim. Laverne doesn’t appear to have much interest in her guests. If one of them were to say, for instance, that he kept a bear in his rooms at Cambridge, like Lord Byron, she would probably reply, “tell us about your fourth disc, and why you’ve chosen it.”

Then there are the guests. Just as Plomley turned for comfort to rear admirals, Laverne can’t get enough of pop musicians and assorted bores. Increasingly listeners have to put up with “stars” borrowed from BBC shows; a form of advertising that doesn’t sit well with the programme’s original purpose.

Too many have no hinterland. Although it isn’t essential to select music from the world before 1950, those choices would suggest a curious mind. There must be interesting people out there for whom music is more than a lifestyle accessory, and it shouldn’t be beyond the wit of Desert Island Discs to find a few.

Meanwhile, at Sunday lunchtime, Private Passions sails merrily along on Radio 3. Michael Berkeley, the host since 1995, actually listens to his guests, who tend to be lively talkers, so their conversations strike sparks. As I appeared on the show 20 years ago I speak from experience.

It is primarily about music but Berkeley nevertheless draws more out of people than Laverne. As Alf Garnett liked to say, it stands to reason. Invited to speak seriously about music it is likely you will reveal something about your personality that may not emerge from a set list of conventional questions.

So the lesson to be learned from In Our Time and Private Passions is simple. The views from the heights are usually more rewarding than those glimpsed in the valleys.