That, he thinks, has always been the reason for the programme?s existence: its examination and promotion of the work of artists and performers working today. ?I think we do the great dead artists pretty well in television,? he says, ?and we do arts magazines shows well. The Culture Show is pretty good. But I am going to do big contemporary people. I just like saying here is someone we think is doing good work and we are going to spend time on them.?
Bragg displays a work ethic that would fell a lesser man. He combines his broadcasting commitments with regular attendance at the House of Lords, where he tries to vote on issues he is concerned about, such as trying to defeat the recent health service reform proposals. He gets up at 5am when he is writing and has a new book planned for next year.
?I have always had this sort of life since I started to work,? he says. ?This might be psychobabble, but my parents worked all the time. They had a little pub from the time I was nine or 10, which was open every single day including Christmas. So they worked every single day of their lives, and I helped them. That was the context and it didn?t seem strange.?
Bragg still seems driven by the intellectual curiosity that propelled him from Wigton in Cumbria to Oxford and then to a career which ended with him as head of arts at LWT as well as the face of the South Bank Show. His willingness to tackle the biggest subjects has led to television series about science, the English language and The Book of Books, his recent tome about the King James Bible.
Talking about that at literary festivals around the country, he has been struck by a similar hunger for knowledge in a great swath of the population. ?Not just middle-classish people like me.? These are the people who have made In Our Time such a great success, bringing it more than two million listeners a week; the people who launch local literary and music festivals to feed their desire ?to intellectualise this society and to turn their new learning into work?; the people who long to know and think more.
The boom in literary and arts festivals, he says, ?has been one of the phenomenons of my lifetime. I went to the Edinburgh Festival in 1967, and I think there were about 5,000 people going to a couple of events a day. Now there are 250,000 people going to the Books Festival alone, and listening to talks on every subject under the sun.
?It?s great and I think it is one way this country has gone which they just haven?t cottoned on to down in Westminster. What Chris Smith [the former culture secretary] called the creative economy is growing every year and we are a far more highly educated society than we give ourselves credit for.?
Later he returns to a similar theme: the power of the arts to transform society, and the importance of the creative industries in Britain, where they account for seven per cent of GDP. ?I don?t think it has got home to the people in the commanding heights of this country what a big thing this is. Why shouldn?t we be the clever country? Why shouldn?t we cultivate this and give it more chance. Now is the time to do it, if ever there was. Why shouldn?t the creative economy become our new iron and steel? What the hell else is going to replace it??
In this sense, Bragg is an optimist. He doesn?t believe Britain is suffering from cultural impoverishment, though a series he has made for BBC2 about class and culture over the past century will reveal what he sees as a massive erosion of working-class skills as traditional industry has vanished.
In the same way, he thinks that broadcasters do still engage with ideas, particularly on radio. ?And there are good programmes across television. I am absolutely not a doomsayer about television.? What he regrets, however, is their reluctance to schedule ?more intellectual content? on the big, popular channels such as BBC1 and ITV. ?I do think there is a slight fear of it, and maybe an unwillingness to let an audience build and give it support to build.?
He compares this with In Our Time. When he took on the time slot on Radio 4 it was regarded as the death slot, where programmes failed. But given a good idea and a long enough run to allow listeners to arrive, it is now a programme that is listened to around the world.
This is the context in which he is taking the South Bank Show to Sky Arts. He thought long and hard before making the move, but says that the enthusiasm of James Hunt, the channel controller, and his predecessor, John Cassy, reminded him of the heady days of Lime Grove in the Sixties, when television was a new medium and anything seemed possible.
I ask whether it worried him that he, a lifelong socialist and a passionate campaigner for social justice, would be working for a channel owned by Rupert Murdoch. ?No, not really. First of all Murdoch backs the TLS and I like the TLS. Secondly, Murdoch backs premier league football and if that Northern socialist Alex Ferguson can put his South Bank Show out on Sky, I can put mine out. And I think that Sky Arts has made clear its independence, and is really having a good go at putting the arts on television.?
He also says, more surprisingly: ?It may make me vastly unpopular to say this, but I think Murdoch did some good things. I worked in ITV when it was strangled at the neck by the unions and it was horrifically disillusioning as a Labour bloke. I had a sort of vertigo.
?I didn?t turn against the unions, but they would just cut you off at the knees when you were a minute over and would decide whether they would let you film in America or whatever. Murdoch had the guts to crash through all that.?
He is clearly thrilled to be back at work on the show. ?I love doing arts programmes and I am very excited about doing this ? more excited than I thought I would be. I remember when I first arrived at the BBC, I said to my friend Gavin Millar: I just can?t believe it, we just keep learning new stuff all the time and they call it work. I like work, I like doing it. ?
With that he is off, papers tucked under his arm, raincoat wrapped around him, marching purposefully toward the BBC, still recognisably the young man who arrived in London in the Sixties, and still Britain?s most persuasive cultural guide.
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