OK, ready when you are. Quiet, please and action.
Good evening. If anyone were to ask me...
..who's done most to popularise...
..art and culture in the last 50 years...
..there would only be one answer.
Well, he's a great talker...
..and what a voice. Lovely voice.
Well, his hair.
You know the answer to that one.
Got to be Melvyn, hasn't it?
Melvyn Bragg.
Melvyn. Melvyn Bragg.
Melvyn Bragg. Melvyn Bragg.
# You know Melvyn Bragg was in the parlour
# And he said that he was going to have some tea... #
He's the godfather of popularising culture.
You know, he'd make a documentary about Earth, Wind and Fire
or you know, Tchaikovsky.
Contains some strong language.
Best known for the South Bank Show,
the country's longest running arts programme,
Melvyn Bragg has profiled many of the world's most notable artists,
actors, writers and musicians.
He's also a constant presence on BBC's Radio 4,
has written numerous works of non-fiction,
plays and film scripts and 22 novels.
A very immoral woman.
I'm an artist.
He's variously been called a polymath and a national treasure.
So you can hear me now? Yes.
That's all right.
For all that, he's still deeply embedded in his working class Cumbrian roots.
'Now on Radio 4, here's Melvyn Bragg with In Our Time.'
Melvyn Bragg's Thursday morning routine hasn't changed since 1998
and, now aged 75, he shows no sign of slowing down.
Regent's Park, it broke down, the lights, for 25 minutes.
Never happened before, ever.
Shit.
I said to the guy, "Turn right..." I didn't say turn,
I said, "If you turn right and go that way, it's much easier."
A key cultural figure in our time, Melvyn Bragg is widely known
as an inexhaustible broadcaster and champion of the arts.
What's less well known is his private persona,
the story of the working class boy from Cumbria
who crossed the class divide to become an establishment figure.
I used to deliver the newspapers for the man who had this shop,
John Easton.
Wigton is Melvyn's home town.
Hello, how are you?
He's a familiar sight on its streets and still has a house nearby.
And here's one of my best friends, Mickey Saunderson,
and his son's taken over there.
Most of his novels are set in and around the Wigton of his youth.
All right there? Yeah.
Writing in the genre of autobiographical fiction,
the novels sometimes reveal a great deal about the man himself.
The funny thing is I can't look around this town now without seeing
the town I knew when I was a child cos it's so extraordinarily vivid.
Over there where there's a gap, that was stables,
that was all stables, lots of horses, it was a horse town,
one of the biggest horse fairs in the North of England.
The gypsies came, they rode them up and down the streets.
So that's what I see now as much as what I see here.
My working class experience,
it was the experience of millions of people in this country.
The accommodation was really poor.
There were horrible inadequacies.
It was disease-ridden in 1946,
there was an epidemic of TB went through the town.
I got TB, my mother got TB.
People knew it was bad, they knew it was rubbish,
just like they knew a lot of the jobs they were doing were dreadful,
sweating like horses to do horse work.
They knew that.
But out of that they built a terrific society.
The colossal sense of freedom.
We were out on the streets, there was scarcely any traffic
and you played hide and seek inside the town.
It was just absolutely wonderful.
The fizz of it was terrific.
Hello. Hello, how are you?
Good, how are you? Yeah well, how's it going? Good.
Go on, then, let's have a look.
Melvyn uses his own memories of the past as the canvas for his novels.
The strength of the English novel is in its small localities.
Melvyn is very much in that tradition, independent,
sceptical, and yet full of passion,
even sometimes a religious passion for the place from which you come.
With a population of 5,000,
Wigton had 12 churches,
which were central to town life.
I went to church, most people went to church.
You heard the King James Bible,
you heard from the Book Of Common Prayer, you sang the hymns
and you heard these magnificent words, this great language.
It was that kind of unconscious education which is often,
I think, as good as the best education.
It's like the way Thomas Hardy learned about nature.
Thomas Hardy walked to school every day for many years,
through the woods, until he could tell the nature of the trees
from the sound the wind made as it went through them,
the different trees, whether it was oak, whether it was beech, and he could.
It was at this eagle that I did my, er,
first piece of what you could call public speaking.
It was the service of The Nine Carols And Nine Lessons
and the opening lesson had to be read by the youngest choirboy.
I was six. The sentence I most remember was,
"And the serpent beguiled her and she did eat,"
and I hadn't the faintest idea what it meant.
I had to come here though and they put a box on here
so I could see this and see above this and I just was so terrified.
I think that set the pattern.
I mean, before any sort of public speaking since then,
I've always got so nervous that I'm almost shaking,
even now aged 75, 69 years on, so you didn't do me any favours.
Factory workers Stanley Bragg and Ethel Park married in 1938.
Melvyn was born a year later.
I was an only child.
I was born when the war started and obviously they decided
to have no more children and I never asked them why.
The number of questions I did not ask my parents makes me ashamed
ever to call myself an interviewer really.
His father joined the RAF and was away for the next four years,
leaving Melvyn alone with his mother.
My earliest memory, it's to do with my mother.
She's been asked to leave the factory when she got married,
as girls were in those days.
She went out to clean houses.
She'd tuck me on the back of the bike
and I'd go to other people's houses.
I remember being with her very firmly.
Going down the street with my grandma, 100 yards to the Co-op,
could take about an hour.
She just talked to everybody.
She would want to know how they were
or who won at bingo or what was going on or she would be laughing.
She'd just be really interested. She loved people.
They were a really strong community, as if it was extended family.
They really looked after each other.
We knew so many people, which was great.
I was Ethel's son or Stan's boy.
Before anybody got their name round this outlandish name called Melvyn,
which was ridiculous in a town that was full of Johns and Josephs
and Joes and Sams, and what the hell was I called Melvyn for?
Where was that from? My mother went to the pictures in 1938
and saw Melvyn Douglas in a film and thought he was
terrific, so I got stuck with it.
He was a good actor, so we're all right, but still.
The burning of the lips that isn't thirst but something
a thousand times more tantalising, more exalting than thirst.
You're very talkative.
I can't remember much, in fact,
about my father coming back from the war.
The impact it must have had on me being so
entirely supplanted by this man I didn't know at all.
It was no longer my mother and me, it was three of us.
In his autobiographical fiction, the main protagonist, Joe,
is Melvyn's alter ego.
In this passage, he describes Joe's experience
when his father comes home from war.
"Joe was in the bed.
"Sam picked him up rather roughly and the boy woke up.
"'Come on.' Sam's voice was louder than he had intended.
"'Where are we going?' 'Back to your bed.'
"'I want to sleep with Mummy.'
"'This is where you sleep now.'
"Joe sniffed. He didn't like the smell that came off his father.
"'Why can't I sleep with Mummy?'
"'Don't be such a baby.'
"The words were harsh. Joe cringed and lay tactically still.
"'We used to sleep in mud sometimes,' said Sam, by way of reparation."
When Melvyn was eight, his father became the landlord of an old Wigton pub.
That, that middle room, that was my bedroom, it's like a cell.
I lived here from 1948 till I went to university in 1958.
Well, it wasn't like this at all.
It was four rooms down here, not one room.
This on the right was the bar. It was a man's bar.
On the left was the singing room with a piano in the corner.
I was an only child, so I had a room on my own
and I was up there from five o'clock in the afternoon on my own.
By quarter to seven it was empty, most week nights
and then dad would go upstairs and my mother would go upstairs
and I would be left in charge and I'd be what,
11, 12, and you learn to pull a proper pint.
My father taught me, so I liked that.
Even in the 1950s, it was far nearer the late 19th century
than the late 20th century.
I mean, women would walk down the street dressed in black, no teeth, aged 40.
And the Old Testament was in full force.
There was masses of don'ts.
You couldn't play there and that, you couldn't do that there,
you're not supposed to do that and that made people have secrets.
My mother, and for a lot of them, they just monitored it,
who'd be with who, and the secrets they knew,
if I'd have known them, I could have been Dostoevsky.
There was a big secret at the heart of Melvyn's own family.
His mother, born in 1917, was illegitimate,
then a terrible stigma.
And her mother was sent out of the town.
I mean, it's the good old days, God Almighty, er,
and she was fostered by this woman called Mrs Gilbertson
who I thought was my grandmother, so I was brought up
surrounded by people who were not who I thought they were.
People had lied to you, but they lied to you because
it was better than telling you the truth,
which they thought you weren't supposed to say that sort of thing.
So it was quite complicated.
What has that done for you, do you think, in terms of truth and lies?
It's made me the wreck I am today.
Is William in? Yeah, OK.
Melvyn's oldest friend, William Ismay, runs the town cafe.
The date of their first meeting is lost in the mists of time.
Oh, better ask Melvyn that. I can't remember these fine details.
It would be about four or five, wouldn't it?
Similar ages, then to the Scouts.
Of course Melvyn was always a natural achiever
and we sort of became the best group in the Cumberland Westmorland Scout District.
My father started off in this shop here and of course Melvyn was down in the Black-a-Moor.
I used to go down, you know, some nights,
"Are you coming to the pictures tonight, Melvyn? Good film on,"
if it was a cowboy or whatever it was.
He'd look at his rota, "No, no, I can't go tonight,
"I've got to do this tonight," so.
Sounds terrible, William.
Oh, no, no, no, I mean, and the rugby team.
Melvyn wanted to be on that first team and he tried to be,
he got onto it. Once he was on, that was it, you know,
there's no way he'd be off the team.
I used to have arguments with your dad about it. Aye, that's right.
I remember once saying to him when I was in your kitchen,
in the middle of some kind of row,
I was about eight or nine, I said "But, Mr Ismay,
"money doesn't matter." Oh, he'd never let me forget that.
"Money doesn't matter, there," he'd shout as we were walking down the street.
'I've very lucky, I've kept some of my closest friends.'
I've got, what, ten friends or something,
three or four of them are people I knew when I was five years old,
four years old, six years old, back there.
But when you went back, you were conscious that you were privileged.
You two left school when you were 15 or 16, didn't you?
And when I went to be an apprentice bricklayer
and went in the army when, as soon as I was 21,
cos you registered at 18 and as soon as you were 21,
you went for a medical and two weeks later, I was in the army.
It was difficult to talk about what you did...
..because it, everything you said would sound like showing off.
Youth hostelling, we went youth hostelling,
cycling in the lakes, those were good days.
This happy, active childhood was unexpectedly fractured.
When he was 13, Melvyn had a nervous breakdown.
I can't remember how it started, but it started.
I had this experience.
It happened when I was lying in bed
and I'd look in the corner of the room and there'd be a little light,
an absolutely discernible light,
and that light was me
and I didn't know what to do and I had to wait until that thing
came back and rejoined me and then I would be OK,
except by that time I was terrified and...
So that went on, and then it started to accelerate.
I'd be walking up the street to school
and glance in the shop window and see a reflection
and it would slide out again,
or I'd be brushing my teeth and it would slide out again.
I was frightened out of my mind and I didn't know what to do.
I couldn't talk to anybody, anybody.
And everything went on the slide.
I was, I was OK at school, I stopped being OK at school.
I think it was the year after that I got sent down from 3A to 3C.
"It is as if a distinct part of me, is it my soul,
"it is certainly an intelligence,
"leaves my body entirely and completely,
"totally and unmistakably and hovers above it looking back on this
"vacated thing of flesh, bone, blood, breath, water, matter.
Help was to come from an unusual quarter,
a poem by Wordsworth, himself a Cumbrian.
It was when I read The Prelude, and I hit on a patch
where this boy was obviously frightened out of his mind
and he had a breakdown, which he does in The Prelude.
I thought...
"That's me."
And Wordsworth describes it very well about how the formations of the clouds
after he's done something, stealing a boat, in this case,
as a boy, troubled his mind and how the shapes that he saw
began to feel like thoughts, feel like formations of thoughts.
And then the great accident that he was writing about places
I would go bicycling to, so I would go to this place
and go to that place and go to the other place.
Over the next few years, Melvyn found a way of coping
that was to become his defining characteristic.
Then I started to really work...
..and I got lost in that,
and then at the age of about 15 or 16, sex kicked in and I got
a girlfriend, who was wonderful and still is wonderful,
and, er, things began to veer.
But it took me quite a few years to stop fearing it.
"Joe had an intimation at the uttermost limit of his mind
"that with Rachel, the siege would be lifted,
"not only the fallings away
"but other fears that she would heal in yet unknown ways,
"what work and will had only staunched and subdued.
"And yet if his feelings and thoughts could have been summed up
"in a single word as she came to a stop a mere pace in front of him
"that day, it would have been, 'help'.
Joe's girlfriend Rachel is based on Melvyn's first girlfriend,
Joan, who's living back in Wigton.
We had dances in the lunch hour once a week at school.
I don't know what or why, I think probably to teach us to dance
but I can't remember being taught,
and I used to dance with Melvyn.
He was a good dancer.
TEACHER: Quite smart. A little bit shaky here and there.
He was good looking.
Um...
I just liked him.
I never thought of him, you know,
because he was clever or anything like that,
no, he was just my boyfriend.
# Let's rock
# Everybody, let's rock
# Everybody in the whole cell block
# Was dancing to the jailhouse rock... #
When I was about 15,
I used to desperately want an Elvis Presley haircut.
Well, this, we were still in the era of short back and sides
so you had to struggle,
and I used to go in the bathroom and put on my own mixture
of water, brilliantine and Brylcreem to make this thing go quiff.
Now my mother hated that.
I turned round. She looked at me and she said,
"Melvyn, you're pleasant looking and you'll never be anything else."
Just what I needed when I was, when I was,
I was off on a very serious date.
Every time I got that much above myself, it was psssht!
It was like a sort of sharpened scimitar
going just underneath the kneecap.
In 1950s Wigton, most people left school at 15 or 16.
But the new history teacher, Mr James, had other ideas.
Now 94, Mr James still lives in Wigton.
Right from the beginning I started out,
right from the beginning with the assumption that you were going on
to university, as if the world was your...
..I hesitate to use the word oyster, it's such a cliche,
but that the world was there for you to take.
Any one of you would have the ability to do it.
I had to encourage people, on the staff as well as in the school,
that it was worth sending people to Oxford and if you remember,
I took you and five others from your group, down to Oxford.
I took you to London as well and I took you round the House of Commons,
I seem to remember, didn't I?
What I was trying to do was open up the potential,
open up the possibilities that were available for people like you,
and you were one of my most rewarding, because you bit.
The line was out, the fish rose,
you rose and of course the most surprised people, your parents...
Yeah. ..whom I went down and saw quite often. Yeah.
I used to come down to the Black-a-Moor and see your mum and dad.
Your dad was very good. He was.
He was very good indeed. He never said a thing about it, you see.
I'm, I'm discovering my life sitting in this...
I talked to your dad, I talked to your dad. He never said a word.
You know I kept in touch.
I've been brought up by people who never told me anything.
You didn't tell me you were a Spitfire pilot,
my father didn't say you'd come and talked about going to university.
But also for one reason or another, I became very,
I became addicted to doing an enormous amount of work.
Well, that is the other point we've not mentioned yet.
That is that the secret of your success,
actually, was your capacity to work.
You worked extremely hard.
Melvyn began to excel at school and became head boy.
Eventually you got a 90, didn't you?
I got 90 and a 95 in the A-level.
You did. We were talking about going up Helvellyn, do you remember that?
I remember going up Helvellyn, you taking me up Helvellyn
for a treat with a sandwich and an apple.
He was a bit of a perfectionist, yes. I remember you, when we got to
the top of Helvellyn and you turned to me and you said to me,
"You know, I can't help wondering."
I said, "What are you wondering?"
You said, "What happened to the other five?"
Oh, dear! We're not putting that out.
Melvyn was one of a growing wave of grammar school
boys and girls going to Oxford and Cambridge.
And in 1958, the working class boy with the broad Cumbrian accent
travelled south to take up his scholarship at Wadham College.
Do you think there's any reason for opening the doors of Oxford
and Cambridge to more grammar school boys that at present come in?
They are getting in more and more now.
I mean, three years ago there were less...
I'm sure there were less percentage of grammar school people coming than there are now.
Do you, as a public school boy, welcome that?
Er...
No, I suppose I don't, really.
Well, I was very broad Cumbrian, but I wasn't aware of that
and I wasn't bothered by it.
I loved the story of Joan Bakewell going into the lavatory one afternoon
and saying, "I can't talk like... I can't talk Lancashire any more,
"I've got to talk like them," and coming out talking like them.
That's great and I'm sure it's true.
I think she's terrific, so that was...
I didn't do that, it kind of rubbed away.
We were the scholarship kids from the north
who made it to Oxbridge
and that was a great aspirational aspect of our generation.
Our parents wanted us to get on in the world
so we worked and got scholarships
and we went to study in golden places
which were not known if you lived in the north.
We really sank into what they were about, which in those days
was entirely about love of learning for its own sake,
not as a vocation, not to get you a better job or a higher pay,
but because you loved knowledge for its own sake,
and that's characteristic of Melvyn.
He loves knowledge for its own sake.
Melvyn was still with his first girlfriend
and in the vacation he went to see her father on his farm.
My father was milking and Melvyn went into the byre
where they milk the cows to ask if we could get engaged.
I suppose I must have been about 19 and my father said,
"I'll think it over when I'm milking."
On reflection that was a bad thing to do because my father
didn't like being interrupted when he was milking the cows,
and he came back and said "No, she's too young, wait till she's 21."
Keen to spread her own wings, Joan had moved to London,
near enough to Oxford to continue their relationship.
I went to Oxford to see him.
I felt a bit like a fish out of water maybe, but that's...
..he had these very intellectual friends
and I certainly didn't feel as though I could keep up
or contribute to their conversation.
We kept going for a couple of years
and then it was just too much of a strain,
distance and growing away and,
and then she, she... she grew away, she pushed off.
I do remember one thing in particular.
He suggested I would maybe have to go to cookery classes
for when we gave dinner parties, and I thought, "Dinner parties?"
"What happened to suppertime?"
Which is what we call the evening meal here.
But I think probably that, and I think I got cold feet...
..and called it off.
"In the summer vacation, Joe came back home
"for as short a time as he could.
"Wigton belonged to the time of Rachel,
"which was gone, and forever.
"How could he ever accept and absorb that?
"And Rachel still came there and had to be avoided.
"Avoiding Rachel was the root of those days.
"It belonged to a time so near he could reach out
"in his memory just a finger length and touch it,
"like rubbing his hand on a sandstone wall.
I started writing when I was 19,
started writing short stories and never told anybody, obviously
never published them. I thought, "Well, I want to write
"and I'm going to make a living,
"and I can't make a living out of writing."
So I went to the careers opportunity office in Oxford
and I didn't know what I wanted to do so I filled in forms
for Unilever, for Blythe iron and steel works,
for anything, I just wanted a job so I could have a living and write.
And then he said, "There's this BBC stuff,
"why don't you sign some of those?
"A lot of you young men want to try this,"
so I filled in the forms for the BBC stuff.
The BBC awarded just three traineeships that year,
one of them to Melvyn.
By now Melvyn had fallen in love with Lisa, a French Viscountess.
She was five years older and studying painting in Oxford.
"'Why do I want to marry you?' he said eventually.
"'Because you made so little fuss about making love,
"'because you're always here, now, when I call,
"'because you're enigmatic and I don't know you but
"'there's something I know I can do for you, because I feel set
"'and grounded and I can see a wonderful life with you,
"'a life which will take me to
"'where I'd never have dreamed of going without you.'
But he said none of that.
"'I want to marry you,' he said, that's it.
In 1961 they married and moved to London.
We're going ahead in ten seconds, ten from now.
From Wigton to London, via Oxford,
Melvyn took up his first placement at the BBC in radio,
then considered the senior service.
From the moment I went into the BBC, I thought two things.
They'll both seem immodest but, you know, what's the point if you're not trying to tell the truth?
I thought, "I can do this, I can make programmes,
"I can do this,"
and I also thought, "I'm not going to let this go."
"If this is the way to earn a living,
"wow, I'm going to hold on to it."
So I loved that and I liked doing radio programmes,
and then you're supposed to go to television and I didn't want to go.
I had seen one Monitor programme.
Monitor was the BBC's first television arts programme,
edited and presented by Huw Wheldon.
Good evening. The return of Monitor.
He was to be an immense influence on a generation of broadcasters,
Melvyn included.
Do you regard yourself as a writer who, as well as writing novels
and essays and other works, also writes poetry,
or primarily as a poet?
I'd seen a study of Robert Graves and I was stunned.
That's him writing.
And he was writing "the butterfly, a cabbage-white,"
and then he corrected it and I was completely stunned.
"Even the aerobatic swift Has not his flying-crooked gift."
That's about me, not about the butterfly.
So I said, I'll go to television if I can work on Monitor,
and they said, "Huw Wheldon doesn't like trainees."
But I went to see Huw
and he tilted his chair back and his feet, both feet on the desk
and then he said,
well, the laconic... HE SIGHS
"So why do you want to come to Monitor?"
And I said, "I don't."
And he nearly fell off the desk laughing.
I said, "I've got to do it because I've got to finish this course.
"I'd just rather stay in radio.
"I've seen one of your programmes and I thought it was really good,
"but I'm having a very good time in the radio and I'd like
"to stay there, but I've got to do some television, so there you are."
He hired me on the spot.
Comparisons are odious but inevitable.
Background rumble and the woodwind section seems strangely...
Soon after Melvyn's arrival at Monitor,
Humphrey Burton took over as editor.
Those days back in the '60s, it really was a golden age.
Television was expanding.
Each year, many more millions actually bought licences.
People were still, not everybody had television
when Melvyn came into Lime Grove.
He was full of energy. He was full of enthusiasm
and he always wanted more than he could have.
Even when he was just 23, 24, he was pushy.
He wanted to have his projects given full attention.
Experiment was still OK.
Eric Weldon coined the phrase, "you have the right to fail."
But Melvyn came out tops.
He was one of the leaders of the arts in BBC television.
It was an exciting time
and a wealth of innovative programmes all came from one place,
Lime Grove Studios in West London.
This is BBC television.
# That was the week that was, it's over, let it go... #
We were watching each other's programmes
and thrilled with each other's programmes
and we were changing things. I mean, look at That Was The Week.
It was getting 16 million people at 10.30 on a Saturday night.
A letter in the Guardian this week,
Sir, the trouble with the Liberal Party is that it contains
too many chartered accountants and too few farm labourers.
Increased opportunities came with the launch of a second BBC television channel.
Two new BBC Two transmitters opened today so we begin by welcoming
everyone who hasn't been with us before to Late Night Line-Up.
Melvyn is born of a television age, which was in its youth
when he began, and has mellowed with it,
and in so doing he has shaped it.
"London began to draw me in, a willing victim,
"tempting, enthralling, poisoning, transforming.
"I was half in bondage to it and half the untutored Goth,
"raiding Rome in lust for its loot.
"I couldn't wait to get at the city and work was a carnival."
Melvyn found himself playing the role of an MC at a strip club
for the controversial director Ken Russell.
Well, ladies and gentlemen...
It was the beginning of an important collaboration.
He would go on to write the screenplay for several of Russell's films.
By now Melvyn was narrating his own films
and, in this one, is clearly making his best efforts
to sound as BBC as possible.
'David Mercer has just bought this house in North London.
'He's 38 and has made his living entirely from writing
'for the past six years.'
Melvyn's accent...
personally, I couldn't give a toss.
I think it was a very pleasant accent
and I don't think he lost any ground from
being a north... er, a Cumberland boy and being proud of it.
'It was his stage play, Ride A Cock Horse with Peter O'Toole
'a year or so ago which brought him recognition
'as a dramatist of the theatre.'
We were the grammar school generation and Britain began to be
populated in the '60s,
'70s and '80s by that predominantly working class
generation, the beneficiaries of the Attlee government,
and it did fundamentally change the power structures of Britain,
so Melvyn, I think, was part of that movement and that drive.
This is one of his first appearances as a presenter,
talking about an author to whom he himself would one day be compared.
Now, though Sons and Lovers is a novel,
it didn't come out of thin air.
Though there is part of any work of fiction
which does come out of the blue,
that imagined force that gives it life,
but a great deal has to do with the real life of the writer.
Although he was working full-time at the BBC, Melvyn was still
managing to write and had completed, but not yet published, three novels.
What I used to do is to get up at about five in the morning
and write for two or three hours,
and then go through to catch the Tube and then do another hour
or two in the evening.
When I'm sitting there writing, I'm absolutely content.
In 1965, Melvyn's first novel was published.
It was acclaimed as the debut of a distinctive and talented new writer.
He decided to abandon his successful BBC career to write full-time.
I'd just retired from the BBC, taken out my pension, £262 and ten shillings,
my entire pension fund,
set up as a writer and got broke within about three months.
Hollywood came calling and he began writing film scripts.
MUSIC: Jesus Christ Superstar
In films, I got to write the script and then that would be
used as the first brick in building a house that you could not
recognise when it was finished, and other bricks above that,
but other screenplays, writers, having a go at it and changing it,
sometimes changing it radically, so, so there was no satisfaction in it.
You didn't control it and you weren't working with people
who were sympathetic to go in the same direction.
That didn't work for me and I didn't work for them either,
so it was two negatives, pow.
By 1971, Melvyn had separated from his wife, Lisa,
with whom he'd had a daughter.
Lisa, who had a history of depression,
tragically committed suicide.
It was an event that cast a long shadow over Melvyn's life,
and it would be 40 years before he felt able to write about it.
Their daughter, Marie-Elsa, was six when her mother died.
She hasn't spoken about it publically until now.
Oh, I'll never forget when he told me what happened, I mean,
um, so obviously...
um, a very big part of my life, um...
He did tell me in a church.
He took me to a church.
My mother was deep in, er, Jungian analysis
but her analyst committed suicide, six months before she did.
There were just catastrophes that happened along the way and
nobody knew, she didn't tell anyone because she couldn't or, I don't
know why, so what seems to happen is that everybody feels guilty.
Until this day, some of her greatest friends still love her
as if she was around yesterday and they're still really, really
upset and they're still wondering if they could have done anything.
After my mum died, er, for a good period, he would take me
to work with him a lot, especially if he worked weekends,
so I got to sit inside editing suites and go and check the sets
with him or he'd have a big group of people debating the next project or
he'd be going for a walk and needing to decide between different titles.
It was very hard work. He worked really hard.
"It was not so much that he put everything into his work,
"it was that he looked at the work to put everything into him.
"Labour was his school, his opportunity, the stuff of his
"imagination and increasingly the object to which his senses reached.
"He attacked it and wanted his blows returned to go harder,
"daring it to give him limits."
In 1973, Melvyn married writer and film maker Cate Haste,
with whom he would go on to have two more children.
I thought he was very good-looking, actually, um,
but also he was, full of, um, well, he was exploring new areas
really, there was this sort of bubbling energy
but in different areas, almost exploring different facets of his personality,
and I've always felt writing was actually the most important thing.
He was publishing novel after novel, but it didn't pay enough,
and the need to earn a living drove Melvyn back into television.
# Paperback writer... #
By the mid-'70s, Melvyn had returned to the BBC with a new series
that he'd created.
And I really did think, I'll copy a panel game
so if anybody turns on, it looks like a panel game -
it's got dah, dah, dah, three people there,
chairman there, it's got a little quiz in the middle,
except on the panel will be Gore Vidal,
Jonathan Miller, Martin Amis, Antonia Fraser, they'll be the panel.
Hello, this is the programme about paperbacks out this week, coming
into the shops from today and to talk about them tonight I'm joined
by Joan Bakewell, journalist and of course television broadcaster.
Hello.
Clive James, poet, songwriter and television critic. Hello.
And Jonathan Miller, doctor, writer and a director in theatre and television. Hello.
But why did you choose to write about Cromwell?
Well, I, I must be honest
and say I wanted to write somebody as far away as Mary Queen of Scots
as I possibly could find and I think that person must be Oliver Cromwell.
His popularity was growing.
His casual style was radical and refreshing
and he wasn't afraid to take on famous establishment figures.
..of the leftist, for example.
You're supposed to have all these outrageous opinions and then...
I never... They never appear in print, except in your words.
I know what you're trying to do.
You're trying to make me out as a, as some er, crypto-National Front...
It isn't right, you know.
You accused me of calling you a, a crypto-National Front,
in other words, of calling you a fascist. I hadn't said...
Colonel. Just a second. Colonel was under the bed.
I hadn't said any such thing, but you got a lot of fun out of it.
That's what you mean. What... That's what you mean.
You can't get, you can't say that, you can't tell me what I mean.
Across the river, on the South Bank of the Thames, an offer was brewing.
London Weekend Television wanted to revamp their arts programming.
We set out to, um, look for a presenter for that programme
and actually, er, there was a list of one.
We never looked beyond Melvyn.
He had a fresh, contemporary feel to him, brisk, no-nonsense.
At that time you would say this, this may seem, er,
a little bit of a caricature but the, kind of the arts were
owned by the public school classes.
That's not a completely fair statement, but here was somebody
who was bright, obviously
of working class origin, unfussy, unprissy and, er, exactly the fit
for the programme that we wanted to make, and we approached Melvyn.
He wanted to be the editor as well as the presenter and er,
the deal was done and the rest was history.
And I had got, already worked out that there, the thing that was missing was the
join in my life between the culture I'd been brought up in,
which was comedy on radio, going to the movies,
er, later watching television, comedians, pop singers, all that
and the things that I'd got used to
in London, opera, ballet, concerts, the high-brow writers and so forth.
I thought these are the same, they're in the same business,
they're like that.
Therefore a very good composer of popular music is to be taken
just as seriously as a good composer of classical music.
Melvyn was particularly good, wasn't he?
I mean, he nailed his colours to the mast from the beginning
when he got Andrew Lloyd Webber to jazz up the Paganini variation.
# Dum-dum dum-dum dum-dum... #
MUSIC: South Bank Show Theme
This was the start of The South Bank Show.
THEME CONTINUES
Hello. This is a new show.
We're here every Saturday night for the next six months
and I'm going to try and make programmes which will include
both the latest and the best in the arts of our times.
I got the Berlin Philharmonic lined up, we'd worked there.
I'd got the Royal Shakespeare lined up, we'd done some work there,
and one or two other things like that lined up,
but I really fought to get McCartney.
You're just plonking along on a chord and you decide to
sort of, for some reason, you decide to reach out and see what's there.
See what you can pull down.
And you can do it any time, you know, you can just, you know...
I mean, this will probably be chronic,
but you can just, you know...
# Melvyn Bragg was in the parlour
# And he said that he was going to have some tea... #
I mean, you know, that's not very good, but you could, you could work on that.
I think it was the Sunday Telegraph that said that we applaud ITV
doing an arts programme,
but we draw the line in the arts at that Lennon-McCartney.
When they talk about bringing dreams in...
The South Bank Show started life
as a multi-subject magazine programme,
but it wasn't getting an audience.
The whole struggle was against monumentalism, I mean,
we should be doing our own.
We were getting murdered, every which way, we were getting murdered.
People will just walk by it and not think.
Melvyn had to think fast, and mid-run,
he abandoned the magazine format
and devoted each programme to a single artist.
I just bet the ranch on it and I thought, well, they're going
to fire me so I'm going to do Ingmar Bergman
because he's my hero, he's never done anything on British Television.
Take one. So we got Bergman.
Ha! Right! Good.
We got Pinter. His first interview in many years, and David Hockney.
We did a big film with David and it went phew,
it took about two weeks to turn the entire thing around
and then we won the Prix Italia. I think it was ITV's first Prix Italia
and then we won it again the next season and then we won it again the next season for the arts.
So once we got into the swing of it, it was OK.
It was very hairy at the start.
It was seriously, sleepless nights and um,
it was a, a bit nerve-racking.
Surprising what winning a couple of prizes does for you, though.
This was one of Melvyn's most memorable
South Bank Shows, about the painter Francis Bacon.
Well, how long have you worked here?
Well, I've been here for years, about 23 years or more.
Their shared interests extended beyond the arts.
Yes, I think Francis will follow me to my grave really.
These, these are my few abstract pictures here and er,
because I used the walls and things just to test the colours out on them. Yeah.
And we turn up at his house, this dump in Reeves Mews, which was,
um, it's now, they transported the whole dump to Dublin as a museum.
He'd lined up champagne bottles.
We had a couple of glasses of champagne
and I felt it was really good - what did I stop drinking for?
It didn't have the slightest effect on me whatsoever.
How right you are. Whatever, whatever it is.
And everything else is a falling away.
Whatever it is. Everything else...
Is a falling away. Is a falling away. That's right.
Then we went up to the place where we always had a big lunch
so we had a big lunch and a lot of red wine and we kept drinking
and er, well, we both got very drunk.
I say "why should you?" but I want to be able to re-make
in another medium, the reality of, of an image that, that,
that excites me.
Cheerio. Cheerio, Francis.
And I saw the rushes a couple of mornings later and I rang up
and said, Francis, there's a, when we done that thing,
in the studio it was fine, and, and in the restaurant towards the
end, you're drunk and I'm drunk, er, but I think there's something in it.
I think, I think it's, it shows you as you are really
a lot of the time, not drunk but you're saying things, you said well,
I've got egg all over my face but, I don't mind, do you mind if I show...
"Do what you want with it, darling, do what you want with it."
You're not interested in fantasy, are you?
No, not in the least. Nor am I, not in the slightest.
I'm not interested in things of fantasy. I'm interested in reality.
What's reality? Reality is what exists.
For me, the South Bank Show was my route to culture,
my only route to culture,
at the age of sort of 14, 15, growing up in Margate,
it was like my, you know, it's
like how I got involved in the world that was actually in my head.
Our visual arts presenter, Tracey Emin.
When I was a child about 10 years old,
when most of the kids were outside playing, I must confess I would
sit in front of the mirror and imagine that I was being interviewed
by Melvyn Bragg, so this is the closest I will probably ever get.
I suppose some teenage girls would have other idols
and fantasise about other people, but mine was Melvyn.
MUSIC: Fame by David Bowie
Hello, Tracey, very nice to see you. Cheers.
There are those who have said that celebrity
gets in the way of being serious.
That is true, like a museum's not as likely to buy my work as they would
do if it was someone else because of the celebrity thing, because of
the, the glamour thing but there are a lot of sort of like as I've said,
sort of grumbly old men out there that would never take me seriously.
My dad has a continual delight about people
he meets or new ideas or, you know, an artist.
He, he has a... it slightly dazzles him still.
Where is the fellow? I fear to come.
Go to, go to.
Come hither, sir. Good Majesty.
The South Bank Show has run for almost 800 episodes.
It's a remarkable chronicle of many of the world's most talented
artists, musicians, writers and actors.
We use that word, isn't he a polymath... I know that he reads up
about things and he's obviously got an incredibly retentive memory
cos he remembers everything but he, he knows, he knows the business,
so you feel safe and you know that in his hands it will be all right.
There you go. I would like to be like Newton Blick who, you know,
died in the dressing room after a performance,
except that I love my family so much that I'd prefer to do it here.
You get some people who interview you, who have questions and ask the
questions, but Melvyn, you feel that it's, that the interview is organic.
Melvyn's most affecting interview was with Dennis Potter in 1994.
At the height of his fame as a TV dramatist,
Potter was dying of cancer.
I think mine is with the ashtray.
He came in an ambulance with morphine.
Champagne he wanted and fags.
There's no treatment possible, it's just blanking out pain with
morphine so it's finding the balance between the amount of pain
that allows you to work and the amount that you need to blank out,
you know... Yeah.
Cos you know, if you blank it out totally, you can't work.
What was the biggest triumph, of course, was, was seeing him
so much himself, easy, open, relaxed.
Er, er, full of joy in some way.
Below my window in Ross, when I'm working in Ross,
is a plum tree, er, it looks like apple blossom, it's white and
looking at it, instead of saying, "Oh, that's nice blossom," you know,
now the, last week, looking at it, through the window when I'm writing,
it is the whitest, frothiest, blossom-est blossom that there
ever could be, you know, and things are both more trivial than they
ever were and more important than they ever were and the difference
between the trivial and the important doesn't seem to matter.
But the now-ness of everything is absolutely wondrous.
Um, can I break off for a second? I need a swig of that,
there's liquid morphine in that thing.
And there was one terrible minute when he, he stopped
and I thought, he's stopped and he reached,
and he got his morphine bottle out and he couldn't open it.
Anyway, we went on for about 74 minutes.
This is not agitation about Brimstone and Treacle, by the way.
Do you want another drink?
I wouldn't mind, yeah.
Somebody's last testament
was in this way not in any reality show, celebrity show crap,
it was a real person giving his last interview inside the medium
that had made him the person he was.
I need that thing again. I'm sorry, I'm...
Thank you very much, Dennis, thanks.
No, thank you, you made it easy, Melvyn, but, but then you always do.
Well, I felt OK, you see. At certain points I felt I was flying with it.
Yeah, you were.
And, so I'm, I'm grateful for the chance, you know, this is my chance.
When we'd finished and I went out on to the... Thames side
and of course it was the pathetic fallacy, I mean, it was pouring down,
um, and er, I was just very shaken up and the whole studio was.
Thanks very much, folks. Thank you.
Do you want to come in the Green Room?
It was very difficult to do but he reached a height of um,
the height of his sensitivity in that interview,
which enabled Potter to say things which were extraordinary
and poetic and I think it takes a very good interviewer to do that.
Melvyn was now a prolific author,
Controller of Arts at LWT, ubiquitous on our television screens
and presenting Radio 4's Start the Week,
certainly famous enough to be lampooned.
And now like many international artists, Mick Jagger
lives in a particularly comfortable house in a sunny climate.
Spitting Image, we followed it at South Bank Show.
They had good exit lines.
There was one line where, er, one of them said, er, it was me, at the
end of that, me, my puppet at the end of, er, Spitting Image saying,
and now The South Bank Show. Please do not forget to turn off your sets.
Hello, tonight on the South Bank Show I'll be saying a few words
at the beginning to introduce a piece of film and then going down the pub.
If you want me, I'll be down The Coach and Horses.
Melvyn seemed to me to be at the centre of English literary life.
I met Melvyn first at a grand literary do
and he came bowling over to me, looking very handsome...
and pointed his finger at me and went, "you."
I got quite frightened, because I'd published two novels -
in the first, Melvyn had been an object of literary envy
in the novel, um, and in the second I'd made fun of his name
and put his name in a list of preposterous names.
He saw my fright and he threw his head back, showed me that fine
set of choppers he has, and just laughed and laughed and laughed.
We were both Northern, working class grammar school boys.
We shared a sense which might sound strange to you and it certainly
sounded strange to a person sitting at the next table when Melvyn and
I started to discuss this because this person came up to me afterwards
and said, what does he mean then, when he said he feels an outsider?
How can you be an outsider if you're Melvyn Bragg?
But there's the interesting thing,
and that was the thing that we shared, we both felt that we
were outside, somewhere or other, outside the culture.
How Melvyn could feel outside the culture,
when for many people and indeed for me, he WAS the culture, is hard
to explain, but it might be that you were marked forever if you are,
if you haven't been, in this country
if you haven't been to a public school,
and you're not from the south and you aren't middle class.
Howard said, um, he needs some advice,
I, this incorporated best man is supposed to give some advice.
Melvyn was best man at my wedding ten years ago.
He wanted it to be poetic, really poetic.
And ended his speech with a song.
He sang to us as Al Jolson.
# When April showers do come your way... #
APPLAUSE
# They, they bring the flowers home
# That bloom in May... #
People could not believe their eyes.
They just could not believe that there was Melvyn Bragg being
Al Jolson, but I have seen Melvyn Bragg at some of his parties
being Pavarotti, singing as Elvis Presley.
# ..daffodils... #
The side of him one doesn't know about, but you see,
that's actually perfect, Melvyn doing Pavarotti as
Elvis Presley quintessentialises the provider of culture in, in our time,
that he should be Elvis Presley and Pavarotti at the same time.
CHEERING AND APPLAUSE
ELECTRIC GUITAR SOLO
I was a, er, an avid viewer of The South Bank Show
because it seemed that for, for the first time there was a show
that was cultural that, that I actually enjoyed.
I remember the Eric Clapton one,
you kind of got to understand some of the craft behind the art
and that was, you know, to those who had ever taken up a guitar
and held it in their hands, that was a fascinating programme.
Melvyn was made a life peer by Tony Blair in 1998
and became Lord Bragg of Wigton.
Melvyn has always been the same position in the Labour Party.
He is a progressive, he is a radical but he wants Labour governments
so that combination of radicalism and realism, is, is a sort of
defining trait of Melvyn and people, and people like him and makes him
really rather more consistent than the rest of us who went through
various student versions of Labour, you know, early, um, sort of left
and then moved probably more centre, centre-wards and then he has always
stayed in exactly the same place and stood for exactly the same things.
"'All wrong' was how Seth saw the world, for it seemed to him
"all wrong that men should slave while others lorded it.
"All wrong that the sick should suffer while the rich wore pearls.
"All wrong that there should be hovels for some
"and palaces for others.
"All wrong that a man should be shut out from learning at the very
"time he might make sense of books.
"All wrong."
Melvyn has been a tireless advocate of arts and education in The Lords.
Both are subjects he feels passionate about,
as even the slightest push on the button reveals.
Some private schools are rubbish, some are very good.
I don't think Eton's all that good.
If you take our Prime Minister as an example.
Once when on the Letterman show he was asked what, what Magna Carta
was and do you know what he said, he said "You've got me there."
This was a guy who had been told he was brilliant at Eton,
he told Letterman, you've got me there.
He must have done something, he could have said big chart,
couldn't he, Magna, oh Carta, oh Big Charter and he didn't know that.
When Dad was made a Lord,
Grandma and I were sitting up at the balcony and he came in,
in this long red robe with a white ruffle and I remember
she sat there and she just went, "Imagine that, our Melvyn, royalty."
I said, "No, Grandma, he's a Lord." She said, "Oh."
I, Melvyn Lord Bragg, do solemnly, sincerely...
My mother was pleased but there's no doubt whatsoever that she'd
have much preferred if I'd stayed in Wigton, married my girlfriend, had
three children, lived two streets away and led that sort of life.
That would have been much better for me, for her, everybody.
Who knows, she might have been right.
After the death of his father in the late 1990s,
Melvyn started work on what was to become an acclaimed
series of novels, the Cumbrian trilogy.
I wanted to write about him
but I wanted to write it as fiction because I didn't know
enough about him, I didn't want to intrude on him.
The first book, The Soldier's Return,
is a fictionalised account of his father
settling back into life at home in Cumbria,
after a long absence at war.
My favourite one was The Soldier's Return,
which I think's a marvellous novel
which reminded me in many ways of Sons and Lovers.
It's in that tradition, it's about that kind of Northern sensitive
boy, um, but it's not just about a Northern sen...
it's about Northern sensitivities and where they come from and attachment to, to mothers.
Fantastic about the boy and the mother, that novel,
wonderful about the boy in the novel, marvellous scenes
about him learning to dance with the mother before the father comes
back and then the father coming back and all that confusion within
the father coming back to a family world that he doesn't recognise.
But if you misremember, as I do in my autobiographical...
you get it wrong, you're not trying to get it wrong, you,
then it sets you off onto a completely different course.
The lines switch and you're going somewhere else
and you don't know where you're going. You know it's still in that area,
you're supposed to be based on this chap here
but it's getting further and further and further and further away.
Crossing The Lines is the third book in the Cumbrian Trilogy.
It follows his character Joe's relationship with his first girlfriend.
I remember bumping into one lady in Wigton.
She was lovely and "Joan," she said, "how nice to have a book
"written about you," and I said, "Oh, I don't know about that.
She said, "Do you know, I'd love somebody to write a book about me."
There was a lot of reporters and things around,
trying to find out who "Rachel" was in that book and I must admit, I was
worried stiff that they would find out and come here and start prying.
I didn't want that at all.
But apart from that, no, it... I wasn't worried about it.
Some of it wasn't true, but most of it was, yes, yeah.
He told me that he'd put me into this,
this tale of the Maid of Buttermere and I thought, oh, I'll be a
major character, I'll walk in about chapter two and go right through.
In a 30-chapter book, I appear in chapter 29
and I'm the jailer of Carlisle Prison.
Mr Campbell, a jailer of Carlisle Prison
and the prisoners are all Melvyn's friends, named Brian Henderson
and David Pearson and Eric Hetherington, people like that.
They're all rogues and been put away in jail, you know.
Quite a little touch of local humour in that.
In Wigton, local artisan and friend Brian Campbell worked with
Melvyn to create three stained glass windows
for St Mary's Church, the scene of so many Bragg family memories.
That's the bit that everybody likes best.
That bit here. With the lights on in the houses and the church.
Yeah. And the, the sheep in the field.
I wanted to bring Wigton into the church
because my argument was that the church was the people.
This was a very good building, but the church is really the congregation.
I wanted where you can see out into the town
and the town can see into the church.
Melvyn and Brian are relatively new friends,
of only 40 years' standing.
A chance conversation when we first met,
my painting had almost dried up.
I'd almost given over working.
I was very discouraged and you talked to me about that.
You won't remember this, I'm sure but you talked to me
about that painting and said,
why don't you concentrate on your own locale, why don't you stick with
what you know in Wigton and district and the Northern Fells and the Solway Plain?
The best bit of advice I ever had, because I kind of picked up
and went on from there and I owe you a great deal for that, actually.
And I've had to wait this long for you to tell me that.
Absolutely, yeah, yeah, but it was worth waiting for, wasn't it?
Melvyn's recent novel, Grace and Mary,
is based on his mother's illegitimacy.
I started to write it before she died.
She was then in her 90s and Alzheimer's was raging,
she was getting more and more frail, so I just started making notes.
Right, we'll do the Midnight Tango now.
She loved dancing, she loved singing,
she loved being with people.
This is a snatch from Grace and Mary and it's
when the man is going back in time with his mother
and remembering when he was a boy and they went to dances.
"For Mary, the glory was the communion of the two circles
"and its imitative gentle parody of distant unattainable
"privilege taken over here by ordinary people
"and made into their own with a smile at the ease of it.
"Just ordinary people getting on with their lives
"and making the best of not giving in.
"And then, Fred Ingram was on the trumpet,
"wet his lips and Tommy Jackson hit the drums and all of them,
"the Studden boys and Queenie, Kettler
"and other people from the town, out for an evening celebration,
"Grace and Mary and himself, all of them..."
I can't read this, I never can.
So I'm sorry about that.
For the past 50 years,
Melvyn has juggled his careers as writer and broadcaster.
I really love doing both of them.
If I didn't, I don't know what I would do.
I think if you do something you like,
it gives you energy to do the next thing.
It's a form of sort of vitalism I know,
but it's, it's true, people who do jobs they hate must be worn out
and the energy left over to do anything else must be very difficult
but I love doing these television stuff and the radio stuff.
I can't think of anything better to do at nine o'clock
on a Thursday morning than to talk to people, you know.
I love doing it, I really genuinely do.
Melvyn doesn't need literary prizes, but you know, every writer
likes to, likes to be, likes the laurels and I think Melvyn
as a novelist has not had all the laurels he should have, um, out
of the snobbishness of the culture because he's not sufficiently,
it's felt, a priest of literature, dedicated to literature only.
It's because he does the other stuff, the media stuff
and we should be better than that.
Incredibly, the random selection is '70s heart-throb Melvyn Bragg.
LAUGHTER
Hello.
Lord Bragg of Wigton. Hello.
How are you? I'm Ashwin Kumar.
Very pleased to meet you. Of Wembley.
My settled view on this is that if the public persona, er,
takes precedence over the writerly persona,
it's bad news for the writer.
Melvyn, would you like to try Melvyn Bragg?
Yeah, it goes something like this. That's fine, thank you.
A lot of a novelist's job is eavesdropping, it really is.
Now if you have a very, very large scale public persona you're
present in the media a lot, er, it's very difficult to do that
eavesdropping, er, because you are part of the noise of the culture,
so it's almost like trying to carry a tune when you're shouting.
You know, the literary muse is a harsh muse,
she doesn't really like that, she wants you to, to, to stick with her.
Fucking Regent's Park, it broke down at the lights.
While he may not have an exclusive relationship
with his literary muse, Melvyn's passions do remain constant.
Radio 4's In Our Time is now in its 18th year.
And you've got 20 minutes' work to do in, in five minutes.
It started because I got fired from Start the Week,
when I was put in the Lords and the BBC Director General
at the time thought this impeded my impartiality
and therefore I should leave Start the Week immediately and offered me
what they cheerfully called The Death Slot on a Thursday morning.
I thought, well, I'm going
to do what I want to do now, cos I've been fired and it didn't hurt.
Um, I'm going to do one subject, I'm not going to have anyone plug
any book, I'm not going to refer to a book, even when I introduce them.
I'm going to have three people that are top experts and they're going
to be, all going to be academics and that's that and we're going
to go right across the field from astrophysics to Chinese history.
All the things that I want to learn about, I'm going to learn about on this programme.
That's what Eddington's talking about.
The idea that somebody can sit down with three academic
specialists in a subject area and talk about it for 45 minutes
and in the process be completely enthralling,
teach you something you didn't know, engage you with a subject and
leave you wanting more, almost every week, on the nail, is phenomenal.
Now, since I became an aficionado of In Our Time,
it has swelled like some awful bubo or carbuncle in my psyche
to occupy quite a large part of my consciousness,
so um, mostly because I tend to fall asleep with Melvyn every
night, every night, not just one or two nights a week, but every night.
Some episodes of In Our Time I've heard 10 or 15 times.
In Our Time was produced by Tom Morris.
Thanks for getting me through that.
I was hanging on by lots of fingernails there.
Did you think you said most of what you wanted to say?
Despite Melvyn's many successes and achievements, his life has been
overshadowed by the suicide of his first wife, Lisa, in 1971.
In truth, that time has tormented him, all, all my life, all,
since, since my mum died.
It's sort of like a, a tumour.
You can't get at it, um, and you can't dissolve it.
You wish you could find some sort of psychic acid and you could drill
a little hole there and pour it in and shh, but that won't happen.
Melvyn hoped the remedy might be to write Remember Me,
published in 2008.
I seem to remember at the beginning, it started with him writing,
kind of almost like letters to me, um...
Was just the amount of love.
You know, he, he, he, he's a very
complex person, but he really does love.
And he really has loved me.
I knew I couldn't write anything else if I didn't write that.
As I've written these three straight autobiographical novels,
got this man to Oxford, and then the next stage was he married,
which I did when I was 21,
married this extraordinary woman, an intellectual scientist,
a painter, er, ended in her taking her own life and the way
I've coped is the way I coped when I was 14 or 15.
It had just been work, you know, you work and you work and you work
and if you like your work it's, it's, it's wonderful,
it's another country.
And yes, you block it and by writing that book
I just drove a stake through it, and it erupted, and so I was
covered in this stuff while I was writing the book, which was a sort
of flailed by images and regrets and recollections and that...
it didn't do anything that people say that sort of thing's supposed to do.
It's supposed to be therapy. It was not.
It made things far, far worse.
It stirred the whole thing up again and has been stirred up ever since
and I'd learned to live alongside it.
It that sense, I profoundly wish I hadn't written it.
I think I'd be more contented,
er, than I am now, by a long way.
"The heart of it is shame.
"That's what he wanted to tell his daughter,
"but how could he convey it without running into an excess of
"self-reproach or falling into the arms of self-pity?
"He saw the truth of it when the depression came back.
"Shame reappeared as clearly as the mark of Cain.
"The shame had poisoned him but it was a poison he deserved,
"and his system learned to live with it, though at a price."
I don't want any sympathy. I really don't want any sympathy.
I don't deserve it, I don't need it
and I think I've done very well without it, thank you very much.
Well, I've done well enough.
Er, but the fact is that I can't get over it.
I think forgiving yourself is one of the most difficult things to
really face the, face the music and come through it and that's
what I felt he had the courage to try and do with Remember Me.
He was willing to really face it with a full heart
and come through it and that's brave, that's very brave.
Right, er, our publishing plans for...
Fifty years after the publication of his first novel, Melvyn's publishers
are discussing the book cover for what will be his 23rd.
It's Melvyn's first historical,
proper historical novel since, since Credo.
His core audience, it has to be Radio 4...
Absolutely Radio 4, but I think it's wider than that.
I mean, he is a, he's a literary brand name.
I just wanted to show you some initial thoughts.
I think he is somebody who needs to be working at full tilt
all the time and as long as he is able to
carry on working at full tilt, he will carry on doing it.
He's been doing it all his life.
I hardly think he's going to stop merely because he's 75.
CHOIR SINGS: # Keep the homes fires burning
# While your hearts are yearning
# Though your lads are far away
# They dream of home... #
When the time comes for me
to say cheerio to radio and television, I'll be, I'll be bereft,
but my God, I've had a good innings.
# ..the dark clouds shining
# Turn the dark clouds inside out
# Till the boys come home
# Oh, turn the dark clouds inside out
# Till the boys come home. #