THE SATURDAY INTERVIEW:MELVYN BRAGG HAS been awake since 5am. The early rising was for some last-minute preparation for his Thursday morning radio show, In Our Time, which he presented live on BBC Radio 4 before taking a flight to Dublin.
He has just come from his talk on autobiographical fiction, given as part of the Dublin Writers' Festival, where he told a packed Project Arts Centre how hard he has found dealing with the publicity following the publication of his most recent book, Remember Me . . . ,a fictionalised account of his marriage to artist Lisa Roche who took her own life after the marriage ended.
I have watched him tell the audience about the emotional toll encounters with the media have taken – "I've never been so upset in public," he says of an interview he did with the London Times– and I've seen him visibly shaken by the demons that have been raised in the writing and publication of Remember Me . . .During his presentation, he even excuses himself from further exploration of the subject. "I don't have the heart for it," he says simply.
But now, his talk completed, he is on his way to be interviewed again. Conscious of the wounds that previous media encounters have opened, and conscious of the fact that it is now past 10pm and Bragg has been awake for 17 hours, I can’t help but feel like a vulture preying on the vulnerable.
But this is Melvyn Bragg, a man who has interviewed thousands of people over the course of a career in broadcasting that spans more than four decades.
When he finally walks into the restaurant, he is utterly professional and I am suddenly the vulnerable one, slipshod and fumbling as he takes charge and politely requests that the music be turned down to ensure his words are audible on the Dictaphone.
And despite the lateness of the hour, the gruelling presentation he has just given, and the fact that Bragg will be 70 this year, there is an energy in him that seems to welcome – even invite – a grilling.
Still, it would be easier to begin with a question about the South Bank Show, ITV's long-running arts programme that has been presented by Bragg since it first aired more than three decades ago. How does he feel about the fact that it has been axed, and is due to end its 32-year run next summer?
“Shocked,” he says, and gives his anger rein. “We’re a very, very lean, efficient programme unit. In 32 seasons we’ve never gone over budget, never once. We cost ITV one-quarter of 1 per cent of their entire spend. They wanted to cut that one-quarter of 1 per cent by 80 per cent.” The result? “The programme was unmakeable.”
The decision spells the end of a show in which Bragg has had a long-standing personal investment, “because it’s a programme that I built up and that I believe in”. He made it his mission on the show to dissolve the distinction between so-called “high culture” and popular culture. “What was amazing was saying on a big arts programme, ‘We are doing a programme on Billy Connolly which we will take just as seriously as a programme on Pavarotti. Now stand back’.”
The result was television gold, though not everyone was pleased. Writer JG Ballard famously decried the show as “a classic example of dumbing down”. Yet Bragg insisted – and still insists – that popular culture had a place within the arts. “In an arts programme, my job was to go where the talent was. And the talent was in popular culture.”
While Bragg believes ITV will be the poorer for getting rid of the South Bank Show, it's the viewers who are the ultimate losers. "Television, above all, is the place where people can see the world they live in, and if the world they live in is a world without the arts, so much the worse for television, and so much the worse for the viewers."
He's clearly not the only one who thinks this: reaction to the announcement of the demise of the South Bank Showwas swift and heartening, though Bragg jokes that it's hard to be cheered by such widespread coverage when it's like reading his own obituary. "I'd rather have that programme than the obituary."
THE END OF THE South Bank Showis hardly the end for Bragg, who not only remains on the airwaves with In Our Time, but who has been double-jobbing all his life. He has published 20 novels, as well as a dozen non-fiction titles, two children's books and four screenplays, while simultaneously building a career in broadcasting, which began at the BBC and included stints at the BBC World Service, and the BBC Home Service, as well as 10 years as presenter of the weekly discussion programme on BBC Radio 4, Start the Week. So is he a broadcaster who writes, or a writer with a sideline in broadcasting?
“I love writing and I love making arts programmes. If you put a gun to my head, I’d obviously go for writing first because I started writing first.”
The fiction writing began while Bragg was in his late teens, studying at Oxford. “And I loved it,” he recalls. “I loved doing it. And over the next couple of years I thought, ‘That’s what I want to do. But how do you do it?’” For Bragg, who grew up in the pub his parents ran in the small market town of Wigton, writing was not a recognised career option. “I thought all writers were dead or on shelves. It was nothing to do with me!”
Though he has come some distance from his working class origins – he was made a Labour peer in 1998 – he often returns in speech and in fiction to the place that played its part in his formation and that has been incorporated in his title, Lord Bragg of Wigton.
Wigton was the setting for the first three of his autobiographical novels, which began with The Soldier's Return, and continued through A Son of Warand Crossing the Lines. Remember Me . . .is the fourth in the series, and in many ways the most painful, dealing as it does with the love and loss of his first wife. Although in his Dublin presentation, Bragg expounded on how the genre of autobiographical fiction has liberated him to write without the constraints of "love and tact" that the memoir format would have imposed, the subject of Remember Me. . . made it a particularly tortuous undertaking.
“When my wife and I were in really serious trouble, I started an affair with a woman who in the novel I call Helen, who is my present wife,” he says in a rush of matter-of-factness about the sensitivities he had to take into account. “I’ve been with her ever since. I had to take a lot of care about that. The book is not about her and yet that is one of the angles. So I had to protect her from the full blast of Natasha [the name of the character based on his first wife, Lisa].”
Categorising his work as autobiographical fiction didn’t necessarily simplify things. “Actually autobiographical fiction is very tricky,” he says. “I pushed it. I tested it. I did that deliberately.” He is chin-juttingly frank. “And it was perhaps foolhardy.” Does he regret it? “I do sometimes.Yes, I do.”
The writing of Remember Me . . .clearly took its toll on Bragg, yet he persisted. "Why did I push it so hard?" he asks, anticipating the questions that he has steeled himself to answer. "I think I did it because I really thought I wasn't going to publish it. And it's written as a book not to be published."
It was the reaction of Bragg’s daughter Marie-Elsa, the only child from his marriage to Roche, that first made him reconsider. “First of all my daughter said she loved the book,” he says. “Then I got the jitters and I sent it off and the publishers liked it, and two people I respect enormously thought it was the best book I’d written.”
Even after it had been sent to publishers and slated for release, he stalled a number of times before finally agreeing to a publication date. “The whole thing was – well nightmare’s too strong a word, but it was fraught.” It’s clear it still is, and the pain that even our exchange on the subject is causing is evident. Yet Bragg seems determined to be truthful, wilful to suffer the consequences. When our conversation digs too deeply into his open wounds, however, he retreats behind conversational throwaways, a gruff “there you are” or “anyway” that pulls things back into the everyday.
If talking about this book is so traumatic, the emotional wrench of writing it is unimaginable. “It was a very strange experience writing it,” Bragg acknowledges. “When I was writing about the actual suicide, I had all the symptoms of a heart attack.”
He acknowledges that the media probing he now faces has come in part at his own invitation. “It came out, and you had people poking their hands in it, which I’d asked for because I’d published it. But at the same time, we don’t live simple lives, do we?”
We are all implicated in this probing of the personal – readers, interviewers and writers, and Bragg accepts his part. “Of course you’ve got to talk about it. It’s in the public domain. What are you going to do? Run away? Well, that’s what I did. I ran away for nine months,” he says referring to his silence after the book’s publication. “But I’d been running away for a long time, I think.”
This last sentence is delivered as if from a distance, and he shakes himself again into the present. “So anyway, there we are.”
THERE WE ARE,with a book that is searingly honest about the painful disintegration of a great love, and about the mental illness and breakdowns of both its protagonists. Bragg writes of the panic attacks Joe Richardson, his fictionalised self, experiences as his marriage falls apart, attacks that Bragg has spoken of subsequently as his own. He admits he is no stranger to mental illness.
“I think that I had a really serious breakdown when I was about 13 or 14. I think I’m very, very lucky to have survived.” At the time, he says, he couldn’t even talk about it, but that is clearly no longer the case. “That sort of sorted itself out in some way or other, but I felt fractured. I always felt fractured. And then in my late 20s when Lisa and I were in such, such f***ing difficulties . . .” he breaks off, his grief glaring in his slow continuation. “The thing is, it was an accretion. It was an accretion. If any one of the things hadn’t happened, it would have been okay, but they kept happening.”
Gone is the feisty broadcaster defending his show from money-grabbing executives, and in his place a scarred and openly wounded man backing away from the Dictaphone that sits accusingly on the table between us, even as he offers information unsolicited. It is clear that this is a subject Bragg wishes both to avoid and address.
“I mean, I was really in a bad way,” he says softly. “We lived under a flight path for six or seven years. It’s really serious hell . . . and I was going mad.”
The planes, and his wife's indifference to them, the fact that she went into analysis, that her analyst then insisted Bragg go into analysis, that Bragg did so and hated the experience – all of these are folded into the narrative of Remember Me. . . and all, Bragg tells me, contributed to weigh down his real-life marriage.
“Then her analyst killed herself . . . and Lisa didn’t tell me. So the biggest thing in her life, next to me, or maybe bigger than me, this happens and she doesn’t tell me. What the f**k is going on?” He is raw in the telling, almost 40 years on. “And then the game was up really. We parted – we hadn’t divorced – we parted, I still saw her regularly. I loved her.”
This is shaky ground for Bragg, and he knows it, but he presses on, describing the panic that the notion of divorce engendered in him. “People didn’t get divorced. And there was I being told that divorce was on the cards.” All of this – the marriage trouble, the affair, the divorce – leads, at least chronologically, to his wife’s suicide, as we are both acutely aware. But Bragg, whose fatigue is beginning to tell, knows his limits and before the conversation can take him there, he excuses himself to “calm down a little”.
When he returns to the table, we talk of other things. I ask him about a conversation in Remember Me. . . where two characters argue over whether mental illness is a necessary component in the making of a great artist.
Just as Richardson does in the book, Bragg disagrees with the need for such a correlation. “Health and strength and focus seem to be more important,” he says resolutely. “Stamina, focus, and just keeping on keeping on.” Bragg is the king of keeping on, yet while his broadcasting career continues apace, he admits that for the first time in his entire adult life, he is not writing.
“We all like to think we represent the times we live in. And what I am representative of at the moment is a sort of paralysis,” he tells me. “I can’t write fiction. I can’t think much about the future. I can do diurnal things. Look after my children, visit my friends, visit my mother . . . but in there, where it matters, the compass has broken down.”
For Bragg, this personal stasis is a reflection of the general. “The compass has broken down. And that’s what’s going on: Nothing’s going on . . . communism has collapsed, capitalism has collapsed, materialism has collapsed, America has collapsed. The idea of a church has collapsed.” He waves his hand in imitation of a compass going wild in unchartered territory. “It’s a profound, ‘I don’t know what the hell’s going on’.”
I laugh, a little at his impression of a wobbly compass and a little at his humour and lack of hubris, even as he places his own personal crisis within a universal malaise. I shouldn’t laugh, I say, but what can you do?
Bragg is all energy again, his fatigue dispelled as he pounces on the phrase. “You’ve said it!” Bragg the broadcaster is back, his cultural compass clearly still working as he defines this moment in a pithy soundbite that for him speaks as much about the times we live in as it does about himself.
“That phrase, what you just said, they’ll be putting as the epitaph of this age.” It is as much an answer as a question. “But what can you do?”
Melvyn Bragg Life and career
Born:England, 1939
Family:Married twice, first to Lisa Roche, with whom he had one daughter, then to Cate Haste, with whom he had two children.
Career path:Has worked in broadcasting for more than 40 years, first with the BBC and later with ITV on the
South Bank Show. Has also published 20 novels, and several non-fiction books.
The turning point: In broadcasting, when the
South Bank Show, which he wrote, edited and presented, first aired in 1978.
In writing,
The Hired Man(1969) garnered him the Time/Life Silver Pen award and was made into an award-winning musical.