Melvyn Bragg, host of the BBC Radio 4 programme In Our Time since its very first episode back in 1998, has greeted me in the same delightfully brusque manner hundreds and hundreds of times:
Hello. In 1911 the Dutch physicist Haika Kameling-Honors made a remarkable discovery that nobody predicted and that none can since fully explain—it's called superconductivity.
Hello. Until twenty years ago, dinosaurs were widely assumed to be large, lumpen lizards that became extinct millions of years ago.
Hello. Italo Calvino (1923-1985) was an Italian author of inventive, bedazzling stories, with a passionate belief that writing and art could make life better for everyone.
Hello. Considering he ruled as Roman emperor for less than two years (361-363 AD), Julian the Apostate made an extraordinary impression on history.
Hello. Civility, in one sense, is among the most valuable virtues in society: the skill to discuss topics that really matter to you, with someone who disagrees, and somehow get along.
That final one, it turns out, was actually a goodbye. Bragg announced last week that he was stepping down as host after 26 years and more than 1,000 episodes, making the episode on civility, which aired in July, his last.
It’s fitting, I suppose, given how adept Bragg has been at making In Our Time a venue for productive discussion. The setup is deceptively simple: Each week, Bragg invites three academic experts to discuss a topic. The number here is key: One guest would be an interview, two could be a moderated debate, but with three, you can have a proper conversation. And the topics themselves are astonishingly broad, ranging across history, literature, science, and philosophy. One week a novel, the next a famous mathematical problem, the following a religious text. The show is often described as a sort of continuing education program—“like sitting in on a university lecture for beginners,” according to Melanie McDonagh, who rather hilariously notes that her poorly educated daughter could benefit from such a thing—but that hardly explains the ardor of fans like me. I’ve sat through many university lectures, and few have stayed with me as long as the episode on the evolution of teeth. To understand that, you must understand that In Our Time is more than a radio programme—it’s a worldview. It is a weekly affirmation that the world is endlessly fascinating, and that learning about it is a joy.
That joy is all down to Bragg. Casual listeners tend to revel in his occasional impatience: how firmly he yanks back a guest who is about to go off on a tangent, how he insists on people sticking to the point at hand and saying things as clearly as possible, how irritated he can become at jargony equivocations. Woe to the Oxbridge PhD who dares suggest to Melvyn Bragg that, in order to answer his question, one must first address three other things.
You might imagine this reveals some contempt for his guests, but you could not be more wrong. Bragg’s foremost register, the one that animates this whole project, is not derision—it’s delight. He will not tolerate useless bloviating on a topic because the topic is interesting and we only have 45 minutes to get to the good stuff. Equally, he does not need guests to dumb anything down because he assumes the listener is an intelligent and curious person.
Admittedly, there have been times he tips into rudeness. Most famously, during an episode on the Industrial Revolution, he became irate at Professor Pat Hudson for suggesting that underlying environmental factors, alongside contingencies of global economic history, is a better explanation for the pace of technological development in 19th-century England than any one man’s inventiveness. Bragg wasn’t having it, interjecting, “Oh it’s all to do with the broad sweep of history. Listen, people invented things that hadn’t been there before which enabled things to happen that had not happened before.” Things got more heated from there.
It wasn’t his finest hour, and Hudson was correct that great man theories of history are both insufficient and, often, ideologically motivated. Yet, even here, I can forgive Bragg his defensiveness, because what awes Bragg, what bowls him over time and time again on the show, is human achievement.
That we manage to write, and compose, and discover, and understand things is a miracle to Melvyn Bragg, and if you listen long enough, you will appreciate it too. What fascinates him about dinosaurs is not just that they existed, but that we—now, today—can have our whole notion of whether or not they had feathers upended by recent fossil discoveries and advancements in chemistry. What people know and how they come to know it, sparks of creative genius, myth-making and intellectual obsession—the whole lot of it is, to use a phrase he is so fond of, simply terrific. Focus too much on the grumbling at wayward guests and you might miss how often Bragg marvels at what he is being told. This is the source of his charm. It’s the way, sometimes, he lets out a slight gasp, and how he is so reliably confounded by scale—anything numbering in the billions will get a comment about how he struggles to get a good view of it. Well, same!—and how he always makes time for a guest to read us just a little bit of the original Latin.
Writing for The New Yorker a few years back, Sarah Larson pitched In Our Time as a “great way to escape the news.” She is right in the sense that it stands in opposition to the sort of podcast that grapples with the week’s headlines, or whatever. But the sensation of listening to a new episode of In Our Time has never felt to me like an escape or a distraction so much as a great plunging in. We tend to assume, once you’re done with school at least, that interest precedes knowledge. You know a little bit about something—Nero, Sense and Sensibility, the structure of DNA—and then set out to learn more. In Our Time often flips that on its head, presenting me with a subject about which I had little to no curiosity and, over the course of 45 minutes, convincing me that it is the most interesting thing in the world.
They will get a new host, and things will go on, as they always do. Perhaps I will like whoever it is they pick. And Melvyn Bragg, at 85 years old, deserves to do whatever he wants with his time. After all, he has given us over 1,000 episodes of the greatest radio show ever made, and changed my life countless times in the process. Thank you, Melvyn. I will miss having some bonus material with you, and your guests.
