Melvyn Bragg: 'I regret a great deal... I could have behaved a little better'

Attached to each of the tall black railings outside Melvyn Bragg’s house in Hampstead is a line of small Ukrainian flags fluttering at chest height. I didn’t need to look for the house number. This had to be it: the only residence on the road wearing its heart on its sleeve.

The broadcaster, writer and Labour peer comes to the door looking elegantly gaunt, as though he is recovering from something. He is, though it is not only Covid that has been sapping his reserves of late. Morning, noon and night, he says, he is transfixed by news footage of atrocities in Ukraine. Whatever it was he used to watch on television has been swept away by the tragedy and depravity unfolding in Putin’s war.

‘I’m completely, absolutely, compulsively watching anything to do with Ukraine. It’s taken over from reading, thinking. I feel as if I’m being sucked into something monstrous, brutal, senseless. I can hardly believe that this is happening in my lifetime. It can’t be. There are bodies in the streets with hands bound behind their backs and bullets in their heads. You used to read that [kind of barbarity] about the Tartars, didn’t you? What’s going on? Well, this is going on – and for the first time in history we are all seeing it, the terrible detail of war.’

He is angry, he says, about the timidity of the Germans in making meaningful efforts to cut their supplies of Russian gas and oil. ‘It’s all coming out now. Angela Merkel was far too cosy with the Russians. That East German upbringing shows. And Macron, all those telephone calls to Putin and what happened? Not a single movement. He is a little peacock.’

Lord Bragg of Wigton in the county of Cumbria has been double locked down these past few years, first because he was seriously ill and then because of the pandemic, though you would never have known (and weren’t meant to) from his undiminished work rate. He continued interviewing for The South Bank Show (now on Sky Arts), writing books and ringmastering his cult Radio 4 programme In Our Time. ‘I’m very lucky that I have sitting-down jobs,’ he says drily, as if his prostate cancer, melanoma, pneumonia, shingles and a hip replacement had been seen off with aspirin and a bit of patience. ‘The thing was, they came in succession. I was just getting better from one when another came along.’

Between debilitating assaults on his previously fit person, Bragg got married for the third time, to Gabriel Clare-Hunt, his long-time friend and lover, in 2019. He was three weeks short of his 80th birthday. They first met in 1980 on The South Bank Show. ‘It was the right thing to do,’ he says. ‘I love Gabriel and I felt it would be unfair to her not to get married. I thought, “I’ve had enough of having a mistress.” We thought it would make both of us very happy and it has done.’

He proposed to her in a broken-down sheepfold on Cumbria’s Binsey Fell, in the middle of a tearing gale, the wind snatching away his shouted declaration of love. They were married more or less in the shadow of the fell, in the tiny church of St Bega’s on the shore of Bassenthwaite Lake.

Binsey has an almost spiritual significance for Bragg. He has haunted it and it has haunted him both before and after he left his tight, working-class community for Oxford and a dazzling media career in the metropolis. In his teeming, eloquent new memoir Back in the Day, he describes cycling there as a boy from his home town of Wigton and experiencing a kind of Wordsworthian epiphany (though he doesn’t call it that) as he watched the sun set over the Solway and felt himself part of the landscape. Not just then and there, but inalienably. ‘I doubt if I had ever felt more complete,’ he writes. ‘I would come and seek out similar moments for the rest of my life. This was life itself. I felt both helpless and in some way invulnerable.’

On his wedding day, Bragg wore a marvellous floral waistcoat. He’s a stylish, attentive dresser, often teased by shabbier friends for being so immaculately turned out. In a BBC Two documentary to mark his 75th birthday, he is seen walking his beloved fells in a proper coat.

When we meet, his tall, lean frame is in ochre corduroy trousers, a blue sweater and brown shoes polished like conkers. The shoes tap away gently throughout our talk, as if they have a life of their own. For all his experience as an interviewer and presenter, he admits to being nervous before a show or a speech. Or just nervous for no good reason. Perhaps he is nervous now.

Bragg is complex, a man of outward ease and charm who has a lot of baggage. More than most. The background to his professional success is a troubled, many-layered private life, and it strikes me as I leave his big, comfortable semi-detached house in Hampstead that the simple wedding ceremony in the fells, the people present and the beautiful isolation of the setting encapsulated it all. What he is, and was, and what matters to him.

For a start, Bragg’s elder daughter, the Rev Marie-Elsa Bragg, 56, conducted the service. She is his daughter with his first wife, Marie-Elisabeth (Lisa) Roche, an artist from an aristocratic French family. They married when he was just 22, soon after he left Oxford; she was his senior by a few years. It was an intense but probably doomed partnership and some months after they separated, clinically depressed, she took her own life. It was 1971, and Marie-Elsa was six years old.

‘I could have done things which helped and I did things which harmed,’ Bragg told The Guardian in 1998. ‘So yes, I feel guilt, I feel remorse.’ The tragedy overshadowed the lives of both father and daughter, but also created a deep bond between them.

A handful of his oldest friends were in church, too. A choir of six sang an anthem written by the composer Howard Goodall, who also adapted, for the organ, music from The Hired Man, the musical he wrote in 1984 from the first of Bragg’s Cumbrian trilogy novels. ‘Someone getting married at 80 in such a place and with such a small number of people, was always going to be an emotional thing,’ says Goodall. ‘And it was.’ Bragg himself says: ‘It was difficult and wonderful at the same time.’

Also in the wedding capsule were Alice, 44, and Tom, 41, Bragg’s children with his second wife, the historian, writer and documentary-maker Cate Haste, who died last year after a battle with lung cancer. That relationship had its complications, too. Haste and Bragg had been living together at the time of Lisa’s death, and she helped to bring up Marie-Elsa and give some stability to their lives. ‘I couldn’t have gone through those early years without Cate,’ Bragg admitted later.

The Lisa years and the beginning of his relationship with Haste are transparently laid out in his heartbreaking novel Remember Me… (2008), which he hoped would be cathartic. It was anything but. It tells the story of Joe Richardson, a young BBC broadcaster who, having married a French art student, Natasha, later has an affair with a BBC researcher, Helen. Natasha takes her own life, leaving behind a young daughter. Writing it tore him open all over again. ‘It wasn’t a good idea,’ he admits. ‘If I’d been stronger, I wouldn’t have published it.’

He classes himself as religious non-believer and later, when we are talking about the spiritual dimension in his life, he says, ‘My first wife died just over 50 years ago but she’s still very vivid in my life – and my daughter’s. I mean really vivid. It’s her thereness. If they’re there, where are they? Where’s there? Is it just memory? Or is it a way of getting in contact with somebody? I still sense her every day.’

After more than four decades of marriage, Bragg and Haste divorced in 2018. Their marriage had ‘run out of steam’, as he puts it, but they were always friends and before she died she told him she had had a wonderful life, mostly because of him. ‘That was nice of her,’ he says, his eyes red-rimmed and full.

Though Bragg has mined his personal life in fiction, he is far from easy talking about it. His voice drops. ‘I’m very disappointed in myself in lots of ways. I could have behaved a little better. I regret a great deal. But my regrets are all personal. In my work life, I’ve been nothing but lucky.’

Partly to defuse the emotion, we switch to discussing his time at the BBC. He was one of the first grammar-school boys to get a general traineeship there, and although he spent the biggest and starriest part of his career at ITV, he leads the charge in defence of his alma mater.

‘I know it’s having a hard time,’ he says. ‘I know it’s getting competition, but in many ways the BBC is the cultural backbone of this country and should be protected.’ He accuses ministers of failing to recognise its value and argues that the licence fee should not be scrapped ‘until they can replace it with the multiplicity of programmes as regularly as we have now. Count up the number of programmes on Radio 4 alone. Hundreds of them. They fertilise the mind. There’s no other television organisation in the world that does all that. They can’t just throw it away.’

He invokes his old boss Huw Wheldon, editor of the arts programme Monitor in the late 1950s and early 60s. ‘He said, “Never forget that the BBC is just the sum of its programmes” – and that’s what it is.’ Bragg likens its niche audiences to ‘the old hedgerows full of different birds and they’re all singing away. And that’s very important. Variety, diversity, professionalism.

‘That cultural person we’ve got…’ he continues.

Has he forgotten her name or is he being mischievous?

‘Nadine Dorries?’

‘That’s her name, yes. I haven’t met her. I don’t want to be rude about her but it seems to me that whenever she says anything, she doesn’t know what she’s talking about.’

Dorries, the Culture Secretary, confirmed earlier this year that the licence fee would be frozen at £159 a year for the next two years, then rise in line with inflation for four years, pending a decision about whether to abolish it. ‘Why?’ Bragg demands. ‘Who gains by this? The licence fee has got disadvantages, everything’s got disadvantages. But nothing that cannot be adjusted. It isn’t difficult. Just do it. Don’t pretend that the whole thing, which has been going for 100 years, can be dismantled in a few months. They’ve got no sense of what this country’s about.’

Now well into his stride, Bragg is incensed (he calls it ‘dismayed’) by Michael Grade’s recent appointment as head of Ofcom, the communications regulator. ‘He has declared publicly on several occasions that the licence fee is past its sell-by date. And he is a Tory lord, an absolute whipped Tory lord, a Tory mouthpiece. How can they give it to a man as biased as that?’

He thinks the BBC is ‘going to take some defending’, though. ‘There’s a lot to admire about what he’s doing at the moment in Ukraine but television is not his strong point. So the fight’s on to keep the BBC.’

Bragg’s voice counts. It’s hard to think of a more effective, consistent or zealous champion of the arts over these past 50 years. Fresh from Oxford, he began his career at the BBC in 1961, first in radio. By the time he was a producer, he’d had two novels published.

He made the leap to London Weekend Television (LWT) in 1978, where he presented ITV’s arts flagship The South Bank Show. (He was head of arts at LWT from 1982 to 1990, and controller of arts there from 1990.) People thought he’d switched for the money, but he says it was because he wanted to shake things up, to show the arts as a rainbow of disciplines – popular as well as classical, high and low – and not as a pyramid with opera, theatre and ballet at the top.

At the BBC, he’d been hooted out of the room for proposing a programme about Elvis Presley. There wasn’t that kind of snobbery at ITV. His first interview for The South Bank Show was with Paul McCartney, and over more than 700 episodes he has featured almost everyone who was anyone on the cultural scene. The arts documentary-maker Tony Palmer, who worked on several editions with him, says, ‘He’s always had an unshakeable belief in what he’s trying to do: bring the arts to as broad a group as possible. And he’s still at it. Perhaps it upsets some people that he can still do it.’

In 1994, Bragg interviewed the dying dramatist Dennis Potter, an encounter no one watching the night it was broadcast on Channel 4 could forget. Potter needed to take gulps of liquid morphine to get through it and yet, with Bragg handing him the medication, spoke about his heightened awareness of the wonder and freshness of the blossoming world outside his window.

Bragg’s other fixture was the lively radio programme Start the Week – that is, until his friend Tony Blair elevated him to the House of Lords in 1998. ‘They decided when I went to the Lords I couldn’t do Start the Week any more because it would be imperilling my impartiality,’ he says with drawling amusement. ‘I was given a six-month contract to keep me quiet. That became In Our Time. I only got the job because I was fired.’

The Thursday-morning programme – traditionally known as ‘the death slot’ – has run for more than 950 episodes. Two million people tune in each week, and there are more than three million podcast downloads a month. ‘What is encouraging,’ says its producer Simon Tillotson, ‘is that every single episode ever made is heard by many people each month, from the archive. In Our Time is anything but ephemeral.’

‘Why did it catch on? Baffles me. It just did,’ Bragg says. ‘For a lot of people it’s a sort of education. For me, it’s all the things I want to learn about.’ The seminar format is simple: Bragg rounds up three academics, ‘the best people around’, and gets them to distil and thrash out their subject in a way that lesser mortals can understand. ‘We are never knowingly relevant,’ he boasts. Everyone seems to have a good time, Bragg especially. ‘One week it’s vampires and the next it’s Homo erectus and away we go! It’s ruined my non-fiction reading.’

Tillotson says Bragg’s ability to get to the heart of a subject is key and the homework he does is prodigious. Through illness, cancer treatment and lockdowns, he has not missed a single episode. ‘His boundless curiosity and enthusiasm to understand daunting topics and communicate them to his listeners is what makes it,’ says Tillotson. ‘It really matters to him. People tell him the programme has had an impact on their life.’

Meanwhile, Bragg has kept on writing books – 22 novels and 18 non-fiction works – all of them in longhand. ‘Slow going by the pace of the great Victorian writers,’ he remarks. One of the most outstanding is The Book of Books, about the radical impact of the King James Bible over 400 years. Plenty of people have written about the King James Bible, but I doubt whether anyone has made it so gripping.

Bragg was a choirboy at the Anglican church of St Mary’s in Wigton, so his childhood was steeped in church music and the glorious language of the King James Bible. He says the church gave him a vast unintended education, as well as a lot of intended guilt. He may be a man of lost faith now, but a residue remains and anyway, he thinks the ruins of belief ‘like the ruins of castles, are often more interesting then the castles themselves’.

Bragg’s books have won awards, but there is a suspicion among some full-time authors that because he has a prolific broadcasting career, he must be a part-time writer. ‘He suffers,’ says Howard Goodall, ‘from the fact that people think no one person can do all of those things terribly well.’

So long as he has the approval of people he respects, Bragg really doesn’t seem to care. ‘The great thing about writing books is writing books,’ he says. ‘I couldn’t do without it. When I finish a book, I start thinking about what I’m going to do next.’

His latest, Back in the Day, is the memoir for which everything else seems to have been a dress rehearsal. Into it he pours years of accumulated observation and affection for Wigton, the small factory town (population, 5,000; churches, 12) that has featured under a different name in many of his novels.

His first home – two up, one down with a shared wash house and an outside lavatory – would be classed today as a slum. Later, his father, a former stockman and mechanic, took on the tenancy of the worst pub in town and made a go of it. Bragg had no idea his family was poor.

Austerity Britain was grey but Bragg’s Wigton is a place of energy and colour. ‘I remember most how vivid it was, how undull, how full of things to do. So much was going on – every day. Cattle going up and down the street, sports going on, pigeon men sending their pigeons to France. I knew everybody. I can see them all now. I could name them but I’d sound like the Old Testament. The town – I’m trying to avoid my own tendency to cliché – the town was the drama.’

He has always gone back to it, seeking out old friends, keen to hear the news. Home is a remote cottage a few miles outside Wigton, which he bought 50 years ago for £6,000.

Oozing condescension, a reviewer once accused Bragg of peddling ‘the usual sepia-hued, Hovis-ad boyhood of media Northerners’. When I quote this, he bridles; of course he does. ‘It’s crap. It’s ignorance. I can’t be bothered with it.’ He doesn’t need to bother because Back in the Day demonstrates once and for all that his Cumbrian-rootedness is absolute, not some bogus literary conceit or sentimental memory.

He’s honest about his own shortcomings and fair to those he does not like. The heroes of his story are ordinary people who make the best of harsh times with stoicism, good humour and courage. ‘I am in awe,’ he writes, ‘at the extensive and complex web spun from so little by men and women who refused to be worn down by their deadening work and poor wages.’

The book is a tribute to quietly epic lives, especially to his mother, whose force of character and love of the town overcame the stigma of her illegitimacy; and to his late-understood father, who agreed to let Bragg stay on in the sixth form – not something working-class boys were encouraged to do. Only relatively recently, Bragg was touched to discover his history teacher had visited his parents three times to persuade them Melvyn should stay on at school. The memoir ends as he wins a place at Oxford and, after much heart-searching, decides to leave Wigton.

A pivotal section of the book deals with a life-altering breakdown Bragg had at 13. He started to have visceral ‘out of mind’ experiences. At night, he would see a light in the corner of his bedroom and was convinced that it was his mind. It had slipped from his shell of a body. For hours he was too afraid to move. During months of paralysing fear and panic, his school work suffered and he was demoted in class. He was too ashamed to tell anybody about it, least of all his parents.

Eventually, he found his own way out: overwork. An addiction to books and the acquisition of knowledge has been his salvation ever since. ‘It is absolutely clear to me now,’ he says, ‘that it wasn’t a little thing. It was an immense crack-up. Eventually I pulled myself together through work. I filled my mind with learning stuff, reaching forward to today. It stops you thinking about the thing you don’t want to think about. It’s about possession.’ There was a further breakdown in his early 30s, after Lisa’s death, and even now he says panic can return to destabilise him. ‘But as you get older you just learn to hold on tight.’

Bragg is 82 now, still learning, more than holding on. His shoes, though, go on tapping their own message. He has ideas for the next book or three. ‘Retirement’ is not in his vocabulary; there is work to be done. After years of personal tumult, you want things to go well for him, very well, from here.

Back in the Day: A Memoir, by Melvyn Bragg, is published on Thursday May 26 (Sceptre, £25); Order it from books.telegraph.co.uk for the discounted price of £19.99. You can read an exclusive extract in this week’s Sunday Telegraph