“Few places on earth have been as affectionately alchemised into literature as the Lake District.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“Well, I don’t think I’m good-looking… I know people who are good-looking, and I’m not good-looking.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“I just got fed up with the Protestantism that I’d been brought up with being rubbed out, disregarded. There’s an awful lot of frailty and doubt about it, which I understand and share, but there are certain things you just have to acknowledge.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“Class doesn’t create culture anymore.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“You ask 20 of your friends how English and American democracy came about. None of them would say that Anglicanism or Protestantism had anything to do with it. But it was crucial to it!”
― Melvyn Bragg
“In 1997, the Labour government set out to strengthen funding for the arts – and achieved it.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“My memory seems to be holding on quite well. There is no reason why it shouldn’t if you keep training it.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“I don’t feel like I’m slowing down.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“My life is not very different from what it was 20 years ago. In fact, my career hasn’t changed much since I was 22.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“I was brought up in a strong working-class community by working-class parents and relations until I was 18, and that’s what I really am. Now all sorts of things have been added, but that’s what I am.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“I decided years ago that I am just unfashionable.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“I’m not a fan of the working class being mocked, including by some of our famous writers – even those who came from it.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“I’ve been making arts programmes for almost 50 years, and every day, I can’t believe my luck.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“Too old at 72? Careful. Ageism is out. We’ll have the law on you!”
― Melvyn Bragg
“I’ll never forget my interview with Barry Humphries – one of the oddest I’ve ever done. He insisted that for half the time he appeared as Dame Edna. So I interviewed the real Barry Humphries in a suit and tie, and then I interviewed Edna in full fig in her dressing room, where she criticised Barry mercilessly.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“The best of pop in our country is among the best of the arts that we do. And Britain does the arts as well as, and sometimes better than, anybody else on the planet.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“I don’t believe in a personal God, no. And I don’t believe in resurrection as it is in the New Testament.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“We start out as sand and soot out there in the universe, and who knows, in 40 trillion years’ time we might come back. But if we come back without memory, it doesn’t really interest me.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“There’s a lot of hours in the week if you use them properly.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“What artists are doing, and what people who are receiving the arts are doing, is entering into this agreement to occupy a parallel world. The parallel world is ever-expanding. We used to think that it existed only for people who were wealthy, well-born, or educated. It isn’t like that.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“Connery made Bond real through his physicality. He did most of his own stunts and fights, and the audience knew it was him.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“In a sense, Bond ousted the cowboy as the screen hero, and Ken Adams replaced the horse with technology.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“Craig has explored the darker recesses of 007’s psyche. He has shown us the lonely man. And he has shown him falling truly in love.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“Dame Barbara Cartland was an endearing eccentric, and when I interviewed her, she wanted me to listen to her dictating to her secretary one of those romantic novels that she turned out fortnightly.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“There is some brilliant pop music and some very poor classical music. And why shouldn’t comedy be treated as seriously as drama?”
― Melvyn Bragg
“It was my idea for high culture and popular culture to be treated equally.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“Once, the arts were opera, ballet, classical music, and everything else deemed highbrow.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“I wanted ‘The South Bank Show’ to reflect my own life and that of the team around me; to stretch the accepted boundaries and challenge the accepted hierarchies of the arts; to include pop music as well as classical music, television drama as well as theatre drama, and high-definition performers in comedy.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“The idea that popular arts were shallow by definition and the traditional arts were profound was dead, I thought, and I wanted to prove it.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“I enjoy what was called ‘swotting’ in my day.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“I’ve been writing since I was 19.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“I don’t want closure, I don’t know what that means or why you would want it.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“Work is a great blotter up. It stops you thinking, which is useful. No, it stops you feeling.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“It is in our culture that we don’t want to admit that our culture is good.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“Britain is undoubtedly becoming more cultural. No question of it. People who say it is dumbing down simply don’t look around enough. They don’t know enough.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“The BBC does a sterling job, but I’d like to see it do more. ITV does four arts programmes a year; it used to be 28. At least Sky, with its two arts channels, is trying.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“The driving force behind ‘In Our Time’ is that I want an education. I want to know more about science, say, and if I want to know, then other people probably do, too.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“I don’t go around thinking I’m attractive or not attractive. It has never occurred to me. People don’t think like that where I come from… No one has ever said, ‘Oh, he’s a good-looking bloke.’ They just didn’t use those words about men.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“Now, perfectly ordinary people will give each other hugs. I mean, it used to be that a hug was reserved for if you came back from Australia – you know, back in the ’40s and ’50s.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“If I meet pals, we do hug each other, and it’s very nice, you know… it’s something that’s come on me late and became second nature, and it’s first nature now!”
― Melvyn Bragg
“We listened to a lot of drama, adaptations of books, comedy. There was a real love of music expressed in choirs, because you didn’t have to have instruments except your voice.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“I don’t feel inferior in the slightest to anybody – or superior to anybody, let’s get that clear. But I do feel different.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“That’s why writing is important to me. Time goes past, and you’ve been somewhere and come back that hasn’t hurt you, and you’ve been somebody else.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“To give religion two minutes a day, in its own space, isn’t exactly selling general morality or atheism short.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“A structure is a bit like a story. People will go along with you – they see where you’re going.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“I don’t get nervous when I’m interviewing someone on film – it can be cut, and we can do it again. It is quite nerve-racking doing things live.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“Sometimes, you’re just moved by people’s journeys.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“People in jobs that they hate must be worn out.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“I like the fact George R. R. Martin took Shakespeare’s political plays as material, but he also took on all sorts of other sensational stories and mingled them in together.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“I’m addicted to ‘Game Of Thrones.’”
― Melvyn Bragg
“Darwin talks about evolution, but he doesn’t say how it started. Maybe the sense of mystery will dissolve in the face of science, but I am not so sure. We are all described by the human genome, but it’s getting people nowhere.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“I’m going to try and make you take the Beatles and Eric Clapton as seriously as the Berlin Philharmonic and Simon Rattle.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“We were working class, and you don’t lose that. Later on, I bolted on media middle class… and now people like me are in the House of Lords.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“I’m a class mongrel.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“I was born in a radio world, and I got so much from it.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“I’d been writing fiction for 50 years, since I was 19. And when you write fiction, it becomes a way of thinking: there’s always a novel around. The strange thing was that after ‘Remember Me,’ there wasn’t.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“The abolition of slavery was driven by the King James Bible. It gave slaves a common language and purpose.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“The class barricades have been stormed by the forces of a broad culture, which is made up of clusters of individuals who have decided for themselves what they will be in society.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“As the 20th century unspooled, a cultural warming melted down many frozen class characteristics.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“In music, the Specials brought a city, Coventry, bombed out for a second time and riven with racism, to a celebration between black and white musicians and their music.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“In the 1990s, from the estates of Scotland came the phenomenon of Irvine Welsh. ‘Trainspotting’ demanded its place not only in the high ranks of contemporary fiction but as a describer of a Britain that literally and metaphorically was in a deep mess.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“We got a copy of the ‘New Statesman’ at my grammar school in Wigton, Cumbria, in the 1950s. It sat mint fresh every week on the library table, with two or three other bargain-offer magazines. The ‘Statesman’ came out of the unimaginable Great World. I started to read it then and have pegged along ever since.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“In the 40 or so years I’ve known David Puttnam, not only has he pursued an outstanding career in films and now politics, but he has been the keeper of the flame of the British film industry.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“Magna Carta has become totemic. It is in the comedy of Tony Hancock, in the poetry of Kipling, never far from the front pages in a constitutional crisis.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“Magna Carta has 63 clauses in abbreviated Latin. Two of them that are still on the statute book, numbers 39 and 40, could be said to have changed the way in which the free world has grown.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“Is it rather stupid and dangerous to take Magna Carta so much for granted, as many of us seem to do, and to think of this attitude as ‘very English?’”
― Melvyn Bragg
“Like university science departments, the arts have shown how they can earn their way and point to an economically newborn future for this country. They show that the U.K. could be a prime provider of imaginative riches and intellectual adventure, which I think are the two great prizes of the 21st century.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“The success of the arts has come through a mix of public subsidy, substantial private support, and good box-office receipts, but central to Labour’s post-1997 programme has been a determination to increase access as much as excellence.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“There is an army of the informed wanting to be more informed.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“Love of place is one of the characteristics I enjoy most about novelists.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“Control, like curiosity, can be an exterminator.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“I have written favourably in support of subsidy for the arts since the 1960s, and I continue to believe absolutely in subsidy, as I do in the BBC licence fee.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“It is very difficult for middle-aged, institutionalised males who have done so well out of subsidy – and, fair play, given much back – to realise that there is a time to be a well-heeled revolutionary.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“In an arts programme, my job was to go where the talent was. And the talent was in popular culture.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“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.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“I love writing, and I love making arts programmes.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“Autobiographical fiction is very tricky.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“A lot of the novels I admire are ‘admirably provincial.’”
― Melvyn Bragg
“I actually admire some of the books by a lot of the writers who write magic realism very much, but it’s not for me. It’s not what I can do, but even if I could, I don’t really want to try.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“A lot of the novels that I’ve really enjoyed in my life, whether it’s Tolstoy’s ‘Cossacks,’ or ‘Sons and Lovers’ or ‘Jude the Obscure’ or ‘David Copperfield’ or ‘Herzog,’ have an autobiographical spine.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“Writers are looking for a story. Using your own life as the basis for a story gives it an association with reality that’s a wonderful starting point.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“More people go to Tate Modern than watch the Arsenal.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“The theatre always seems to be in trouble but always thriving. It’s deeply comical to me that we agonize about our crap football teams and indifferent Test sides when in front of our noses is a great world success story that no one’s interested in apart from those who work in it.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“Film has changed the way we look at the past.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“One of the great things about making ‘Reel History’ was meeting British people from all over the class system. It made me realise that London is a different country.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“I sometimes think the only true record of England is the ‘Cumberland News.’”
― Melvyn Bragg
“The arts stimulate imagination. They provoke thought. And then, having done that, all sorts of other things happen.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“I’m a Labour party supporter, but I’m also a democrat.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“Compared to the big 19th-century novelists, I’ve got a slim volume of work.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“I enjoy writing. Would I rather be playing golf? No. Would I rather be fishing? No.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“I think television does tease out a certain vanity in everybody when you look at yourself and you go, ‘Oh Christ.’ Maybe that’s why my intros get shorter and shorter.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“There are two big beasts in the arts: the BBC and Sky Arts – challenging, leading the way.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“I am 74 now. Looking back, I have a sense of not really being in control of my career. I just went where it took me.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“I was the only BBC graduate trainee in 1961 interested in arts broadcasting. I knew I wanted to write, and I had to make a living.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“Grime reminds me, if there is an echo, of sort of near enough like Liverpool in the very early Sixties. It’s a lot of kids obsessed with music – obsessed with it.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“Miliband failed us, his Labour supporters. And Labour will now, because of him, be in a disaster zone for a long time.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“I do think the BBC could do more, but I’ve always thought the BBC could do more – I think there should be more arts programmes full stop.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“It’s amazing that Sky is the only place that has two dedicated arts channels. The BBC is doing very well… but why don’t they do more?”
― Melvyn Bragg
“If you look at the creative economy in this country, it’s per capita way bigger than any other in the world.”
― Melvyn Bragg
“I got the job I wanted when I was 22, and I’m not going to give it up now.”
― Melvyn Bragg
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