Melvyn Bragg - Broadcasting Career

Broadcasting Career

Bragg began his career in 1961 as a general trainee at the BBC, spending his first two years in radio at the BBC World Service, then at the BBC Third Programme and BBC Home Service. He then joined the production team of Huw Wheldon's Monitor arts series on BBC Television. and won an award for his screenplay on Debussy. He presented the BBC arts show The Lively Arts, a series that included the first ever televised documentary on Doctor Who broadcast in 1977, Whose Doctor Who. His work as a writer and broadcaster began in 1967. He is best known for the London Weekend Television (LWT) arts programme The South Bank Show, which he edited and presented from 1978 to 2010. He was Head of Arts at LWT from 1982 to 1990 and Controller of Arts at LWT from 1990. He is also known for his many programmes on BBC Radio 4, including Start the Week (1988 to 1998), The Routes of English, (mapping the history of the English language), and In Our Time (1998 to present), which in March 2011 broadcast its 500th programme. In February 2012, he began Melvyn Bragg on Class and Culture, a three-part series on BBC2 examining popular media culture with an analysis of the British social class system. In 2012 he brought back The South Bank Show to Sky Arts 1.

A novelist and writer of non-fiction, Bragg has written a number of television and film screenplays. Some of his early television work was in collaboration with Ken Russell, for whom he wrote the biographical dramas The Debussy Film (1965) and Isadora Duncan, the Biggest Dancer in the World (1967), as well as Russell's film about Tchaikovsky, The Music Lovers (1970). He is president of the National Academy of Writing. His 2008 novel Remember Me is part of a series of autobiographical fictions.

Bragg is a Vice President of the Friends of the British Library, a charity set up to provide funding support to the British Library. He became a member of the Arts Council Literature Panel in 1969, since becoming Chairman, and is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society.