There has been a huge outpouring of well-deserved admiration for Melvyn Bragg and In Our Time, since Bragg announced he was stepping down from the BBC programme after twenty-seven years. I have joined in with this. IOT has done some things that many people would have thought impossible. It has held millions of people gripped by discussions between three academics, moderated by Bragg, on subjects from “Kant’s Categorical Imperative” (September 21, 2017) to “Wuthering Heights” (September 28, 2017). It has appealed to the under-thirty-fives, as well as to us greybeards (Bragg himself is very proud that it is one of the BBC’s most popular podcasts among young listeners). And it has convinced a wide audience that university teachers can be funny and engaging, not just dry as dust.
Students play it late at night for painless revision, and I don’t know anyone in my line of business who doesn’t at some point turn to the relevant IOT episode for a quick re-introduction to what they have largely forgotten. It rescued me on “Aristotle’s biology” (February 7, 2019) and “Alcuin” (January 30, 2020). I hope the BBC have got the message that – in a world of simplistic binaries and clickbait – we need more programmes of this sort, unashamedly exposing, and revelling in, the complexity of argument.
But most of the tributes have written about the programme as if it had been largely unchanged for almost the last three decades, and as if our sole ambition should be to see it continue much the same in perpetuity. The fact is that is has changed radically over its history, and for the future we might have to ring the changes.
Even Bragg seems a bit hazy on how it started out. “For a programme with a wholly misleading title”, he observed in one of these tribute pieces, “it’s been quite a ride.” In Our Time was not a misleading title at all for its first couple of years, which largely featured discussions on some aspect of the twentieth century, that is “our time”. These took place between two rather than three experts, and they not all were academics. The very first discussion (October 15, 1998) was on “War in the 20th century”, between Michael Ignatieff and Michael Howard. The following week Gore Vidal and Alan Clark discussed “Politics in the 20th century”. One of my favourites (January 7, 1999) is the sometimes fiery argument on “Feminism” between the Darwinian Helena Cronin and a wonderfully characteristic Germaine Greer. She satirizes masturbation as a “duty” for modern men, “like cleaning your teeth”, and at one point she turns to give the chair a quick lesson: “Let me explain, Melvyn, there’s always been a tension in feminism between whether you are going to demand equality or privilege difference …”.
It took a few years for the more familiar themes and format to develop. Even since then, there have been changes, at least from the point of view of the participants (I took part eleven times between 2001 and 2017). As I recall, the earlier ones were much more free-flowing, less overtly choreographed. The later ones involved much more preparation and briefing. A long phone call would explain that (eg) Melvyn would start by asking Dr X to set the scene, then he would come to you to explore the political background more closely, and so on. I am not criticizing that. If I were running a live radio discussion at 9 o’clock on a Thursday morning (and it used to be live, though not recently, I believe), I would want all the participants well briefed too. But it was more edgy and fun in the earlier days.
And more change must come. It is faintly dispiriting to think that some poor new boy or girl is going to step into Bragg’s shoes, while (obviously) not being quite as good at “being Bragg” as he was. I’m not sure what precise changes I foresee, but I do think that the subjects could be a little less conservative. To speak just of the history episodes, there is a lot more to academic history than the largely old chestnuts (albeit fascinating ones) on which IOT concentrates – mostly, but not entirely, narrative, and/or great works of literature. In fact, the very earliest programmes took rather more intellectual risks than the recent ones (try, for example Roger Scruton and Will Self on “Modern Culture”, January 21, 1999). So, I wish IOT a great future, but not as an old dinosaur that eventually gets pensioned off, when past its prime.
There is a great wiki-list of all episodes of the programme, from which you can link to all the programmes I have mentioned in this post. After some recent regrettable BBC changes with overseas broadcasting, I am not 100 per cent sure that listeners outside that UK will still be able to hear them. But I hope so.
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