Melvyn Bragg is the most articulate spokesman for the arts in Britain on Independent Television (ITV). Presenter and editor of The South Bank Show since 1978, and controller of Arts Programs for London Weekend Television since 1990, he is now president of the National Campaign for the Arts and has arguably done more to advance the cause of arts programming on television and radio than anyone else.

Bragg was a working-class boy who won a scholarship to Wadham College, Oxford, before joining the BBC in 1961 as a radio and, later, television producer. Bragg has never forgotten his origins; he shares with his viewers his genuine delight in new artistic discoveries, and readers of his novels delight in his portraits of northern England. Bragg worked for the BBC Television flagship arts program, Monitor, under its brilliant editor Huw Wheldon, and in 1967 he became producer and editor of BBC 2’s first arts program, New Release, as well as the program Writers’ World. Interviewed in 1970, he explained that when he worked for the BBC in the 1960s, he had wanted to make arts programs current; he added that he wanted to put on the arts because I think it’s the only way that People, with a capital P, are going to find out about the things that I particularly like. Missionary is too strong a word for it and propaganda is the wrong word—but it’s certainly to do with the fact that the people I was born and brought up among very rarely read books, but all of them look at television.

Bragg’s tenure as the anchor of the BBC Radio 4 program Start the Week, as well as his editorship of The South Bank Show, have led to his being known as the “Arts Tsar” or “Arts Supremo.” Critics have suggested that “any traffic between high art and mass taste had to pass through Bragg’s custom post,” as Henry Porter wrote in the Guardian. Bragg replied that in England if people get too big for their boots, they get cut off at the knees.

Bragg’s long tenure as presenter of The South Bank Show has kept the flag flying for the arts on ITV, and Bragg claims that ITV shows more arts programming than the BBC does. Among the outstanding episodes of The South Bank Show that will go down in history are Bragg’s portrait of the English film director David Lean, and Bragg’s moving 70-minute interview with the dying screenwriter Dennis Potter.

In the 1990s Bragg became the most articulate contributor to the “two cultures” debate since the late Lord Snow, and he proved himself equally at ease in the worlds of science and social science. In 1998 Bragg presented the BBC Radio 4 series on the history of science, On Giant’s Shoulders, with his own book to accompany the series, and in 2001 he chaired the televised Darwin Debate, which examined the significance of evolution theory for human society on BBC 2. His 20-part television series on the history of Christianity, Two Thousand Years (ITV, 1999), demonstrates the breadth of his intellectual interests; he wrote two books to accompany the series. Bragg has also written screenplays for such dramas as Isadora, Jesus Christ Superstar, and, with Ken Russell, Clouds of Glory. Of his 19 novels, A Time to Dance was televised in 1992, and his novel The Soldier’s Return won the W.H. Smith Writer’s Award in 2000.

Bragg profited from his support of London Weekend Television’s franchise-renewal application to the tune of several million pounds, and he also became chair of the ITV program contractor, Border Television, in 1990. Without his skills and dedication, it is possible that arts programs on ITV might have been marginalized in the same way that ITV religious programs have been. His presence and his promotional skills have ensured good time slots and good ratings for The South Bank Show. His clear-sighted integrity has endeared him to television makers, artists, and politicians alike. Bragg became chancellor of the University of Leeds in 1998, a well-deserved recognition from a university that has encouraged the interaction of the worlds of academia and television for many years. He currently hosts two programs on BBC Radio 4: In Our Time, in which he discusses key cultural and scientific topics with his guests, and The Routes of English, which traces the evolution and development of the language.

Established as an outstanding arts presenter, Bragg is also seen as a wise elder statesman commenting on the future of British television. In the 1990s he warned the government that British television was being turned into a two-tier system, “telly for nobs and telly for slobs” and that the medium was being destroyed by a “class and cash” system whereby satellite and cable systems were able to siphon off prime material. Every newspaper reported his speech, and the Daily Telegraph devoted an editorial to the subject. Such leadership, all too rare in the independent sector, suggests that Melvyn Bragg will be remembered as one of the greatest of the ITV leaders in the 1980s and 1990s, and at the dawn of the 21st century.