Melvyn Bragg: 'I think Howard Stringer would be a cleansing sword for the BBC'

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/may/11/melvyn-bragg-howard-stringer-bbc-sky-arts

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Back in the dark days of the recession when a panicked ITV crassly cancelled The South Bank Show, Britain's longest-running arts programme, its editor and presenter Melvyn Bragg turned to the eager embrace of BSkyB. From one programme in 2011 – the South Bank Awards – Sky Arts has increased its commitment to Bragg over the past three years with the result that he currently has 52 shows in production.

Bragg, who began his career in arts broadcasting at the BBC, and still has a foot in that camp with In Our Time on Radio 4, is in no doubt as to what has spurred BBC director general Tony Hall's new commitment to the arts. "There are two big beasts in the arts, the BBC and Sky Arts – challenging, leading the way. We are going to give them a very good run for their money. Good luck to them, get on with it. We will get on with this!" he says.

With BBC Arts going into battle with operas, dramas and ballets, and broadcasts from festivals including Hay on Wye (previously sponsored by Sky), does he agree that many of the initiatives seem copied? "I couldn't possibly comment," he replies crisply. But he had been in the audience for Hall's launch in March, and does not demur when I say guests there remarked on the host of similarities. Sky Arts champions single plays in Playhouse Presents. BBC promises new single dramas. Sky Arts has broadcast live relays from English National Opera. The BBC will show Glyndebourne's Der Rosenkavalier this summer.

Asked if Sky Arts played a part in Hall's new strategy, Bragg is emphatic. "Yes, I think it did, it was one of the influences. Sky Arts is not a new kid on the block – it is the block, with two channels [Sky Arts 1 and 2]. The proof of the pudding will be on screen. They [the BBC] have so much money to spend, so much spread, they can do things very well." He has had no approaches from them about the planned new version of Civilisation, but on the choice of presenter says: "Good luck to them. Tough call."

In fact, the current crisis, the need to find a new chairman of the BBC Trust, could be an opportunity for renewal, he suggests, with cuts to its bloated management. He is backing the former Sony boss, Sir Howard Stringer. "I think Howard Stringer would be great. Very powerful. He would be a wonderful chairman of the BBC, but also bring it a cleansing sword. The thing is, he won't go native. He is not charmable." What should this cleansing sword do? "The BBC is rightly in a process of having a rigorous self-examination. Friends of the BBC, and I am one, hope it can do this in such a way it will be refitted to sail on for many more triumphant years."

Turning back to Sky Arts, he says "there is a zeal there. Because these people mean it. Their drive is there, from the top, from Jeremy Darroch [BSkyB's chief executive] downwards. What you get is backing. They just want to do more arts programmes, the commitment is absolute.

"I think they are on to something in the arts. There has been a change [in the public appetite for them], and it is down to access to higher education. When I went to university in 1958 only 5% of the population went. Now it is 44%. We are a much more educated population." But Sky Arts is run on a lean, undisclosed budget. Bragg says his budgets are "decent, tight but adequate".

The glory days of his South Bank Show enclave on the 16th floor of LWT's tower overlooking the Thames seem like another country. Now a most unlikely entrepreneur, as he acknowledges, he runs a modest four-person independent called Directors Cut Productions, with small offices near Oxford Circus.

Of the dark period when ITV's chairman Michael Grade (who greenlit the ITV arts series as LWT director of programmes in 1978) and director of programmes Peter Fincham cancelled The South Bank Show, he says: "Being stopped in your tracks [like that], it bucks you up, a bit of failure." But he was given an astute piece of advice then by Lord (David) Puttnam around the time of the cancellation. "He said 'what are you going to do with the archive? Get hold of it, go and see Michael Grade'." Bragg did, and emerged with a legal agreement to have prime access to the archive, in excess of 760 programmes, and a huge stash of untransmitted material.

This has opened the door to the broader deal with Sky Arts, with more developments to come in future years. July sees the launch of 30 South Bank Originals, new half-hour programmes, combining archive interviews with new ones recorded by Bragg. They kick off with Paul McCartney, who was on the first South Bank Show, in a film including a catch-up interview with Clive James, the Observer TV critic who back then, Bragg says, was "the only one to grasp its popular agenda". The series will also feature Puttnam discussing David Lean and Kiri Te Kanawa on Pavarotti.

He has also invented a new strand, South Bank Digital Masterclasses, launching later this year online and probably on screen, starting with Joan Armatrading on how to write a song. Nicholas Hytner will give advice on how to direct a stage play, Tracey Emin on how to draw and Abi Morgan on screenwriting.

But the new run of six one-hour South Bank Shows starts on 22 May with a film about TV comedy producer John Lloyd, the man behind Not the Nine O'Clock News, Blackadder, Spitting Image and QI, which deals frankly with his fallow period in the 1990s. It is a classic, thoroughly researched South Bank Show, made by one of the series' stalwarts, Gillian Greenwood.

Bragg loves his job and says he has no intention of ever retiring. In that respect he is the arts world's equivalent of David Attenborough, who at 88 is still in huge demand. Attenborough too was wooed by Sky in 2010 and is working on a landmark 3D series for Sky Atlantic, in tandem with one for the BBC's Natural History Unit.

"I am 74 now, looking back I have a sense of not really being in control of my career," Bragg says. "I just went where it took me. 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. This was a wonderful way to make a living. To anyone coming in, I'd say 'give it a go'."