Hopefully, there were no plans to push Lord Bragg out. Certainly, Radio 4 controller Mohit Bakaya was lavish in his praise after Bragg announced his departure, saying, “His fierce intellect, coupled with a wonderful curiosity and extraordinary passion for knowledge, marks him out as one of the broadcasting greats.”
In Our Time has also offered the BBC much-needed credibility when it has often been accused of dumbing down. In an age of anti-science conspiracy theories on social media and campaigns against “experts”, it has been a counterbalance to the sidelining of genuine intellectual curiosity. “I hope so,” says Bragg. “Because that is disastrous, utterly stupid and destructive. It’s disappointing that quite a bit of our public life is ignorant – but we’re not ignorant.”
Back in 1998, the BBC told Bragg – who had been obliged to leave his berth at Start the Week when he entered the House of Lords as a Labour peer – that the new show could have six months and they would see how it went. “They offered me what was cheerfully called ‘the death slot’,” he says, of the Thursday 9am broadcast time. The very first episode was called War in the 20th Century. Executives had no idea what would happen but then, as he admits, neither did Bragg. “I had not the slightest inkling. It was just a sort of shot in the dark.” It turned out that ordinary listeners were hungry for knowledge. Within a year, the show was getting an audience of 1.5 million and today it is heard by more than two million people a week.
This approach reached a wider audience than expected partly, says Bragg, because people missed things at school and regret it. “I missed science because I stopped doing it at 14, so the science episodes are a wonderland for me. Then you discover that people all over the country feel the same way, they want to learn about science. So, we all go away with a real increase in our knowledge, in our comprehension of what’s going on in the world.”
Did he ever think of taking In Our Time on to TV? “I did think about it in the early days, for about five minutes. And I thought what would happen would be everybody taking part would become self-conscious, and it wouldn’t work as well, so I dropped the idea.” Instead, In Our Time was at the forefront of the corporation’s entry into podcasting, first on the BBC website and iTunes in 2004. “Some people wondered whether In Our Time was good enough, or grand enough, or important enough,” says Bragg of the switch to online that would attract a global audience. “But we just did it, and the audience came to us in millions, and it came to us from around the world. Though, obviously, I’m very surprised.”
Now there is the question of who can possibly replace him. It has been reported that the job was offered to Mishal Husain (who spoke to Bragg for the 1,000th edition of In Our Time, in 2023) to try to persuade her to stay at the BBC. Does he think it matters if it’s a woman? “No, not in the slightest.” So, who would Bragg want to see in the role? “It’s a good question,” he laughs. “I haven’t thought because it’s none of my business any more.”
“Mohit very generously said, ‘Well, we’re going to do more stuff.’ I hope it’s going to be based on the archive, which is extraordinary,” Bragg reveals. “There is nothing like it in the world. It’s an oral encyclopaedia, the like of which exists nowhere else. A lot of young people now prefer to listen than to read, so I’m going to devote myself to doing something special with that. I hope it will be a contemporary encyclopaedia.” An exciting prospect for Bragg? “Oh, it’s going to be great fun.”
The In Our Time archive is available via BBC Sounds
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