Melvyn Bragg steps down from presenting In Our Time

In Our Time represents the best of the form, and the BBC, and that's significantly down to the excellence of Bragg.

The archive (you may need a VPN outside the UK):

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qykl/episodes/player

Some curated lists:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/2Dw1c7rxs6DmyK0pMR...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letters_of_last_resort

I don't know, there are some definite bright spots like IOT but the typical output of Radio 4 is definitely not massively in advance of the big podcasts. The Rest Is History/Politics are clearly hugely popular inside the UK and basically constitute "the competition" for your average R4 listener.

I actually think that the podcast model is a big threat for traditional radio. Podcasts are much more lucrative for the makers, the reach is as-big (or bigger) and you don't have to negotiate with the government like R4 does.

> you may need a VPN outside the UK

Not that odd, really.

But yes, the BBC was always the voice of the Establishment (which is fine) but it's definitely been neutered. You can see it in the documentary output very clearly.

I agree, I chose the wording "best of" rather than "typical" for that reason.

For instance, I regret the asinine tendency to provide "humourous" expositions of subjects in the various programmes co-chaired by second-rate comedians and apparently aimed at what low-expectations BBC execs feel young people can handle.

IOT's format has a lot of statements, but not many questions. Bragg doesn't often say "hold on, what are the consequences of that?" (unless it's a prepared question designed to move us through the biography). Ironically, this lack of curiosity gets worse on subjects he understands well (the arts).

The unscripted chat afterwards is often the best bit. I could do with 10 minutes of on-script introduction and 50 minutes of experts discussing something they're passionate about.

The guests are often pretty eminent academics, feted in their field and used to being indulged. There have been some I know that very much enjoy the sound of their own voice as they tediously ramble for hours, bending any topic to their own pet themes, with colleagues and students obediently hanging on their words. Melvyn has the stature to get testy "Enough about his wife, you still haven't answered the question, get on with it!" and the Oxford emeritus professor complies.

The after show chat works because it's post-time-crunch. It's pressure release and reflection. If you do recruitment this is something to learn. You will have a much more valuable interaction after you have scraped off interviewee armour.

Most of the time I don’t care enough about each topic or what are passions of the experts are to listen to it.

Having an episode where someone prepared information so I can get acquainted with the topic but I don’t have to deal with forwarding some professor ranting about his pet peeve is huge amount of value.

You seem to suggest I'm confused about this and I would appreciate if you could explain why.

It really didn't read to me like they wanted to completely invalidate your statement.

Hmm! The majority of academics in the UK teach... most of them reluctantly and badly because it's mandatory for their research contract!

Those that revel in it are used to monologuing extemporanously for hours every day in the lecture hall and supervision without interuption. It's quite far from a snappy conversational media performer.

If ever I feel there is a need for a deeper dive into a subject, there a thousand ways I can spend hours listening or watching someone drone on about it.

Excluding things like political things which wouldn't land the same to international listeners, my favourites are:

The Kitchen Cabinet You're Dead To Me Crowdscience Inside Science Just a Minute The Unbelievable Truth Nature Table Take Four Books Witness History Last Word Gardener's Question Time A Good Read (I wrote a blog post a while ago about scraping the books using LLMs to extract from the text of the descriptions: https://rpep.dev/posts/a-good-read-extracting-books-with-llm...)

I fear Emily Maitlis will annoy me more than Alistair Darling does though. Can't win.

There's always The Rest Is History for neutral interesting information!

just

like

this