Interview with Melvyn Bragg: my suicidal thoughts, infidelity and regrets (original) (raw)

You see him here. You hear him there. On television, on radio, on bookshelves and in parliament, for nearly 50 years, there has been nothing elusive about the broadcaster, novelist and Labour peer Melvyn Bragg, the handsome face and adenoidal voice of British arts. Astounded by his workload, Brian Tesler, his old boss at London Weekend Television, used to accuse him of running an atelier of overworked apprentices in his loft. His own excuse has been that work has allowed him to escape the personal demons that might otherwise overwhelm him.

Oddly, Lord Bragg has also been a frequent physical presence in my life. Once, while I was buried in a book, he announced himself to me on a train, and I looked up suitably startled. More often the paths on which we cross are London streets. On these occasions, he is always genial, although he knows I have been a critic of his television work. Bragg apparently walks everywhere. For years, the newsletters he wrote to supplement In Our Time, his weekly Radio Four seminar in which the roles of demanding dons and besieged pupil are reversed, ended with descriptions of his post-broadcast strolls. He may be the capital’s greatest literary perambulator since Dickens.

In our interview, I discover why. We talk in his offices in London. He is in a typical Bragg get-up, a good grey suit and pink tie loosely knotted. His hair is luxuriant, Seventies-style, but still good on him. He is trim, too, having lost half a stone from a recent bout of pneumonia; he would have lost more but for his hip surgery in February. Typically, by recording extra programmes, he made sure he did not miss a single In Our Time.

Our conversation, initially good humoured, becomes darker as we move from my reservations about The South Bank Show to his self-excoriation of his personal life. I ask if he has ever contemplated suicide.

“Several times. There was one suicidal moment that scared the living daylights out of me, and I knew it was serious. I was with Lise [his first wife, Marie-Elisabeth Roche] and I was getting in trouble with heights. I was in Shepherds Bush Tube station, going home from Lime Grove [BBC studios] and I heard the train in the tunnel and I knew I was going to throw myself in front of it. So I pressed myself against the wall and was actually ... to say pouring with sweat is wrong, but sweating very heavily, until it stopped. And I walked up the stairs and have never taken the Tube since.”

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So that’s why he walks everywhere!

“Walk, or take a taxi.”

Marie-Elsa, his daughter from that first marriage, said a few years ago her father was a tormented man. I ask if he is still.

“Tormented is a strong word. Sometimes tormented. If there’s a halfway [point] between tormented and depressed, it will be that.”

Incredibly, given his looks, Bragg is 78.

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Paul McCartney on The South Bank Show, 1978

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He talks about his regrets being as much a function of his age as his experience yet, both professionally and personally, he is in the twilight of nothing. Indeed, two years ago, he began a new era in his domestic life when he separated from his second wife, the author and television producer Cate Haste. Once she had left their home, Gabriel Clare-Hunt, his girlfriend on and off for decades, moved in.

At one point, his mobile rings. “It’s Cate!” They must be on good terms then, I say, after he suppresses the call. “We’re on terms,” he replies.

In the convoluted and sometimes tragic journey of his personal life – Lise took her own life in 1971 – this, one assumes, is a final turning. In contrast, The South Bank Show marches forward as if on a Roman road. Its 40th anniversary having passed quietly in January, its 22nd annual awards ceremony is held at the Savoy tomorrow. The awards, its publicists claim, are unique in representing “the entire spectrum of the arts” from classical music to comedy. In this, of course, it bestrides the show’s ambition.

Bragg began his career in radio. His first TV experience came working on Huw Wheldon’s BBC arts programme Monitor in 1964. In estimating The South Bank _Show_’s contribution to arts broadcasting we must remember how narrow Monitor was. When he returned from a shoot with the conductor Sir John Barbirolli and told Wheldon that the great man, by then 66, had been listening to the Beatles and pronounced them “really good”, Wheldon simply did not believe Bragg. On another occasion, when he suggested a programme on Elvis Presley, his seniors “almost left the room”.

Bragg quit the BBC to pursue a career as a writer. During this period, in the early Seventies, he wrote screenplays, including for the film of Jesus Christ Superstar, but was frustrated by the lack of ownership. Equally, while his novel-writing would prove prolific, it did not quite amount to a living for a married man with a family in London. Back at the BBC in 1974, he hit on a novel way of popularising literature on television: devising a book programme that looked like a panel game. A panel on Read All About It might include Jonathan Miller, Clive James and Joan Bakewell with Lady Antonia Fraser as guest of the week.

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I look back on my life as a series of a things that I’m ashamed of or could have done better

In 1978, having additionally proved himself by conducting long-form interviews with writers such as Saul Bellow and Günter Grass, he was lured to ITV by London Weekend Television for a salary hike of £2,500. After a sticky start on Saturday nights against Match of the Day, Bragg revamped the programme by devoting each edition to a film about a single subject.

From the start, its breadth was evident. In those first years, it profiled the TV playwright Jack Gold, the Broadway musical producer Hal Prince, Talking Heads and Billy Connolly, but it was for a film on Kenneth MacMillan’s ballet Mayerling that the show won a 1978 Prix Italia, an award Bragg suspects saved the programme from cancellation. Over the next four decades, if you had not been profiled on The South Bank Show, you had either not made it in the arts or turned Bragg down.

There were outstanding episodes, many more routine ones, but when in 2009 Peter Fincham, ITV’s director of television effectively axed it by telling Bragg to reduce its costs by 80 per cent, it took only 2 years for Sky Arts to revive it, albeit with just 6 new programmes a year backed up by a library of revised profiles. The South Bank Show was too significant a pillar of the British cultural Parthenon to remain toppled.

Its strength and weaknesses were present in its very first edition, a profile of Paul McCartney. Bragg emphasises that the programme was a coup since McCartney was media-shy following the bust-up with John Lennon. But did Bragg ask him about it?

“I didn’t because he wouldn’t have answered. I would have probably scared him off. But that’s a good point you’re making and I’m sure you’ll come back to that.”

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I do come back to it, for in my 20 years as a television critic I, not always, but frequently marked The South Bank Show down for its timorousness. This was not because Bragg is an untalented interviewer. His empathetic, carefully structured interview of the dying screenwriter Dennis Potter in 1994 has claim to be the best in television history. As host of Radio 4’s Start the Week between 1988 and 1998, he turned a cosy plugarama for authors into a sharp-witted, celebrity-free and serious-minded discussion programme. When, as he puts it, he was “fired” from it on becoming a Labour peer (he blames an unnamed executive’s long-standing grudge), he started In Our Time, a programme itself 20 years old this October. The rigour with which Bragg taxes his academics on subjects from cosmology to hermeneutics is merciless. A year ago, a guest answered his query about Socrates with the word, “Probably.” “Does he or doesn’t he? You are the expert,” said Bragg. Imagine a spark of dialogue like that on The South Bank Show.

“In Our Time is a different sort of interviewing completely from The South Bank Show,” he counters. “I take that it [his approach on the latter] can be seen as too soft. It was often too soft, but then I think, well, don’t listen to the questions, listen to the answers. And now we’ve put out over 150 South Bank Show Originals where we take out 60 minutes of the original programme and add a fresh critic. They’re gold. What they actually said is terrific. The proof is in the pudding.”

Bragg’s 1981 encounter with Elizabeth Taylor

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To which I would say the pudding might have been even richer if he had stirred a bit more vigorously. Too often he stepped back from the embarrassing, critical or personal question. He offers two reasons. The first is that he tended to interview artists he admired. “I was not in awe of them, but listing in that direction.” The second is that he did not want to scare them off. “Also, I thought that, if I lobbed, it meant that they could smash. And they did. If I lobbed something like, ‘Why is the novel so important to you?’ to Norman Mailer, he took off.”

There was nothing, therefore, on how the great American writer came to stab his wife, a question of some interest, in particular, to his feminist critics. For that, they would need to dig out instead an edition of America’s The Dick Cavett Show.

He then says something that I cannot accept, for it seems an offence both against journalism and literary biography: “I don’t think that the relationship between autobiography and art is necessarily straightforward or necessarily interesting.”

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As he says, we disagree, but after such an exchange, it would be cowardly were I not to pry into Bragg’s private history. In this I am aided by his 2008 autobiographical novel, Remember Me, although I am aware I use the book to illuminate the life rather than the other way around, which would be more critically respectable. Remember Me is the fourth of a family saga, which began with The Soldier’s Return, about a soldier returning from Burma after World War Two to his home in Wigton, Cumbria, a small, puritanical town with well-buried family secrets – and the place in which Melvyn Bragg was born to a tailoress and her ex-soldier husband, the landlord of a local pub.

By book four, Sam the soldier’s son, Joe, isat Oxford University where he meets an art student called Natasha, whom he marries. Natasha is a brilliant but troubled young Frenchwoman. In London with Joe, who is working at the BBC, she becomes increasingly unhappy and takes to Jungian analysis, persuading Joe to find a therapist of similar ilk. Although they have a daughter, Joe starts an affair with a BBC researcher named Helen and leaves the family home, while never quite deciding between the two women and continuing to sleep with both. Natasha dies from an overdose in France.

Joe is very largely Bragg and Natasha is, in good part, his first wife, Lise, also French, whom he met at Oxford and who killed herself. Helen bears a similar relationship to Cate Haste, whom he went on to marry in 1973, and from whom he split two years ago.

If any character is underwritten it is Haste’s, who became a TV producer and historian. This is probably because the book is partially framed as a gift to Joe and Natasha’s grown-up daughter, “Marcelle” – that is to say, to Marie-Elsa Bragg, who was six when her mother died. The book explains who she was.

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What I’m saying about regrets is as much to do with my age as my life

Writing it, Bragg said on Olivia Lichtenstein’s documentary Melvyn Bragg: Wigton to Westminster in 2015, had been a mistake because it “stirred things” up in him.

I ask if he still regrets it. “I don’t regret writing it, no. That’s wrong. I don’t regret writing it at all. In fact, I wish I had written it more boldly. But I regret publishing it. Looking back on it, I think it was as true as I could make it, but I could have been harder on myself.”

Writing an account of the causes of her suicide did not prove cathartic; neither did his Jungian therapy. To this day he is angry that Lise’s analyst killed herself while she was still in her care and made no posthumous provision for her continued therapy. “That was f***ing unspeakable,” he says.

“I went to a nice chap – I couldn’t afford it, apart from anything else – three times a week. Hauling up to London when I was trying to get going as a writer, freelance, but never mind. I didn’t know what to say. This is the truth: I didn’t know what to say. I don’t dream very much, and if I do I can’t remember them for more than ten seconds. So I was lying on this couch and what the f*** am I supposed to say? And he would prompt me but … So it was three years I did that. Also, what I didn’t like about it was there’s an addictive side to it. Even though I didn’t like it, even though I didn’t rate it, after a year I was kind of addicted.”

Despite having written so many words about a close version of himself, and despite the years of analysis (terminated swiftly after Lise’s death), Bragg remains unable to forgive himself.

“One of the best songs in the world, and one of the most stupid quotes in the world, is Non, je ne regrette rien. How anybody can go around saying they don’t regret anything! I think they must be zombies.”

Sin, he explains, was dinned into him as a child. Although he views some things about Christianity with affection – Marie-Elsa is a priest – its take on sin is not among them.

“We were high church, so we were all sinners. Confession every week: ‘You’re a bad person.’ And so there was a psychological track record there. I look back on my life as a series of a things that I’m ashamed of, could have done better. You know, when you can’t get to sleep and you sometimes mark yourself, it’s single figures out of 100.”

The trick, I suggest, may have been to avoid guilt by obeying the strictures of his faith.

Interviewing the terminally ill Dennis Potter – who died three months after this was recorded – in March 1994

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“The thing was that by the time I was, let’s say 17, it had started to drain away. Of course, there’s no resurrection. Of course, there’s no eternal life. Of course, there were no miracles.”

Perhaps he threw out Christian ethics along with the Christian faith?

“I hadn’t thought of that. I suppose I did. I threw a lot out. I think I got completely carried away. Although it was wonderful, Lise didn’t know who I was. She came from a completely different culture: social, intellectual, language and so on. So we were very, very different. And I was pretty young, 21. I’m not making excuses, but I sort of am making excuses. You came to London and it was almost like the Klondike. It was land grabs. It was, ‘God, everybody’s going mad in the Wild West.’

“I think I lost my head. Also, there was a bit of success early on, which I didn’t have the slightest idea how to deal with. When I started to write, when I was about 18 or 19, I mean, I couldn’t give the stuff away. It never occurred to me I’d be published.”

I suggest he embraced just about all the “sins” he would have heard condemned from the pulpit in Wigton. For instance, barely a conversation in Remember Me begins without someone saying, “Do you want a drink?”

“Again, you see, I was brought up in a pub and we never drank. [But] yes, there was drink at that time,” he says. Over the yearshe developed strategies to cope with it. For 12 years he abjured alcohol for the first week of each month. This has since been supplanted by another routine abstinence, the details of which he keeps to himself.

There was too the personal vanity, the “weakness for the mirror” as it says in the novel, the trendy leather coat for which Joe’s wife scolds him (prompted, Bragg eventually remembers owning the very thing) and, later, the inevitable ego inflation of fronting a TV programme. “We’re getting into tricky territory here, Andrew, because Joe is not me. It isn’t a memoir. It’s autobiographical fiction.”

Outside the novel then: there are the reports of bursts of anger at colleagues (all of those to whom I talk, incidentally, say they like him).

“I lose my temper sometimes. I mean, my life in television and radio is governed by deadlines. You’ve got to finish the cut by Thursday night and on Wednesday afternoon it isn’t working – sometimes it’s bloody difficult – so sometimes I lose my temper as a shortcut to getting things done, but not that often.”

Most marked of all, however, has been his infidelity. It is not that Bragg has debauched his way around medialand, more that he has repeated a pattern of vacillation between two women he has loved, a pattern whose template was forged in the Lise-Cate triangle all those decades ago. It was widely known that, although he and Cate Haste had a son and a daughter, Bragg had two long-lasting affairs. One of, it is said, eight years was with Lady Jane Wellesley, the daughter of the eighth Duke of Wellington and a former girlfriend of Prince Charles.

With his second wife, Cate Haste, in 2006

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The other was with Gabriel Clare-Hunt, once married to a prep school headmaster, who worked briefly as a secretary at LWT. In the Nineties, I remember a friend of Bragg’s complaining he never knew who Bragg would bring to dinner, his wife or mistress, since he was always on the point of leaving one or the other. It is Clare-Hunt, now in her early sixties, who today shares his house in Hampstead.

“Well, I’ve known Gabriel for 40 years. And we haven’t been having an affair for 40 years by a long way. By a long way. We’ve known each other for that long. We’re very, very good friends. I think, given what was against us, Cate and I made a very good fist of it for 46 years.”

She was a good stepmother? “Yes, and a very good mother. I don’t want to talk about the children because they hate it, but the three children are doing terrifically. I think they’re decent people. We had good friends, we lived modest lives and we got on with it. And then it just, like these things do, I suppose, ground to a halt, very slowly, for all sorts of reasons that will take a long time to unravel.”

Unable to choose between a wife and a mistress, I muse – living like that would do me in. “It nearly did for me, I have to say. Nearly did me in. But there was nothing phoney about it. I suppose it depends what you’re looking for. I don’t know. I’ve tried to write it, but I can’t write about it really because there was so much that was good in our relationship and she’s a really fine woman. And she’s well set up now and that’s good. And she’s finishing a big book, so she’s got plenty to do. And we talk to each other, obviously, and we still have the children and the grandchildren.

“It’s a big subject, Andrew. It’s like one of those knots that you can’t undo. There are two ways to look at it to me, broadly, and neither is satisfactory. One way is, to use a proper phrase, I lost myself. Which is odd, because when I go back through it, people say, ‘He’s never lost himself.’ They really do. On the other hand, in one way I did lose myself. I was trying new sorts of freedoms, I was trying to bust out of the extraordinary constraints of my – although happy – childhood.

“The other way of looking back at it is that it was an extraordinary straitened background. I got depressed and depression, which is not surprising. My dad went to the war and I never knew until I was 18 that my mother was illegitimate. All that sort of stuff was going on: uncles and aunts who weren’t uncles and aunts, the crowded little places we lived in. And then you came to London and after a few years you think, ‘Nice. I don’t have to do that. I can do that, instead. What if I do that?’

“And, of course, television fluffs our vanities and all of that. You go with them. It’s a messy business but sometimes it’s terrific. Sometimes it’s been wonderful.”

He has had an amazing career, I agree. “I have had, yes, but again, as you get older you think that isn’t quite all. You just do realise that. It’s very nice here but, honestly, I don’t think I’ve got very far. I’ve just been very lucky and gone up a ladder that was available at the time. Maybe what I’m saying about regrets is to do with my age as much as it’s to do with my life.”

A complacent old age would be terrible.

“I could do with it. If you could buy complacency down the street I think I’d go and buy half a pound. Not complacency, but a sense of calm.”

I had been prepared for Bragg’s ire and promised to inure myself to his charm. What I had not expected was for our conversation to become so melancholy. The least I can do is thank him. I know he was wary of seeing me.

“No, no, I’m not wary,” he says as I pack up. “I talked as openly as I could. The personal things I find difficult, for obvious reasons, but also because you don’t know where the truth is, really. That’s all.”

And that is all. Ubiquitous Melvyn Bragg may be, but he remains, to himself, elusive. We may disagree about the boundaries and point of interviews, but no one can fairly accuse the man of failing to address the hardest questions about himself.

The South Bank Sky Arts Awards 2018 is being broadcast on Sky Arts on July 4 at 8pm