As Melvyn Bragg says, "I hope this is not my obituary."

 

When he commences his speech, everyone, expecting an outburst of unrestrained bravado, is pleasantly surprised at how well mannered someone who has achieved so much remains, how devoid of ego the whole affair ends up being.  
 

Last year, Jeremy Paxman was the epitome of chivalry, this year it’s Mr. Bragg. Maybe The Media Society should get into the image reversal business full-time.  

 

But what is different about Melvyn Bragg, and the honorary Media Society Annual Award bestowed upon him, is not our apparent credulity or Humean scepticism; it is simply that he is not your average celebrity.  Like the artists and intellectuals he covers, he's an outsider.  Instead of name dropping pop culture icons, his peers shout out Schopenhauer, Pynchon, and nuclear fission.  In that way too he is most definitely modern.  None of that starving artist palaver, as the Arts Club members in the audience can attest. Art, and even talking about art, is use-ful, part of what Mark Damazer, oddly channelling Adorno, calls a "culture industry."  

 

Most of the praise on the night is reserved for his work on Radio Four’s In Our Time and ITV’s The South Bank Show. Chris Smith lionises him for “lifting the intelligence of public discourse enormously.” Mark Damazer says “In Our Time best expresses what public service broadcasting can achieve.” 

 

Back in the day, in their infinite wisdom, nationalists, from the Young Turks to Edmund Burke, insisted on the importance of high culture.  It, like a reversal of the collective gains tax, supposedly would instigate a trickle down effect on the populace. At the end of the day, everyone is richer.  

 

But most of the stuff that passes for entertainment nowadays, in novelist P.D. James curiously tangential aside on the inadequacy of the BBC, is crowded out by “loud music.”  Bragg is different. James continues, “He makes no distinction between high art and what is popular. Anybody interested in the 20^th Century will look at the South Bank Show.”

 

Others focus on his manifold style – namely his prose, his coiffure or his dashing attire. “He poses a sartorial problem for the rest of us,” laments Howard Jacobson. 

 

Geraldine Sharpe-Newton says "Bragg is an institution". So too is the BBC.  Now James is starting to make sense.

 

Bragg begins by praising his enthusiasts. He swiftly moves on to young journalists.

 

“Young people are still coming in. There is no falling off either. We need to pass on what we’ve had, give them a chance at minority areas, make sure we cover the minority oddness and the radical nature of it all. Don’t let it become a mere boring monolith.”

 

Cue the earlier quote from the Communist Manifesto about losing our chains. Even Marx is acceptable territory.  It brings to mind Lacan and talking things to death.  See, this culture stuff is contagious.

 

Bragg's reputation precedes him.  Yet, after all this, he seems like such a great guy.