Melvyn Bragg on TV, BBC2, tonight, 9pm
The impact of television on our lives
LORD Melvyn Bragg is sharing his earliest memory of TV.
“It was the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II,” he recalls fondly. “We didn’t have a television, but a friend of mine did and a lot of us went to his house. It was rather like going to the cinema; there was just one television set in the corner, and it was amazing to see it happen,” he continues of the 1953 event. “On this little box, a part of history before our very eyes.
“And that was a take-off point for the sale of television sets in this country,” announces the veteran broadcaster, 77. “For people’s affection for and addiction to television.”
Sixty four years on - 75 since its inception - and the small screen, purportedly deemed a “craze” in the fabulous 50s, has had an impact like no other.
For one, it has made the world an open place, says Bragg.
“We don’t realise that 75 years ago, the world was closed to most people,” reasons the Cumbria-born star.
“They knew their village, they knew their town, they knew a little bit about this and that from geography books, (but) in terms of seeing – and seeing is believing and believing is seeing – very little went on.
“Today, we’re part of the world in a way that we never have been before. We can be present at a state opening of parliament, we can be present when bombs are going off in Iraq ...” he goes on.
“We’re at these things; we’re not participants, but we are viewers who are there when it’s happening. And that, again, I think, has an extraordinary effect on people.
“I haven’t quite worked out what it is, but it is extraordinary.”
Perhaps hosting his latest BBC2 show, Melvyn Bragg on TV: The Box That Changed the World, will provide the answers.
In the two-hour special event, filmed at Bafta, Bragg is joined by some of British television’s key figures to look at the pivotal impact British television has made in the last 60 years.
One such switch is the surge in reality TV, and within that, the redefined status of “celebrity”.
“I think talent helps,” he quips, when the subject is broached. “But I think what television has done, in a few areas, is amplified what was already there. It’s made something that was there and quite big, enormous.
“Years ago there was a programme called Opportunity Knocks, which was basically the same thing,” he notes.
“Young hopefuls came and sang a song or did a dance or whatever, and they went to the final and they won and they became celebrities – sometimes minor, sometimes more.
“It’s now on a bigger scale, but the idea of plucking talent out of the population, out of the mass of people, has been there for a long time and it’s very endearing, it’s very attractive.”
Confessing he sometimes tunes into reality shows “to see what they’re like”, he settles on: “No, I think I feel good about all my pleasures, I don’t think any of them are guilty.”
As for the global success of such streaming sites as Netflix and Amazon, Bragg, a long-standing employee of the BBC, is an advocate for the changing landscape of TV.
“Its good material, good productions, so good for them,” he says, quick to quash tensions between platforms old and new.
“People were snobbish about television when television came in,” chimes Bragg. “They didn’t realise what they were missing out on. They said, ‘I don’t watch television’ and I used to think, ‘Well, it shows’ or ‘I feel rather sorry for you’.