In a frank interview with Claire Allfree, Melvyn Bragg shares his views on government attitudes to culture and why he suspects ACE Chair Nick Serota was 'leant on' by the Conservatives.
It doesn’t take long for Melvyn Bragg to start speaking his mind. We are sitting in the spacious front room of his Hampstead house, the walls crammed with paintings, the floorboards groaning beneath overstuffed sofas and a couple of grand porcelain dogs.
Even though above his armchair hangs a portrait of himself, he is markedly more unassuming than you might expect given the authoritative presence he still commands on Radio 4’s long-running programme of ideas In Our Time.
Yet make no mistake: the veteran 84-year-old presenter is angry and impassioned. “I’m fed up with no one in politics knowing or caring about the arts,” he says. “A general indifference has set in. Throughout my lifetime there has been the feeling the arts did matter, then there was a feeling they didn’t matter and now there is a feeling they don’t matter at all. I don’t like to slag off the Tories but under the last government it hasn’t been a pretty sight.” ... Keep reading on The Telegraph.
It doesn’t take long for Melvyn Bragg to start speaking his mind. We are sitting in the spacious front room of his Hampstead house, the walls crammed with paintings, the floorboards groaning beneath overstuffed sofas and a couple of grand porcelain dogs.
Even though above his armchair hangs a portrait of himself, he is markedly more unassuming than you might expect given the authoritative presence he still commands on Radio 4’s long-running programme of ideas In Our Time.
Yet make no mistake: the veteran 84-year-old presenter is angry and impassioned. “I’m fed up with no one in politics knowing or caring about the arts,” he says. “A general indifference has set in. Throughout my lifetime there has been the feeling the arts did matter, then there was a feeling they didn’t matter and now there is a feeling they don’t matter at all. I don’t like to slag off the Tories but under the last government it hasn’t been a pretty sight.” ... Keep reading on The Telegraph.