Escape the News with the British Podcast “In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg”

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We’re all comfortable with discussing these academic subjects, Melvyn Bragg’s tone seems to say; no need to be self-important.Photograph by Awakening / Getty

In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg,” a weekly BBC Radio 4 program that has aired in the U.K. since 1998, consists of a conversation between its host and three academics about some worthy cultural or historical subject—recently, Picasso’s “Guernica,” feathered dinosaurs, Germaine de Stael, and the Picts. (Up next: Thebes.) The show is beloved in the U.K.; for American podcast enthusiasts, it might be experienced as a refreshing change of pace. It’s nothing like the “This American Life” style of audio entertainment, marked by self-effacing narrative authority, inventive sound design, human intimacy of various kinds, and artfully revealed narrative surprises. It is not organized into themed seasons or arcs. Nor is it an NPR-style show about current events, scientific discoveries, or new books, satisfying a need to keep up with the cultural conversation. It’s just four intelligent people in a studio, discussing complex topics that are, as a friend of mine once said of Bragg’s openers, aggressively uncommercial. To mark the show’s seven-hundred-and-fiftieth episode, last year, a Top Ten list of favorite shows was chosen by listeners. The winning episodes included “1816, the Year Without a Summer,” “The Gin Craze,” “Photosynthesis,” and “Hildegard of Bingen.” Take that, journalistic pegs and hooks.

Bragg, who is seventy-eight, grew up in a town called Wigton, in Cumbria, as the only child of working-class parents. For much of his youth, the family lived above a pub. He went on to study modern history at Oxford, publish three dozen books—fiction and nonfiction—and host long-running culture programs on both TV (“The South Bank Show”) and radio. In 1998, Tony Blair appointed him as a life Labour peer in the House of Lords: he is Lord Bragg of Wigton. British journalists have written about Bragg’s relationships, his holiday parties, his attendance at royal weddings, his lush head of hair. For the naïve American listener, aware of little or none of this context, it’s pleasant just listening to this bluff, no-nonsense presence powering his way through conversation about the Baltic Crusades or the Epic of Gilgamesh. When “The South Bank Show” went off the air, in 2012, British observers worried that it marked a foreboding shift in the cultural landscape—a wide-scale dumbing down. But “In Our Time,” an ideas show in which you run up quickly against your intellectual strengths and weaknesses, just as you did in school, garners two million listeners a week.

“In Our Time” has a straightforward structure. Bragg gives a very brief introduction (“Hello. Until twenty years ago, dinosaurs were widely assumed to be large, lumpen lizards that became extinct millions of years ago”); he asks a guest for background (“Mike Benton, how did the idea become commonplace that dinosaurs were slow, heavy lizards?”); he pushes onward (“How was Huxley’s news received?”); he brings in the second expert (“Steve Brusatte, before we go further, can you give us a few astonishing facts about their lifetime, and what they did, and why they were there so long, and how most of them were extinguished so quickly?”); and the third (“Maria McNamara, what are our listeners to understand by ‘feathers’?”). Once the conversation gets off the ground, Bragg brings in other questions and ideas, continues to extract insights from the academics, draws toward a conclusion, and swiftly wraps up. In the podcast, there’s an extra bit afterward, in which host and guests talk about things they didn’t have time to cover on the air. These segments feel pleasantly like eavesdropping, or hanging out backstage after a lecture. There’s a “How’d we do?” quality, almost as if the tape has been left running. (“And Maria, you didn’t get on to the molecules, and the survival of organic matter, but there we are.”) Somebody comes in and asks if they’d like coffee or tea, and it ends, with the brief teaser of the announcement of next week’s odd topic.

For me, a secondary pleasure of “In Our Time”—and I say this respectfully—is that I find it quite funny, and always because of Bragg. For one, there are those abrupt openers: “Hello, if you were to point a reasonably powerful telescope at the surface of the moon at latitude 17.9 degrees, longitude 92.5 degrees, you’ll find yourself looking at the al-Biruni crater.” “Hello, ‘Four Quartets’ is T. S. Eliot’s last great poem.” “Hello, the Gin Craze gripped Britain in the eighteenth century, when the government feared that poor people were drinking far too much cheap gin, damaging their own health and the safety and well-being of all.” “Hello, Germaine de Staël was born in Paris, in 1766, where her father was finance minister to Louis XVI and her mother held dazzling salons.” Barrelling ahead, his manner is similarly efficient—broadly curious, bluntly purpose-driven. “Let’s zoom in on Pushkin,” he says in the “Eugene Onegin” episode, rolling up his sleeves. He’s stern with his good-natured, compliant academics: he doesn’t want to hear about all six of Jane Austen’s brothers, thank you. In one episode, he says, briskly, “Can I ask you, Jane Gelman, about time in ‘Mrs Dalloway.’ It was originally called ‘The Hours,’ Big Ben keeps striking, clocks are all over the place—right.”

We’re all comfortable with discussing these subjects, his tone seems to say; no need to be self-important. (And there’s none of the self-congratulatory “We’re nerds!” giddiness that can accompany talk about the highbrow or the arcane among people of my generation, especially in the U.S., especially on podcasts.) Bragg can be slangy, in his way—part Henry Higgins, part Eliza Doolittle. Napoleon “only comes a cropper when he tries to invade Russia”; while E. M. Forster was nervous about “Maurice,” he observes, Virginia Woolf was “bowling away with lesbianism.” An overly optimistic “Little Women” joke, quickly regretted, in the Emily Dickinson episode, generated a confused few seconds of his attempting to find some link between Dickinson and Louisa May Alcott; when I heard this moment, this summer on Cape Cod, as I ambled through the woods, I actually stopped in my tracks, I was so startled and amused. His guests were flummoxed, too, as was Bragg, it seemed, but then he shook it off and rolled right along.

During that Cape Cod vacation, I developed a new appreciation for “In Our Time.” Hiking through marshes, or watering flowerbeds and lugging garden hoses around, I sought to escape the feeling of cultural busyness of daily life in Manhattan and the anxiety of political life in America in 2017—but I also wanted perspective. Heading into the winter holidays, it’s something to keep in mind. “In Our Time” provides perspective the way that reading a classic novel does. This summer, I listened to every literature episode of the past few years (the whole archive is available online), explored British views of the Gettysburg Address and the Salem witch trials, and bravely poked around in the realms of the unknown—Saturn, eunuchs, Gerald of Wales. In part because “In Our Time” is unconnected to things that are coming out, things happening right this minute, things being promoted, it feels aligned with the eternal rather than the temporal, and is therefore escapist without being junk. On Cape Cod, listening to the “Emma” episode, I excitedly typed the phrase “the danger of intellectual solitude” into my notepad—a danger articulated by Austen, which Emma faced before her novel’s worth of adventures and lessons, and which “In Our Time,” week after week, unsentimentally fends off.