Melvyn Bragg

The rise of vampirism in Silicon Valley

2 September 2023 9:00 am

The Immortals, which begins on Radio 4 this week, is not for the faint-hearted. While it professes to be about…

The joy of wigs

12 March 2022 9:00 am

I thought, or anyway hoped, that once I’d finished the chemotherapy I would spring back to vitality. Seven weeks on…

Why In Our Time remains the best thing on radio

20 March 2021 9:00 am

In Our Time is the best thing on Radio 4, possibly the best thing on the radio full stop. It…

How to survive a heatwave

1 August 2020 9:00 am

Provence-Alpes-Côte D’Azur   A burning ball appears over the brow of the hill at seven o’clock every morning and then…

Are the Dead Ringers audience told to laugh?

15 June 2019 9:00 am

Nine on a Thursday morning is University Hour for those of us who don’t commute to an office every day.…

Benjamin Zephaniah once found the leg of a man in the back of a Ford Cortina

5 May 2018 9:00 am

‘For me rhyming was normal,’ said Benjamin Zephaniah, reading from his autobiography on Radio 4. Back in the 1960s, on…

In praise of braindead filth

8 July 2017 9:00 am

Melvyn Bragg on TV: The Box That Changed The World (BBC2, Saturday) was just what you would have expected of…

Lucy Worsley reveals - yet again - that there’s more to the WI than jam and Jerusalem

25 July 2015 9:00 am

Some revelations, it seems, are capable of being endlessly repeated while still remaining revelations. Think of all the books, articles…

Dennis Potter, 1978 (Photo: Getty)

Dennis Potter: one of the last great masters of vituperation

11 July 2015 9:00 am

‘Genuine invective is an almost lost art in our wild satirical age,’ Dennis Potter complained in New Society in 1966.…

The pleasures and perils of podcast listening

28 February 2015 9:00 am

No phrase is better calculated to tense the neck muscles of a regular podcast listener than ‘We have something special…

You can’t force low-income people to go to an art gallery or the theatre if they don’t want to

28 February 2015 9:00 am

I went last week to see the justly praised production of Wagner’s The Mastersingers at English National Opera, and I…