Wednesday, 6 December 2023
Monday, 4 December 2023
Lord Bragg & BBC In Our Time - The Millenary Edition
In Our Time is a weekly BBC R4 conversation hosted by Melvyn Bragg with usually three top scholars or academics in their field of study. I've been wanting to complete this since the 1000th episode I drafted, and so it's now or never.
We must press on.
I've been listening to IoT from the early episodes if not just a wee bit later than 1998. The information we're allowed to overhear, the quality of conversation, is valuable and often precious, but not just for what we learn. It continually adds more context to what we already know. I can't say school was a good experience for me but IoT has contributed to my ongoing education more than any other source in my life.
A thousand episodes is an extraordinary achievement. IoT is now an online resource that will always encapsulate the life and times of Lord Bragg, with a range and depth of subjects that are now steadily topping up ours.
Now, on that subject when I was an adolescent before Melvyn Bragg was ennobled, he had a Television production called The South Bank Show. He was always comfortable around authentic, inquiring minds and a wide range of interesting people. To top it off he was handsome on the Telly and a public intellectual you'd want to hang around with, and he still is. Do you know how hard it is to be all those things in British culture and still be well regarded?
Tough call. There are many pretenders but fewer successors and regrettably impostors are everywhere, lisping their way though the third act. Jonathan Myles-Lee perhaps came closest. Now there was a man who likewise had an enormous appetite for, the true, the beautiful and the good.
It's impossible for me to hold back on a few theories I've picked up, like lucky pennies and tuppences over the years from listening to IoT.
This may come as a surprise to many listeners but Lord Bragg is awake, and red-pilled. Maybe even initiated, and possibly not as well. The questions asked of his guests are seldom easy to answer. It's not doctrinaire responses we're looking for it's the differences in the views of the guests as well when they're all singing from the same spreadsheet. It's all informative.
From time to time questions are answered with a little hesitation that is not expected from our best and brightest. One of the best questions regularly asked by Baron Bragg is 'How do we know that?' and the answer is we don't. We're relying on accounts often written centuries later.
I invite you to revisit the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum - March 2017. I can't emphasise enough to listen over and again till a familiarity with the material emerges. This may then fuel your own questions about the official version of human evolution with respect to the climate, weather and atmosphere that initiated our launch from primordial soup to sentient biped. Be sceptical and if you have the ability, be cynical.
Got that?
That's the warm up although there are more absolute gems in that episode, but the objective here is to be limbered up for the kind of detached and cool headed analysis from the Climate Change episode produced much earlier on 6 January 2000
It takes a sort of cobbled-stone stubbornness, and refreshing use of reason, logic and curiosity to listen properly to In Our Time. Kissinger said only academics fight over tiny details, as the stakes are so low.
Don't get me wrong. In our Time is invariably warm, authentic and collegial, it's edited but not in a way that seems anything less than generous. Though rare, I've noticed over the decades that a guest or two appear to be scoring points. It's out of order. They diminish themselves while blaming the victim for the very qualities of restraint they are lacking in. I only mention it because Melvyn Bragg doesn't engage in tit for tat and also leaves it in the episode for us overhear. That's aristocratic integrity. You can't buy that, especially from a working class background.
Over the years I have learned more about great women in history (often the first notable writers in the United Sates and Europe) from Lord Bragg than anywhere else. I was a prolific book reader who tried as many genres as possible up to my 30s. I've said it before in the Hildegaard of Bingen post but its worth a reminder. If feminism means emancipating women with opportunities they are ordinarily excluded from, Lord Bragg is the greatest living feminist I know. It's unmissable that he enjoys and appreciates women as well respecting them.
One more playful observation. Again, over the years so it doesn't happen every time but I've noticed that Melvyn (if I may) has the ability to make people laugh at the drop of a hat. Now he may deny that, but it's a quality suppressed through self control, because his work isn't as an entertainer. Funny, charming and erudite are all qualities he has but Lord Bragg is a serious contributor to understanding the nature, as well as the times that our lives are living in.
I shall be adding episodes below that I feel have been most important to me over the years. There's no rush to list them all immediately, and so I'll start with Strabo who like Jesus, nobody had bothered to document until centuries later.
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