IT is an unlikely story. From sharing a tap and a toilet with three other houses at the other end of the country, Melvyn, now Lord, Bragg grew up to bestride the metropolitan world.
We may see him as leading the charge against the dumbing down of the country’s airwaves as producer of long-running TV arts flagship The South Bank Show and presenter of Radio Four’s weekly brainfest In Our Time.

But Lord Bragg sees it differently. He told an audience at Burgh House, Hampstead on Thursday: “I had a chance to go for four really powerful jobs” (he hinted at government minister and director general of the BBC) “but every time, it took me seconds to say no, because there would have been no time left to write fiction.”

The most recent of his 21 published novels have been good preparation for reviewing his past in the Lifelines series of interviews at Burgh House, where, glass of red wine in hand, he talked thoughtfully to his Hampstead neighbour, fellow broadcaster and former Oxford University pal Piers Plowright.

Last week, he gave his publisher the last novel in a trilogy which draws on his own early life. Lord Bragg was born in 1939, and The Soldier’s Return (1999), which won the WH Smith Literary Award, dealt with a father coming home from World War II a stranger to his family. A Son of War, published last year, explored a nervous breakdown in adolescence, another of Lord Bragg’s formative experiences.

The third novel, to be published next summer and which he revealed to the New Journal will be called Crossing the Line, takes the hero on to Oxford.

Melvyn Bragg has lived in Hampstead for 30 years but grew up the small town of Wigton in Cumbria, where his parents ran a pub. “There were no books at home,” he explained, “but that was OK. I went to the library.”

He was already demonstrating the greediness for all aspects of life which now drives him in In Our Time to examine philosophy one week, science the following week and architecture the next.

“I was mad on doing,” he remembered. “I played ping-pong with the Methodists, sang in three choirs, had my own little pop group and went to the cinema several times a week.”
But after his breakdown, the causes of which he still does not understand, a novelist’s introspection cut in. “I came out different,” he said. “I was flawed and fragile and battened on to schoolwork. I was immensely relieved to be an only child. I was the only person I knew with a bedroom to myself, so I could read and do my homework without being disturbed.”
On the up again as a student of history at Oxford, he played college rugby before being “taken-up” by a chance acquaintance and becoming film critic on the student newspaper. He started acting, made a film, began to write short stories and then “sat down and thought, what job will allow me to write fiction?”

After being taken on as a BBC trainee “by a fluke”, he told legendary TV boss Huw Weldon he did not want to go into television – and promptly found himself working as a producer on 1960s TV arts slot Monitor.

He explained he was “a wireless child,” who still prefers working in radio, “but this was a job I enjoyed and it gave me energy”.

“Huw was so tough on your first cut of a film as to verge on viciousness,” he said. Then we’d go for a cup of tea. The difference between work and friendship was a terrific lesson.”
He started his ten-year stint presenting Start The Week on Radio Four at the suggestion of his predecessor, the late Russell Harty, who expected to return to his hot seat later. Lord Bragg protested: “I’ve been told my voice is no good for radio, and every time I’ve done it, I’ve made a mess of it.” Mr Harty replied, “irresistibly”, according to Lord Bragg: “I know. That’s why I want you.”

The new presenter soon “got fed up with actors, anyone pushing a book and unusual parrots”. He said he would leave unless he got more intellectual guests, and after the arrival of the scientists and historians, audiences trebled.

He denied the British media has dumbed down, although he conceded: “Commissioning editors have lost their nerve in the last few years, through trying to keep a hold on their advertising pull or the licensing fee.”

Radio in particular is “booming”, he said. In 1998 he moved from Start The Week to In Our Time, where he quizzes a trio of academics each week on themes such as consciousness or the grand tour. The programme attracts bigger audiences than the South Bank Show.
“I don’t care if the guests are bad at broadcasting. I want people who know their stuff,” he declared, although their intellectual prowess made him “very, very nervous” and prone to getting up at five in the morning to do some last-minute reading.

It is hard to imagine Melvyn Bragg discomforted by any intellectual challenge. But he did look a shade uneasy during an introductory roll call of his achievements. He explained that his mother, who is 86, had always been very encouraging but “it would be off her radar ever to pay me a compliment”.