The best of pop in our country is among the best of the arts that we do. And Britain does the arts as well as, and sometimes better than, anybody else on the planet. – Melvyn Bragg
We got a copy of the ‘New Statesman’ at my grammar school in Wigton, Cumbria, in the 1950s. It sat mint fresh every week on the library table, with two or three other bargain-offer magazines. The ‘Statesman’ came out of the unimaginable Great World. I started to read it then and have pegged along ever since. – Melvyn Bragg
In an arts programme, my job was to go where the talent was. And the talent was in popular culture. – Melvyn Bragg
Dame Barbara Cartland was an endearing eccentric, and when I interviewed her, she wanted me to listen to her dictating to her secretary one of those romantic novels that she turned out fortnightly. – Melvyn Bragg
I’m going to try and make you take the Beatles and Eric Clapton as seriously as the Berlin Philharmonic and Simon Rattle. – Melvyn Bragg
In music, the Specials brought a city, Coventry, bombed out for a second time and riven with racism, to a celebration between black and white musicians and their music. – Melvyn Bragg
In a sense, Bond ousted the cowboy as the screen hero, and Ken Adams replaced the horse with technology. – Melvyn Bragg
Work is a great blotter up. It stops you thinking, which is useful. No, it stops you feeling. – Melvyn Bragg
There is some brilliant pop music and some very poor classical music. And why shouldn’t comedy be treated as seriously as drama? – Melvyn Bragg
Magna Carta has become totemic. It is in the comedy of Tony Hancock, in the poetry of Kipling, never far from the front pages in a constitutional crisis. – Melvyn Bragg
I don’t feel inferior in the slightest to anybody – or superior to anybody, let’s get that clear. But I do feel different. – Melvyn Bragg
If I meet pals, we do hug each other, and it’s very nice, you know… it’s something that’s come on me late and became second nature, and it’s first nature now! – Melvyn Bragg
I have written favourably in support of subsidy for the arts since the 1960s, and I continue to believe absolutely in subsidy, as I do in the BBC licence fee. – Melvyn Bragg
I don’t believe in a personal God, no. And I don’t believe in resurrection as it is in the New Testament. – Melvyn Bragg
Connery made Bond real through his physicality. He did most of his own stunts and fights, and the audience knew it was him. – Melvyn Bragg