As Melvyn Bragg embarks on a literary tour of Britain, he tells Serena Davies why his new series has a ‘grit’ absent from TV’s other celebrations of our island...Melvyn Bragg’s enthusiasm is contagious. “It’s a fair bet that this is the most written about country on the planet that there’s ever been,” he gushes. The country in question is of course Britain – the inspiration for Shakespeare’s “scepter’d isle”, Blake’s “green and pleasant land” and Burns’s “bonny Doon”. Everyone knows a quote or two about our country, even if they didn’t think they did.
It is these famous sayings coupled with much more obscure writings that will make up the content of Bragg’s new series, Melvyn Bragg’s Travels in Written Britain, starting on Sunday on ITV1. The passages themselves will be read by some of our most popular actors and personalities, Stephen Fry, Jasper Carrott and Tracey Emin among them. Added to these will be the occasional arresting voice from the past – the 1922 recording of TS Eliot intoning The Waste Land’s bleak vision of the London crowds traipsing to work makes a star turn.
Interspersed with these readings will be Bragg’s journeys around different parts of the British Isles. Each of the series’s four episodes will feature a different region: London, the North, the Midlands, and Scotland. These have been selected for the stories, both literary and historical, that they’ve produced. Although the South Bank Show stalwart concedes that there are other areas he could have covered, and is bracing himself for criticism for these omissions.
“One of the things which British critics are absolutely brilliant at, I’ve discovered in my time,” says Bragg, “is that they delight in telling you what you didn’t do… I’m very happy with these programmes. There’s a lot of meat in them. We’ve got Shelley, Wordsworth, Dickens. We’ve got great writers, and people whose words have never even been spoken before.”
By interweaving the texts of literary writers with those of more ordinary records such as newspapers and letters, Bragg will tell some remarkable tales. One involves the lady whose birthday invitation is the only piece of writing in a female hand to survive in Britain from the days of the Roman Empire. We hear, too, of a 12-year-old factory girl who had to carry back-breaking loads of bricks in the days of the Industrial Revolution. Then there’s the 19th century’s Maid of Buttermere, a Cumbrian girl whom one travelling scribe described as the epitome of English country beauty – turning her into a tourist attraction overnight. Her subsequent fortunes were recorded in an article in a local paper – by a jobbing journalist named Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
This last story holds a particular appeal for Bragg (he’s written a book about it) because it is about the area he comes from. In fact, he pinpoints growing up in Cumbria as the inspiration for this series, as well as the reason behind the passion for literature and language as evinced in his previous television series, 12 Books That Changed the World and The Adventure of English.
‘I was brought up two or three miles from the edge of the Lake District but as soon as I could ride a bike or go youth hostelling I was all over it,” he explains. Which means he was “all over” its literary figures, such as William Wordsworth and Thomas de Quincey, too.
“So I was aware I was going through several different sorts of landscapes. I was going through the adolescent landscape growing up, I was going through a real landscape and I was going through a written landscape.”
It is this sense of landscapes real and metaphorical that he wishes to convey in Written Britain. Landscapes “written” not just by poets but also by the folk writer of the famous ballad Do ye ken John Peel, for example, who hailed from Bragg’s hometown of Wigton, and by miners, such as those from his father’s side of his family, who wrote accounts of their labours.
His concern for the grimier realities of Britain’s story means, Bragg says, that his show will stand out from the crowd.
“There’s lots of programmes on nine o’clock on a Sunday night going on about how great Britain is,” he says. He thinks “they’re all wonderful”, and although he declines to specify series, his likely reference points include ITV1’s Britain’s Favourite View, and the BBC’s A Picture of Britain and The Nature of Britain.
“I’ve got nothing but praise [for these programmes],” he goes on. “On the other hand, there’s a bit of grit somewhere: when you’re looking at castles I’d quite like to know who built them. Not who [commissioned] them, but who built them: what stones they used, and how they hauled them.”
Bragg is hoping that ITV finds pockets deep enough to commission a second series of Written Britain. But he’s well aware that the channel that gives him 18 South Bank Shows a year has nothing like the budget for factual programmes that the BBC has. “We’re a lean machine, we’re lean and mean,” he says, speaking of ITV. “The gap between us is now amazing. Good for the BBC. And good for us that we keep doing it.”
Melvyn Bragg’s Travels in Written Britain begins on ITV1 on Sunday, 6 April at 10.45pm
