Books and Arts; Book Review; Culture on television; The cruellest cut;

The South Bank Show: Final Cut. By Melvyn Bragg.

The “South Bank Show” has for years been almost the only serious regular culture programme on ITV, Britain's main commercial broadcaster, the intellectual conscience of an increasingly tacky network. Now, after profiling artists of all persuasions for 32 years, it has been axed, and the pretence of intellectual respectability abandoned. In his new book Lord Bragg, the show's presenter, looks back at 25 of his subjects, weaving excerpts from their interviews into fuller artistic portraits.

The “South Bank Show” has been a long-running answer, indeed rebuke, to the hoary old question about the relative merits of John Keats and Bob Dylan. Its ethos has been that quality should be recognised in popular as well as elite culture, an approach that led to it being criticised as at once worthy and trivial. This collection, like the programme's run, opens with Paul McCartney: “I led with McCartney”, Lord Bragg writes, “because I wanted to show I was serious.” Several of his interlocutors—such as David Puttnam and David Hockney—are of his generation, and like him came from the British provinces to London in the 1960s and 1970s to explore and exploit “a new classless culture, sexy and delighted with itself”.

Probably the most affecting profiles, however, are of more exotic figures: Luciano Pavarotti (“He gives a good name to ‘simple' and ‘spoiled'”), Rudolph Nureyev (“one of the most dramatic and unlikely personal journeys in art in the 20th century”), and a twin depiction of Barry Humphries and Dame Edna that brilliantly draws out the co-dependency of comedian and character. The book's many biographical curiosities—such as the fact that Sir Harold Pinter once worked as a chucker-out at the Astoria ballroom—make it an entertaining volume to dip into. But it also offers some cumulative lessons.

One is about Lord Bragg. In Britain he is the target of much backbiting, often motivated by ill-disguised envy for his success and his sheer industry (he is a prolific writer and radio presenter, among other commitments). Here he comes across as a lucid, supple and valuable analyst of many artistic genres and their varying different potential; he is good on the relative merits of television and film, for example, and on the alchemy of acting. He is a fine reader of faces, and a useful tutor in the craft of interviews: when to press, when to sit back, when to needle and when to leave be.

Together his essays offer some intriguing generalisations about the making and methods of artists. The backgrounds of the people Lord Bragg examines are often humble but disciplined; typically they are exposed to art, or encouraged into it, by some fortuitous incident or acquaintance.

He looks for turning points in lives and careers (Tracey Emin being abused by her ex-lovers during a dance competition; Pavarotti's mother siding with her son when his father wanted him to find another job). Writing of David Lean, he summarises the pattern as “a very early passion which quickly became an adolescent obsession which became an adult, single-minded struggle to have it realised.”

The subjects are mostly less exercised by meaning than by form. And, for many—Eric Clapton, Francis Bacon, Ingmar Bergman, Pinter and others—there is ultimately a sense of mystery and spontaneity; of art coming from elsewhere.