Reader TTS

During the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s there was a golden age of intellectual discussion on British television and radio, especially on BBC2, Channel 4 and Radio 4. The reasons for this are a

mixture of the quality of the presenters, the interviewees and the producers.  First, the presenters included people like Bryan Magee, Melvyn Bragg and Michael Ignatieff. Magee presented

series such as _ Conversations with Philosophers _ (Radio 3, 1970-71). The series began with an introductory conversation between Magee and  Anthony Quinton , followed by discussions on 

Bertrand Russell ,  G. E. Moore  and  J. L. Austin ,  Ludwig Wittgenstein , and the relationship between philosophy and religion, among others. Extracts of each of the conversations were

printed in  _ The Listener _  shortly after broadcast. In 1978 Magee presented a series of interviews with leading British and American philosophers, called _ Men of Ideas _ . This was a

series that according to _ The Daily Telegraph _ _ , _   “achieved the near-impossible feat of presenting to a mass audience recondite issues of philosophy without compromising intellectual

integrity or losing ratings” and “attracted a steady one million viewers per show.” Magee interviewed distinguished philosophers such as Sir Isaiah Berlin on “An Introduction to Philosophy”,

Charles Taylor on “Marxist Philosophy”, Herbert Marcuse on “The Frankfurt School”, William Barrett on “Existentialism”,  AJ Ayer on “Logical Positivism”, Bernard Williams on “The Spell of

Linguistic Philosophy” and John Searle on “The Philosophy of Language”. Except for Iris Murdoch, who talked about “Philosophy and Literature”, all the interviewees were men who taught at

British or North American Universities, half of them from Oxford and Cambridge. Magee followed this with another series of interviews on BBC2, _ The Great Philosophers _ (1987), a series of

interviews with leading philosophers about great thinkers from Plato and Aristotle to Nietzsche, Existentialism and Wittgenstein. Again, the interviewees were leading male philosophers

(again there was only one woman) from leading British and American universities. The new Channel 4 commissioned their own intellectual discussion programme, _ Voices _ , produced by Udi

Eichler with a number of different presenters, the best known being the Canadian writer, intellectual and politician, Michael Ignatieff. There were several differences between _ Voices _ and

Magee’s series for BBC2. First, _ Voices _ was more topical, rather than an academic discussion about the history of ideas. Second, there were many more women on _ Voices _ , including

Margaret Boden, the literary critic Gayatri Spivak, writers such as Nadine Gordimer and Susan Sontag, the economist Emma Rothschild, psychoanalysts such as Hanna Segal, Elizabeth Spillius,

Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel and Juliet Mitchell, and the sociologist Sherry Turkle. But perhaps the most significant difference was that instead of British and American academic philosophers,

_ Voices _ featured not only psychoanalysts, but famous writers such as Saul Bellow, Martin Amis, Günter Grass and Joseph Brodsky, as well as literary critics, social thinkers and

historians, from Ralf Dahrendorf and Anthony Giddens to George Steiner and Alain Touraine. Another crucial difference was how many of the writers and intellectuals _ Voices _ featured were

foreign not British: besides Grass and Touraine, there were Cornelius Castoriadis, Leszek Kolakowski and Octavio Paz. This was not just in contrast with Magee’s guests but the presenters and

guests on today’s more intellectual programmes such as Simon Schama, Mary Beard and David Olusoga, who are nearly all British. That is a significant difference. Ignatieff went on to become

one of the founding presenters of _ The Late Show _ on BBC2 from 1989-1995. Again, these discussions and interviews were more topical, starting with the Fall of the Wall, broadcast live from

Berlin, and a programme on the _ fatwa _ against Salman Rushdie. There was also the familiar mix of writers, intellectuals and scientists, including William Styron, Rushdie and Ian McEwan,

Mario Vargas Llosa, Susan Sontag, Margaret Atwood and Czeslaw Milosz, thinkers such as Isaiah Berlin and EJ Hobsbawm, scientists like Steve Jones and Lewis Wolpert and filmmakers like Marcel

Ophuls, Wim Wenders and Volker Schlöndorff. Another significant difference is the kinds of intellectuals and thinkers who appear on British TV and radio compared with thirty-fifty years

ago. Today many of the media intellectuals are historians, whether ancient, like Beard, or modern like Schama and Olusoga, rather than Magee’s philosophers or the variety of people Ignatieff

interviewed, including psychoanalysts, social thinkers  (Christopher Lasch, Daniel Bell, Giddens, Touraine), literary critics (Sontag, Steiner), or novelists and poets (Bellow, Amis,

Brodsky, Milosz, Rushdie, McEwan). That is a significant change. Finally, think of the kinds of issues Ignatieff discussed with these people, or that Melvyn Bragg discussed on _ Start the

Week _ on Radio 4 in the 1990s or on _ In Our Time _ more recently: Modernity, Psychoanalysis, the fall of Communism, the nature of modern warfare, nationalism, science, filming the

Holocaust. Indeed, the range of subjects featured on _ In Our Time _ is extraordinary. These kinds of programmes have almost entirely disappeared from British television. _ In Our Time _ ,

the annual _ Reith Lectures _ and _ The Life Scientific _ , all still on Radio 4, are almost the last vestiges of intellectual discussion on British radio.  Why has this happened? Firstly,

think of the people who run British television. Executives in the 1980s and 1990s – Jeremy Isaacs and Michael Kustow at Channel 4, Alan Yentob and Michael Jackson at BBC2 — were highly

cultured and hugely ambitious, with a wide range of interests. Their successors are not. Channel 4 has long ceased to be a creative channel. BBC2 has lost the ambition that made it such a

distinctive powerhouse in the late 20 th century. That leaves BBC Radio.  A second problem is the disappearance from our screens of presenters like the late Bryan Magee and Michael

Ignatieff, who returned to Canada. On Radio 4, Melvyn Bragg is thankfully still going strong on _ In Our Time _ , Professor Jim Al-Khalili has now presented over 300 episodes of _ The Life

Scientific _   and _ The Reith Lectures _ still survive almost eighty years after they started in 1948.  A third problem is the disappearance of _ The Listener _ , which used to publish

edited transcripts of _ The Reith Lectures _ ,  _ Men of Ideas _ and _ Voices, _ and publishers who produced books based on three series of _ Voices _ and the decision of OUP to no longer

publish transcripts of series like _ Men of Ideas _ and _ The Great Philosophers _ in the 1970s and 1980s. Many of these programmes can of course be found online if readers care to look for

them. Perhaps the biggest difference of all is the disappearance of the golden age of public intellectuals like Sir Isaiah Berlin, EJ Hobsbawm, EP Thompson and Bernard Williams. There are a

few successors: the philosopher John Gray, the classicist Mary Beard, the historian Sir Simon Schama are among them. But crucially, they no longer draw the same audiences. This is no fault

of their own. It is a product of a larger cultural change. The audiences who used to follow programmes like _Men of Ideas_, _Voices_, and _The Late Show_, who read _The Listener_ and watched

intellectual discussion programmes and interviews late into the evening on BBC2 and Channel 4 seem to have abandoned terrestrial TV and intellectual weekly magazines. Perhaps podcasts are

the only future for such broadcasts.  A MESSAGE FROM THEARTICLE _We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an important contribution to make, one that’s

needed now more than ever, and we need your help to continue publishing throughout these hard economic times. So please, make a donation._