With few exceptions, the towering figures of the arts world over the past three decades have one thing in common: they have all been interviewed by Melvyn Bragg, the Cumbrian culture vulture who is celebrating the 30th birthday of The South Bank Show, the programme that has brought actors, writers, musicians, dancers, directors and artists into often remarkably candid close-up.
George Michael marked the occasion by lighting up an enormous spliff. Laurence Olivier, John Osborne, Francis Bacon and Philip Larkin all got very drunk. Rudolf Nureyev flew into a rage, smashed the place up, stripped off and went skinny dipping.
Such intimate access may explain why the in-depth arts programme has retained a prominent spot in ITV's schedule at a time when BBC arts programmes mostly languish on BBC Four. As well as longevity, Bragg can claim credit for his role in treating pop music and opera with equal seriousness. And there is his knack of wooing some of the trickiest and most guarded egos on the planet.
Take Bacon. Bragg had known him for years when he eventually persuaded him that he needed to do an interview because he had not seriously discussed his work on camera. The painter let him into his cramped studio, showing the world for the first time where he produced paintings that are now among the most coveted in the world. In a charming moment he demonstrates his determination not to fluff his message by pulling out a scrap of paper and reading out an explanation of his work that he has jotted down. He shows photographs that he has clipped from newspapers of wrestlers and boxers being hit that he calls “my models”.
In the astonishing Bacon interview, footage from which features in a new, six-part series, Celebrating...The South Bank Show, he and Bragg go out for lunch and proceed to get “completely plastered” on filthy red wine. Bacon staggers to his feet, declares “Cheerio” and fills their glasses again. Bragg asks: “Why do you want to do that, Francis?” The artist replies: “Because I like doing it. I happen to be a painter, that's all.” He then goes on to talk eloquently, if slurringly, about his work. “Francis drunk was a very important part of Francis,” says Bragg. “And when he was drunk he talked about his life to the highest level.”
The South Bank Show began when Michael Grade, in an earlier incarnation at ITV, persuaded Bragg to leave the BBC. For the first couple of years the show, which had a magazine format, received a critical mauling and Bragg admits that he “got the programme wrong”. When they focused on making a single portrait each week the show took off.
Bragg's aim was to give popular arts the same serious coverage as opera and theatre. As pop music and cinema began to have “access to posterity” there was “a chance to redefine what we meant by the arts”. Realising how grand this might sound, he adds quickly, “redefine it in a mere arts programme. Not trying to change the world.” His plan was to “look at what McCartney's songwriting is about. Look at Dennis Potter's television plays in the same way as John Osborne's theatre plays.”
The show began to get big names. Bragg's strategy was to explain that he wanted to talk about their work, not their private lives. “If their private life came in, it did so because they brought it up.” Tougher interrogators would be dismayed that he knew that William Golding had suffered from deep depression but did not ask him about it. Although it is hard to see how this could not have informed his work, Bragg insists that “it would have meant him saying ‘No, I'm not going to talk about it and actually let's not do the programme'.”
Kevin Spacey, who he regards as a “very resonating and important figure”, is another whose personal life he did not probe. “I would guess his life, which intrigues a lot of journalists, is complex. But Kevin Spacey talking about why he is so driven to help kids and turning the Old Vic into a kind of social centre for that neighbourhood takes you back to the roots of Kevin Spacey in a more interesting way than prodding away and getting nowhere.”
It is hard to argue with the success rate of this approach in reeling in his subjects. Sitting in his office on the top floor of the ITV building overlooking the Thames, he mentions the 130 awards the show has won and that he has interviewed just about everyone he wanted to.
One of the biggest coups was Olivier. Driving down to Brighton with the great man, Bragg remembers him “boring the lives out of us” about an article he had read about alcohol impairing memory. “This is the guy who had just recovered from cancer and was learning Lear by heart, but it was destroying his memory, he decided. He was really serious. By the time we got to Brighton to meet John Osborne, it's an awful thing to say about the greatest living actor, but I just wanted to get out of this van to stop him telling us not to drink.”
Osborne was sitting in the corner of the restaurant with a glass of champagne. Spotting him, Olivier, “in his huge Henry V voice, because he was not above drawing attention to himself when he wanted to, [said]: ‘I will never drink again... except with my great friend John Osborne! Johnny! Johnny!' And bounded over, and we went for it.” By the end of lunch “they were out of their minds. We went out to do the interview and that was probably a mistake, the sea air hitting them. Osborne was hanging on to the railings.” In the film, Olivier can barely speak for giggling.
Through his interviews with Olivier, Osborne and Arthur Miller, Bragg pieced together the story of Olivier taking the lead in Osborne's The Entertainer. Olivier had been scathing about Osborne's mould-breaking Look Back in Anger, which he said was “rubbish” about “dreadful nihilists”. But when he was filming The Prince and the Showgirl with Marilyn Monroe, Miller and Monroe stayed with him in an effort to avoid the swarms of press following her. Miller got frustrated about being cooped up and insisted on going out to see the play that everyone was talking about. Under duress, Olivier hatched a plan, involving decoy cars and blond wigs, to get the three of them to the Royal Court.
Miller and Monroe were so keen on the play when they met Osborne backstage that Olivier changed his mind about it and wrote to Osborne the next day, asking: “If you write another play and could find a tiny part for me I would love to be in it.” Osborne sent Olivier The Entertainer. Many Olivier fans were appalled at the great actor playing the washed-up thespian Archie Rice, but it became a huge stage (and then movie) hit and Olivier left Vivien Leigh for his co-star, Joan Plowright.
“The Entertainer role changed Olivier's career, helped to change the direction of British theatre and his personal life, and all because of Marilyn Monroe,” Bragg says.
For many, A South Bank Show interview is a landmark career event. Tracey Emin said that she had dreamt about it since the age of 10. According to Bragg, Spacey wanted to emulate Olivier, asking “Do you think you can interview me on the stage [of the Old Vic] where you interviewed Larry?” Bragg offered to even “put the chairs in the same position”.
Barbara Cartland made Bragg wear a dinner jacket to listen to her dictating one of her fortnightly romantic novels to her secretary. Elizabeth Taylor, who had “been galloping in one's dreams” since he saw her in National Velvet, was “a little plump at that stage” and changed all the lighting. “I felt tentative,” he admits, “so I didn't do a very good interview.”
Philip Larkin met Bragg for lunch to discuss the possibility of an interview. Drink was taken and the poet proved reluctant to leave the restaurant. He had to be forcibly ejected by policemen with dogs. He eventually agreed to do the interview, “but decided he didn't want to be seen, which I thought was a bit mean of him. We looked over his shoulder and shot him from a distance and all that rubbish. Either it was a tease or he didn't like the way he looked.”
During filming of Nureyev at his private island off the Amalfi coast, the dancer agreed to play some Bach on the piano. When it was suggested that he answer a question before he played, he flew into a rage, trying to lift the piano, knocking over cameras and storming off. The next the crew saw of him was a day and a half later when he appeared naked in view of the cameras and dived off rocks into the sea.
“I'm generally quite nervous interviewing people,” admits Bragg. “Questions don't matter much, it's the answers, but you don't want to look a buffoon.” Harold Pinter once tormented him. “He was playing games. I said ‘The Homecoming, what's that about?' He said: ‘It's about 92 minutes long.' I said: ‘I think it's about sex.' And he was: ‘Oh, you do, do you?' It looked embarrassing, me trying to do an interview and failing, but I kept that in because that is how Pinter is, and a bit like Pinter's plays. Harold is always a bit nerve-racking.” They subsequently became friends.
Some like to shock. George Michael cheerfully smoked marijuana while being filmed in his dressing-room, explaining that “this stuff keeps me sane and happy”. A tabloid frenzy ensued. David Hockney casually used the most pungent Anglo-
Saxon obscenity for a woman's reproductive organs while examining a Picasso sketch. The uneasy smile on Bragg's face as he does so is a treat.
Sometimes he has to spend the first 20 minutes of an interview reassuring anxious interviewees. Ian McEwan, interviewed for the first time when he had yet to write a novel, threw up beforehand. John Cleese “got massively nervous and suggested I interview his mother instead of him. His mother was in the house and he said, ‘She knows more about me than I do. Why don't you talk to her?'”
Alec Guinness was “the weirdest, strangest person I've ever interviewed. He was very difficult, almost shifty, and was convinced of his own psychic powers, which is always disturbing.” Guinness claimed that he had had lunch with James Dean shortly before he died in a car crash, and warned him not to drive the car.
A few have got away. Samuel Beckett met him a couple of times but never agreed to an interview. Graham Greene declined, claiming that he didn't want to be recognised on trips back to England to shop for second-hand books. “I suppose in case he got charged more,” says Bragg.
These programmes offer tantalising glimpses but leave the viewer wanting to see many of them in full. The complete boxed set can't be far behind. For the record, Bragg himself is the ideal interviewee, full of anecdotes and easy to talk to. The only time he is possibly evasive is when I ask whether his bouffant hair, which seems to grow, diminish and grow again as the years pass, is some sort of barometer of his own creativity. “You are not going to like this but the mundane truth is that I forget to go to the hairdressers.”
Celebrating... The South Bank Show starts on ITV3 tonight at 9pm.
