Melvyn Bragg tells of walking once, late at night, down a subterranean corridor at Liverpool Street station, in central London. “I suddenly saw these three big black guys ahead of me. As I approached, they fanned out and confronted me. I was convinced I was about to be mugged. Then the one in the middle pointed at me and said, ‘Are you Melvyn Bragg?’ ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Told you!’ the middle man said to his mates. And they all started roaring with laughter. I had to give them each an autograph,” says Bragg, arms waving, a huge grin splitting his amiable face. “Even though they had no pen.”

It’s clearly a story he loves, and why not? It testifies, more than any number of awards, to the power of The South Bank Show, the arts programme Bragg invented and has edited and presented on ITV for the past 30 years. To some, The South Bank Show has always looked a little out of place on the populist channel alongside Coronation Street, but preaching to the London literati has never been Bragg’s thing.

At 69, he may look every inch the poised, dapper man of culture, a fully paid-up member of the metropolitan great and good, but his accent — a Cumbrian burr — has never been smoothed away completely. His mission, if that’s not too grand a word, has long been to take the arts to people who would never dream of visiting Tate Modern or the Royal Court theatre — like those boys at Liverpool Street — and now, to his absolute fury, that mission has been stopped in its tracks.

Last week, without warning, Bragg learnt The South Bank Show was to be axed. No ceremony, by the sound of it. Peter Fincham, ITV’s director of television, simply summoned him in for a meeting and . . . pow. “He told me what the situation was,” says Bragg, pouring coffee with bristling energy, “and the top and bottom of it was that ITV could no longer sustain The South Bank Show.” I later hear from an insider that the new budget would give an entire season of The South Bank Show about half as much money as is spent on one episode of Britain’s Got Talent. Of course, The South Bank Show doesn’t have anything like the pull of Britain’s Got Talent, which is seen by more than 10m viewers. An average South Bank Show gets one-tenth that audience.

Times Archive, 1978: The South Bank Show

There are obviously delights to come but there should be less Braggness

Bragg, naturally, thinks this is nothing to be ashamed of. “They say we only get a million!” he splutters, urgently attacking his hair so it sticks up, almost comically, in peaks around his head. “Well, for Christ’s sake! Sky television would die for a million! A million people would fill up the Royal Opera House for two years! And if we were played at a regular time, regularly, and promoted,” he continues, with stout emphasis, “things might go up a bit. But never mind. A million is okay.”

Is Bragg a fan of Britain’s Got Talent, I wonder. Of course he is. Liking popular culture is one of Bragg’s core positions. As he frequently reminds people, he has working-class roots and was brought up to value cinema and music hall as well as classical literature borrowed from the local library.

“I like pop culture,” he says, without irony. “I liked it when it was Opportunity Knocks,” he adds, adroitly putting Simon Cowell in his place. “And the Great Moment \ is wonderful. But then I am someone who thought, like a national newspaper, that you cover the territory.”

Another flashing smile. “Covering the territory” is another core Bragg principle. He may have long left the working-class terrain but he is certainly not one to pull the ladder up behind him. And not one to retire without a fight, either. Indeed, last week’s reports that the show ended because he decided to step down irritate him no end. “There is an erroneous opinion that I left and so The South Bank Show closed. It’s quite the other way round. Once The South Bank Show was closed, I thought, well, I am going down with the ship.”

If he weren’t so flash, so good-looking, so famous and so thoroughly urbane, he would be considered hopelessly worthy. He confesses it nearly went that way. “After Oxford, I started off wanting to be a Workers’ Educational Association lecturer,” he admits. Ambition realised, then? “Yes, I have been making WEA programmes for television since then, ha ha ha.”

He probably can afford a bit of self-mockery, since he knows full well that of all the myriad arts programmes broadcast over the past three decades, it’s The South Bank Show that lasted the course, week after week tracing the key names at both ends of the artistic spectrum, and encouraging people to understand just that little bit more about culture.

Even the title sequence was a perfect summation of the show: a variation on posh Paganini by the world’s most popular composer, Andrew Lloyd Webber. With those electrified fingers of Adam and God, in a populist version of posh Michelangelo. Plus, it went out on the nation’s most watched channel. This was no niche for arty luvvies; this was ITV.

“Like the tap in the sink, like the switch by the door, it is unthreatening. It doesn’t cost much to watch, you don’t have to dress up or be in London, you don’t have to do any of that, and we will show you,” says Bragg. “I loved all that. That’s what I wanted to do with my life.” He is probably the last editor of an arts programme you will ever hear admitting to such an unfashionably Reithian ambition.

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