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Bragg was so full of the show’s ambitions at the beginning that he even wrote a manifesto for it. The manifesto, of which he is now only slightly embarrassed, decreed that pop, comedy and cinema should be examined with the same rigour as classical music, literature and opera. In the days when viewers were used to cultural analysis featuring lofty pronouncements by Kenneth Clark on the steps of the British Museum, this was wild heresy. Paul McCartney was featured on the first show. In response, the arts correspondent of The Daily Telegraph sniffily announced: “My own definition of the arts would stop short of Lennon-McCartney ballads.”

No one would be so absurd now, but arguably it was The South Bank Show that started to erode the previously strict cultural delineation between high and low. Nowadays nobody remarks about the National Theatre putting on crowd-pleasing musicals, but without The South Bank Show taking popular culture seriously, such programming might have taken much longer to happen.

Bragg took television drama seriously, he took comedy seriously and he took contemporary artists seriously. “Oh, you can have programmes with someone strolling round talking about old paintings. Or quirky little films, which the critics seem to love. Some of those are good,” says Bragg, quietly putting the knife into the BBC’s arts output and swivelling it like a professional. “The toughest thing is what we tried to do, which is to try to be a gallery of contemporary art.”

Hence the analyses of Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Howard Hodgkin and, most famously, Francis Bacon, with whom Bragg got more and more plastered as the interview took place in the company of what seems to have been an entire case of champagne. Indeed, the first bottle of Bolly was cracked open at around 9am.

Times Archive, 1978: The South Bank Show

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

“I loved doing the Francis Bacon programme,” says Bragg, smiling fondly. “I’m very glad I had the nerve in the cutting room to say, ‘Yes, we ought to show this.’ I look like . . . like . . . what you ought not to look like,” he finishes, laughing loudly.

But what about critical rigour, said the carpers. The South Bank Show was simply a hagiography of the friends of Lord Barg of Ubiquity, as he was known in Private Eye. “It is the grovelling to artistic folk one finds objectionable. Pop stars, I mean,” said Richard Ingrams, then editor of the Eye. Now that this is the style adopted by just about everyone on television (bar Paxman), from Richard and Judy to Jonathan Ross, Bragg’s chummy approach seems less objectionable. Anyway, as he points out, if he had been more provocative, the artists he wanted would have run a mile.

“Once people got the hang of the fact that we were not going to ask, ‘Why have you got three wives?’ and, ‘How much money do you earn?’, they were keen to talk. With Lord Olivier, for example. I asked him about homosexuality. We were talking about his time in Hollywood, and the way he replied said a great deal. He came out of it as he wanted to, but you could read a lot into it.”

The ingratiating manner has its limits, clearly: over the years, he’s relished lobbing hand grenades at the BBC, and he’s not about to stop now. He’s still on at it about its cultural output. “They don’t do enough. I wish they did more. Taking The South Bank Show off the air reduces arts documentaries on the big channels by 60%.”

Indeed, he suggests that Imagine, BBC1’s arts series, fronted by Alan Yentob, was brought in directly after one such goading. Does he think Yentob, a fellow television grandee, stepped in front of the camera in a sort of homage to Bragg? “Alan? A homage?” hoots Bragg. “Now there’s a thought.” I sense there is a distinct froideur between the two. “Alan does what he does, and I do what I do, and there you go.”

I also sense a cooling-off in the long love affair between Bragg and the Labour party. A Labour peer, in the Blair years Bragg was very much in the party heartland. His wife, Cate Haste, co-authored a book with Cherie Blair, and Melvyn was a close friend of Tony — until he was lambasted for blurting out sensitive information about the Blair family in a radio programme. These days he is guarded when speaking about Labour. “I’m loyal to them, but I am not married to the Labour party,” he reminds me carefully.

Astonishingly, he even takes time to praise the Conservative cultural legacy. “You have got to give them the lottery. You could say that was one of the great transforming things of the arts. And you have got to give them Channel 4. The Tories set up Channel 4. And the Tories set up ITV, which since its inception had arts programmes. They have done a lot. It doesn’t mean I am a Tory. But I am not dismayed at the thought of their arts policy at all. They seem to me to have a strong arts policy.”

What is happening to his party, then? “One of the problems of modern government is that it has too much to worry about. This 24/7 culture is absurd,” says Bragg, which, from a man who has edited, presented and written television and radio programmes for more than 30 years, while finding the time to write close to 30 books, is a bit rich, but never mind. “I liked the days when Asquith came out of 10 Downing Street and caught a bus home. At a time when Britain was running the biggest empire the world had ever seen. [MPs] should take more holidays, read a bit more, go to the theatre, maybe go to concerts.”

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