In Our Time is a British radio show about everything. Launched by the BBC’s Radio Four in 1998, it has run for 21 straight years with the same host, the more than 50-year BBC veteran Melvyn Bragg. Its free online podcast archives are an autodidact’s dream and a gift to curious people around the world.
One of the joys of the show is the contrast between the broadness of its sweep and its intimate, changeless format. Each episode begins with a “hello” from Bragg, swiftly followed by a condensed introduction to the episode’s subject, which might be anything from free will to the Haitian Revolution, teeth, the concept of zero, Buddha, the alphabet, the Boxer Rebellion, Simón Bolívar, Virginia Woolf, the Medici, echolocation, the Metaphysical Poets, or Samuel Beckett.
Bragg then introduces his panel of guests, academic experts on the day’s topic who, for the next 45 minutes, will try to fit a lifetime of learning into answers succinct enough for radio yet detailed enough to be genuinely informative. Bragg, an experienced radio journalist, is warm but strict with his guests, cutting off abstruse digressions and slicing through academic waffling. But his pushiness serves a purpose: translating expert knowledge into something ordinary people can follow without dumbing it down.
According to a 2018 article in the Economist, about 2.5 million people download the In Our Time podcast every month, more than half of them from outside the United Kingdom. For foreign listeners, the show has certain distinctly British charms, from the seemingly effortless eloquence of the panelists, particularly in literature and the arts, to an awkward, euphemistic approach to the topic of sex. Discussing the love life of the 18th-century Scottish folk poet Robert Burns, who impregnated women up and down the country, one of Bragg’s guests says vaguely, “He didn’t really go in for ‘either-or’ if there were plenty of opportunities.” Politely encouraging her to continue, Bragg asks, “He had quite a lot of children. Can you fill out that rather prim remark of mine?”
The show’s scholarly discussions are occasionally broken up by unexpected moments of fun. Bragg, 80, has spent his lifetime in elite institutions and was made a baron by Tony Blair, but he comes from a working-class background and retains a playful irreverence about his guests’ progressive middle-class sensibilities. In an episode on the Gilded Age American novelist Edith Wharton, for instance, he asks his guests, “She wasn’t a suffragist. She didn’t believe in women’s rights. Can you develop this side of her, which must be very difficult for you all to admit to?” This good-natured dig gets a laugh from the all-female, and presumably all-feminist, panel of scholars.
For the most part, In Our Time stays mercifully free of politics, and the tone is calm and conversational. But occasionally, the culture wars manage to sneak in. In one episode, Bragg gets into an argument with a guest about the causes of the Industrial Revolution in England. The guest, an academic, cautions that we must get away from any explanation that lauds the unique genius of a small group of English men, as that could stray into nationalist or chauvinist territory later on. To which Bragg keeps asking, “Why must we get away from it?” The critic of everything often ends up an admirer of nothing. For Bragg, however, human achievement is not a zero-sum game. He always resists, in ways that don’t neatly map onto the suffocating presentism of ideological thinking, the impulse to relentlessly expose, unmask, and demystify.
The guiding spirit of In Our Time is humility in the face of human history and knowledge. And the guests’ love of their subjects is infectious. By focusing on timeless topics and remaining indifferent to the passing manias of the day, the show has become a kind of countercultural antidote to the worst of the digital age. It lets listeners step outside the nightmare of internet culture in 2019, with its constant outrages and tiny attention spans, while bringing them the very best of what the internet can provide: access to a deeper understanding of the world and human culture. The show also helps to restore some faith in the academy. Modern academic institutions encourage technocratic measurements of “impact,” but there remain many extraordinary scholars tucked away in departments of history and biology and literature, working in obscurity on their unglamorous passions, eager to share their knowledge with others.
And, of course, there is the immense appeal of Bragg himself, with his idiosyncratic, charmingly old-fashioned perspective on the world. Bragg is rarely an expert, but he is sharp and curious, with a seemingly intuitive feel for the big picture. Most important, he resists the tendency to denigrate when one can appreciate, to critique when one can admire. This attitude is evident on the show, where he sometimes chides guests eager to interpret historical achievements cynically. It is also on display in his rare pronouncements on public political debates, such as his 2012 criticism of Richard Dawkins for his lack of respect for religion or his 2016 attack on Britain’s National Trust for a land purchase that, in Bragg’s view, threatened a farm practicing a centuries-old form of agriculture. Bragg wants to share and preserve everything that is intriguing, beautiful, ingenious, fascinating; he wants to understand what made people who they were and to take in the vast tragedy of a great war or the minute complexity of natural life.
To American audiences who have never had the pleasure, listen to an In Our Time episode every day for a while — on a long walk, on your journey home from work, or under a blanket on a rainy day. Eventually, its spirit of admiration rubs off. When I listen, I find myself filled with a thought I otherwise have too rarely: How lucky we are.
Angela Nagle is the author of Kill All Normies.
