Start the Week

27/12/2010

Andrew Marr celebrates 40 years of Start the Week. When Richard Baker first presented the show in 1970 it was a lively and often chaotic, mix of chat and celebrity knitted together by a weekly theme. Cookery demonstrations, and dancing with Wayne Sleep, rubbed shoulders with Roald Dahl and Sophia Loren discussing what frightens them, and Idi Amin playing the accordion. It was Melvyn Bragg who reinvented the programme 18 years later to make it a forum for ideas. He challenged his guests to explain their views and when guests like Maya Angelou, Francis Crick, Tom Stoppard and Salman Rushdie sat round his table together the debate sparkled. Andrew Marr who has been at the helm for the last 8 years is joined by Richard Baker and Melvyn Bragg to discuss four decades of Start the Week.

Producer: Katy Hickman.

Duration:: 44m
Broadcast on:: 27 Dec 2010
Audio Format:: other

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Thank you for downloading the Start The Week podcast from BBC Radio 4. For more information, go to bbc.co.uk/radio4. Hello, it's 1970. Harold Wilson is Prime Minister, but not for long. The Beatles split up, releasing their last album, Let It Be. America is convulsed by the story of the My Lye Massacre in Vietnam. Concord makes her first supersonic flight. And Ramar is 11 and working his way through the novels of W.E. Johns and Rosemary Sutcliffe. And a new radio programme, Start The Week, is born. It's the time when television, with its trendy stars like Morkham and Wise, Benny Hill and Bruce Versailles, whatever happened to him, seems to be swamping the poor old radio. Radio 4, which had changed its name from the BBC Home Service only three years earlier, fights back. It brings in a dapper television presenter, Richard Baker, for a new kind of morning show. 40 years on, in a rare but shameless display of naval gazing. Richard Baker and another great name in Start The Week history, Melvin Bragg, are with me to reflect on how, on the whole, we do like Mondays. Richard, the early Start The Week was very, very different from the programme people are familiar with now. Yes, it certainly was. It was me in the studio with some written links to go from one story to another. And pieces by what were known as reliable freelances on various different subjects. I mean, there wasn't any kind of exchange of views or anything of that sort. These are all recorded pieces. So it was just me and recorded pieces. I think we had a weather forecast and we had a cookery spot, quite early on. We were seen as skinner, but that was the general pattern of it. And did anyone say to you what kind of programme it was meant to be? Well, I don't think so. I think we just did it and hoped for the best, really, for the beginning of the thing. It was kind of supporting to the news, really, slightly offbeat stories. When did it become live? I suppose we'd been running for about a year and it gradually became live. We would do interviews in the studio rather than on tape and that sort of thing. And the kind of interchange began to develop between the different people in the studio. And then suddenly it was decided on one occasion that we would do the whole programme live for the first time. And that was perhaps about a year after we started, I would think. We're going to hear a little montage now, actually, some of the excerpts that we've picked out from the archives. And you'll hear a little later on the butcher of Uganda, E.D.R. Mean. You'll also hear Ted Heath, Kenny Everett, talking about bottoms, Sophie Lorena and Kenneth Robinson. Good morning. This is Richard, inviting you to start another... ..with the only remotely broadcastable version we could find of Eskimo Nell. If I tell you that this is a men-only edition of Start the Week, I hope their vibes will guarantee that all the girls will stay glued to the radio for the next 55 minutes. ♪ So find me a seat and stand me a drink and a tale to you I'll tell ♪ ♪ Of dare I dick and rest complete and remain a festival now ♪ Well, songs like Eskimo Nell are normally balled out without somebody talking at the same time. At stag parties in raga-changing rooms, pub-back parlours, naffes, service messes and other such masculine preserves. And today we'll be exploring some others, like prison and boys' comics. Most males, I would have... I do study, I read some of the paper, and also I do some sports, swimming, basket balls, and also meeting friends and driving myself. General, I mean, you've been president now for one year. Do you find the job is very tiring? I just play when I feel happy and free after my duty, and I have a time, some time I take time to play accordion, just to refresh myself. When you did the cocaine overture, the critical reaction on the show was extremely good, but one or two critics did say that you had perhaps rather a stiff wrist. I don't think it was really very stiff, but on the whole I prefer conducting without a stick, and just with hands, because I think hands are so much more expressive. I think there might be people who at this stage in our affairs, when we seem to be surrounded by problems and troubles of a great many different kinds, maybe you shouldn't be taking time off to conduct anything other than state affairs. Oh, if they do think that, and I think that's very short-sighted. Sometimes people are short-sighted, they will never get the best value out of their politicians by insisting that they always work themselves to death. I don't think that politics should be the be-all and end-all of life. Can I say bum on the BBC? I'm going to just a moment, I'll check. Can he say bum on the BBC? I don't know, I'll just check. Can he say bum on the BBC? I don't know, I'll check. Can he say bum on the BBC? Thank you, bum bum bum. Can you go out? You live in Paris mainly? Yes, between Paris and Switzerland. Can you move out of the house without being besieged by photographers? I'm an actress, and what we fight for when we start our career is to be known, and to have a certain kind of success. If you reach this certain kind of success, and then you are besieged, you say it's a beautiful word. By photographers or by people that want an autograph from you, and they just want to look at you, I think it's beautiful. Will you sign my copy of the book before you leave? Yes, it's more than good. Richard, he's right to know that. Well done. No card once said to me when he was besieged by autograph hunters. I said, isn't this awful? He said, my dear boy, it's awful when it stops happening. It would be a disaster, no matter what fact it is. I brought here today a summary of the recent news you may have missed, and you'll be glad you did. All genuine items starting with the one about the chairman of the Timber Development Association, who's been three years in his post, the report from Luton, where young people are giving up gliding because of the soaring costs, and more recently, a whole set of traffic lights were stolen at Reading, and the police said people simply wouldn't stop at anything. Sorry, no gender. But anyway, to quote again from Frank Boff's book, thank God, as he says, there is so much light-heartedness about it. It says here. I thought this was a serious Radio 4 programme we're on. Said an eye, Frank. Nevertheless, I think it is an early morning breakfast time tea party, and why not? Thank you, Kenneth Robinson. Frank, your image on the screen that we know. I want to say a special word of thanks to Kenneth Robinson, who's been an integral part of this programme, and the starting of my weeks for 15 years. He leaves the programme today, alas, for the present, to any rate. I shall miss the element of anarchy, Kenneth, which I've had to struggle to control in a sensory kind of way, all those years. Well, I want to say, I'm not going. I'm not going. I had three days' notice after 15 years, and it's a bloody disgrace. Well, there you are. There's a parting word from Kenneth Robinson. Kenneth Robinson, and more of him in a moment. But, first of all, early morning tea party, Richard, a fair description. I think so, he's rather nice, I think. He's in a Greyborn chatty and not too serious programme, which could touch on serious topics as well. Sophia Lorraine, the mention of her, brings back a memory, because I came into the studio, I don't know about Harper 7 or something in the morning, and there was this rather sort of quiet little girl sitting in the corner in a raincoat. I thought, "What is she doing here?" "Yes," I said, "Can I help you?" "Is this start the week?" And I hadn't the foggiest notion that it was Sophia Lorraine. Absolutely dreadful. It was a frightful thing. Melvin, you were on the show from times and times and days, weren't you? Yes, it was a rather crowded jolly. A bit of a man had the steep on you, Richard. That's right, Esther Robinson was a great regular. And I may say, fed her baby while she was conducting an interview, which surprised me at the time, and I don't know why it should surprise me. Esther often had rather sort of kooky ideas, and she painted my feet red on one occasion. There was some kind of research going on. Yes, of course it was April Fool's Day. A strange conception of radio, it has to be said. Just take your shoes and socks off, Richard, I need to paint your feet red. It's on the level with our children, isn't it? Having a ventriloquist on radio was about as good as it got, but now painting some of his feet red matches it. Somebody who came into the studio almost unnoticed, week after week, actually, was Victoria Wood, who played the piano in the corner. We had a little upright piano in the corner. You had a piano in the corner, yes, I'd forgotten that. That's right, and Gordon Clyde used to do some topical songs from time to time. And this unknown lady came in and sat down and played away, and did her stuff and went away again, Victoria Wood. So we gave an extraordinary start on the radio. Yeah, but it's always a studio-based programme. A few outside broadcast, but hardly any. We did an extraordinary outside broadcast one week when we were on a ship, the Hermes aircraft carrier, on a naval exercise in the North Atlantic. And the idea was that we would do a slot from the ship in the middle of the programme and have a certain amount of it land-based with Kenneth Robinson. And needless to say, the Navy was only too happy to have the publicity. And in order to transmit satisfactorily from the ship, the ship had to turn on a certain course. The trouble was the course was away from the exercise entirely. I mean, he had to drift off it in a completely different direction. Oh, I don't mind. He said, "I'd rather be on start the week." We once had out of this studio. Absolutely disastrously, not once, for about half a dozen times. And this was because of the iron will of the producer I worked with, Marina Solandi-Brown, who decided that you wanted to take a start the week around various capitals of Europe, especially in Eastern Europe, not, I think, entirely unattached to her notion that you would like to see that part of the world. Anyway, we went there. I think we did Moscow once on the same basis. They were disastrous. They were terrible. I couldn't speak any of their languages. Their idea of English was often very good, but their idea of start the week was non-existent. And it was quite interesting because the amiability of the English and British folk who do things from academics to entertainers is very nice, tolerant, easy-go. But we were having in the studio time and again, people whose views were bitterly opposed to each other. They were each running pamphlets or little magazines against each other. They'd never, they'd scarcely met, except to cut each other, and trying to get them to take up each other's points and the sympathise was a nightmare. Marina standing in the cubicle waving her arms about and me saying, "Never again can we get out of Budapest as fast as possible." He was terrible, terrible, terrible. You always remember the stuff that goes wrong. I think my worst one was there was a food programme on ahead of us, who were doing a pre-rec. And they'd been sampling illegal American moonshine, the Hoops and these kind of misty bottles without labels. And for some mad reason, the entire, not only all the guests, but also myself, we just were trying it out. I wouldn't say we were actually drunk on air, but we all found that our lips in the front of our faces became frozen. And we couldn't see it properly, I mean, I don't like this. But I think that was the worst moment. It is one of those programmes where people enjoy stuff going wrong, isn't it, when the anarchy takes over. You had to Kenneth Robinson to help with that. That's right. A lot of the time. It's very powerful, I think, on that programme or any other, when everybody talks at once, I think it's absolutely awful. I mean, if you've generated that much interest in excitement, that's quite good. But then you've got to calm it down again, haven't you, otherwise? It gets out of hand. Was it always as much hard work in terms of the preparation? Certainly, I mean, in terms of what I do, it's lots of... I think the weekend was a jolly, busy time. You know, I had to read a great deal and do quite a lot of homework, yes. You brought in this wonderful attack on you, made by the Sunday Times, many years back, where they did a little drawing of Richard Baker. And of start the week, it says, "His leaden wits "be muddled by the clique of prating hacks, "alleged to start the week, "an emptiness where boars and half-truths breed, "supposing he can think as well as read." And you replied, you replied in verse. I have the pleasure of a little reposter there. Indeed, they may be right, who say I grow too highbrow sometimes, but too hacknid? No. Who seeks to shine must study to be bright. And learn to listen, he starts to write. But what is truth, as Jesting Pilate said. A little falsehood brings a lot more bread. Enough of this, my leaden wits collapse. But even they can comprehend, perhaps, this nameless fool's pathetic thick of peak. He's never yet been asked to start the week. Nor will he. You've got a letter of support from John Osbort, which is pretty good. John Osbort, Bob Robinson wrote and said, "As deaf to peace of seeing as off as I've had the pleasure of reading, "I have a double plus," he said. That's not a bad one. So, 1987, you left, Richard. You were replaced by Russell Harty, who had a pretty barbed star, but became ill pretty quickly, didn't he? And then a lot of people were tried out, as possible, presenters. Kate Adi Sue Lourley, George Melly, I think, was tried out. And Melvin, you got the gig, but you got the gig on your own terms. Yes, I was always nervous of radio, partly because I tried to work it out, because it meant so much when I was a child. We didn't have television. So, being in a studio talking to microphones with these people made me very nervous, and even with Richard's expert chairmanship, I felt nervous there. Russell Wiesel, and he was a friend of mine, and I liked him very, very much, as so many others did. And he rang up once, and this is more or less true. I mean, it's remembering, and he said, "I've got to go in the hospital." And it looks as if it's bad. But not that bad. I'll be back. And they're trying to find somebody else, and they're asking Esther and Michael. They're good. I'm trying to get you to do it. (LAUGHTER) And it was right now that they wanted it. The seat won, but not too warm. Absolutely. And so I did it, and I was completely relaxed because I was taking Russell's place. And he used to talk down the microphone to him, because I knew he'd be listening. And curious enough, it blew away my nerves, that particular episode. And when he died, they asked me to stay home for a few months, which I did. And then with the Purdue Submarine That's Landon Brown, I started to think about what I would like to do with the program. So wonderfully established by Richard as his program. But when you move in, you decide what you might do to change a few things here and there. And that's what we try to do over the next few years. I suppose the most famous change that you made was to bring in a lot more science. Yes, when we started the program, when you looked at statistics, 1% of the contributors were scientists. After about 7 years, up that went up to 37%. And it was a deliberate policy on the part of Marina and myself. I was interested in science then. I hadn't done much science at school. I hadn't been much interested in the '60s and '70s. There's some wonderful books coming out of some great writers. People like me, generalists. And I wanted to talk to them, I wanted to bring them on. Interesting how much they resisted at the start, because they had their own programs on radio. And this was a general program that I didn't like the general field. And they would say, "I'm in my laboratory at 9 o'clock in the morning. "It's far too far to travel from Warwick to London just to talk to." But eventually they came in and people like Steve Jones and Richard Dawkins and they took part and Gould. And they liked it, and as you know from this program, as you both know, it gets a very good feedback, and they liked that too. They liked getting out to a general audience. And we built on that, and then I wanted more historians in and I wanted more philosophers in, and we gradually changed the nature of the program. And on the whole, the audience came with us and they built a little bit. And now I was very pleased to do that, because as you both know, the pleasure of this form of broadcasting is that you self-educate and that you do what you think people might like, because you like it, and if you're lucky, they do. So that was a tremendous opportunity for me, yeah. Well, we heard earlier on an ensemble from the Richard Baker years. Let's hear something from the Melvin Bragg years, a wonderful clip. You started Maya Angelou, and among those round the table are Francis Crick, Tom Stoppard and Salman Rushdie, quite a mix. You are able to see the particularities of the little ball of wires in my brain, and say on the left-hand side, or there in the rear, that controls light or controls view or whatever. I, on the other hand, can take an idea and with the use of something beyond those synapses or that I think of. I can put together some sounds to make people weep 10,000 miles away. I can write some melodies and make people want to go to war, along for peace, 500 miles away, who will never see me. Tom Stoppard can set some situation, some character, some event into motion, which can make a person stand erect and want to love someone, want to fight. I'm afraid that when you reduce me, me collective, me human being, to a group of neurons and synapses and little bits and pieces of wires, you've lost the soul of me. That's a very good explanation of the reductivist. Yes, but you see, I entirely agree with you because we don't think that particular way. We think it is the interaction of them and the complicated ways they interact. The do-go view of your thoughts and do enable you to reduce poetry is just that we would like to know what it is that's interacting, that does it. We would like to have what's called a low-level description of what you've given, it's called a high-level description. I think you could say that if you understood it the way we understood it, you might not like it. We would say we would find it even more awesome and fascinating if we understood it in terms of nerve cells, how you do poetry, what happens in your dreams, for example, all those things. So, it isn't true that we want to reduce it just to these elements. We want to use those elements to understand all the things you've just said. Tom's so fun. I'm skeptical about the subtitles. Scientific, a scientific search for the soul. Well, naturally, it wouldn't be unscientific. But I think that Francis isn't actually interested in finding a soul, he's interested in finding that there isn't one, which is an odd way to describe a search for it. That's perfectly clear, though. I'm happy to find the metaphorical soul. That's what you were talking about. That I'm very interested in. You would say, to find it in the interactions of nerve cells indeed. How metaphorical does that leave it? Because I have no difficulty with your hypothesis when you are writing about experiments in seeing what happens in the brain when we see something. I don't know that this necessarily is a sequential series of similarly related levels of perception, which would lead you finally to what I would call a value judgment, a transcendental value judgment, an aesthetic judgment. I think the romantic idea, my goodness, we're going to come to this, aren't we? I just realised it's the romantic classical schism again, isn't it? I mean, it's exactly what it is in here. I'll come coming up in five minutes. I'm really doing that. But on this side of the table, we're unabashed romantic. It's simply fine that you and my Angelou, you're offering Salman Roshan Francesco, people who come... I'm trying to imagine that. It's not television. We find the hypothesis incomplete. That would be the polite way of saying it. Salman and then... I only just say that it seems to me that, like many of us around this table, I also spend my time using this invisible organ called The Imagination. And frankly, anything that tells me what it is and how it works is, to my mind, as helpful as it is to anybody who uses any organ to know what that organ is and how it functions. That excites me. I want to know it. Fellow presenters. This is the sort of strange haphazard fusion cuisine of start the week at work, isn't it? Because you don't know quite how people are going to engage when you get them on. You don't know who's available because they've published something or whatever it might be. And you hope that when you get them into the studio, some extraordinary connections will be made between them. But you never quite... That was a very, very good example of very, very different people finding a common conversation. As you said earlier, it was... It wasted the weekend. I mean, you had to... Mind you, I quite like sorting, so it didn't add all that much. But it did waste the weekend getting around these different subjects. And as you do, and as Richard did, you like to find links between them. Otherwise, the thing is just a series of particles. And that's one of the things you both look for. But at the same time, the differences are what's interesting about start the week. What's about... is a good start the week, is the jump start to the week. It has all sorts of... It has all sorts of resonances, as we know from the innocent sexual playfulness, which Prince Charles and the then Camilla Parker Bowles put it to in one of their exchanges. I fear our most famous moment is a programme. And you know. And one of the things we did, and I'm sure you did, I mean, was we actually asked the contributors to do quite a lot of work. We would say these other people are on, we'd really like you to read their stuff. I know you haven't got a lot of stuff, but you'd be very helpful if you did. So you always had the basis for a discussion. Now, whether the discussion was interrelated in the way that it can be, if you do one subject, it's a different matter. But you had the basis, because they were on the whole extremely conscientious. They'd like to be on the programme. Richard established as a great mainstay programme of British radio. And once they played that game, you were in with a chance of making a decent, cohesive programme. Yes, well, you didn't want the justice sort of plug their own particular line of country, did you? But to take an interest in other people, it was very important that. Well, you could never tell, can you, Richard, what the alchemy is going to be like in the studio? That's right. There's all sorts of rather extraordinary unexpected things happening, leaders to say, when you get a mix of people who aren't necessarily intimate with each other at all, I remember we discussed Amadeus, the Peter Shaffer play about Mozart on one occasion, with him and various other quite DD people. And also on the programme, but not primarily engaged to discuss Mozart, was boy George, who sat rather quietly in the corner, nicely made up and everything else. And eventually he piped up and said, "Oh, I know Mozart died at the age of 35, a pauper." But then he didn't have my personality, did he? I always thought it was a rather good remark. This business of people being expected to do their homework, I mean, I certainly find one of the most enjoyable aspects of it, is impressing on very, very eminent Americans, that they're not allowed on the programme, unless they're prepared to do the homework. That's right. But I guess it's always been haunted by this sort of plugger's paradise aspect of it. There's another little clip of Richard, it's the 17th anniversary of the programme, in fact, when among the people plugging their wares on that occasion, they were indeed Melvin Bragg, as well as Peter Hall and others. Let's just hear a little bit of that. Why do people come on this programme? You're all here to plug things, aren't you? You wouldn't be here if you weren't plugged in. Well, why have you asked them? Why have you asked them? I wouldn't be sure. Well, I have a certain affection for you, since I saw you in the Marlowe Society as an undergraduate acting, and I thought you'd go places then. I think we're obviously going to have an only note. The main reason I'm here is to plug and see if they're part of the National Service. I wouldn't get up on Monday morning when I'm in the middle of dress rehearsal. And Melvin, I mean, why are you talking length about the made of buttermilk? I mean, they think they're not the made of buttermilk. They're not talking about the technical or the made of buttermilk. I think you bring us all here because we're cheap. Well, you're only cheap because you've got something to sell, isn't it, right? But this is one of the extraordinary things about a programme of this kind, that there is a tremendous element of self-advertisements in it, isn't that? I mean, people only come on, really, because they've got something to put. Is that a jascal turns our talk about underneath Cleopatra and books like the made of buttermilk into an infused, such, well-thouched, well-thouched, seamless conversation. What we try and do is invent a totally phony theme and collect the whole thing together. It's like watching you take your clothes over at the moment, Richard. Richard, can I write? I'm not sure these things are good. I wanted to defend the programme for a minute here because when I... Against this present, yes. Now, this is one of the perpetual problems getting people to shut up and to say, "Carry a crawler." Well, I think I was... Well, that was a clip of not that much more than a minute and a bit. You've managed to say "made of buttermilk" four times, I know. It was a... Anyway, I vaguely remember it. I was saying, "I could sort of stop this happening, "just sort of get it out of everybody's system." Say, "Yes, that's what we were doing at that particular moment." "Okay, but what's the problem if it's a good programme?" That's what made me laugh. I mean, hands in newspapers every day. You have interviews with people, you have interviews with Andrew Marr because he's a book coming out. You've interviews with me because I have a book coming out. And that's what happens and nobody, as it were, gets fussed about it. But they seem to get a bit fussed about it on start the week from time to time. And I thought that was very bold, Richard, to sort of take his clothes off in public. And actually, you were just damning them. You were more than hitting the navel on the head. You were driving it into the crowd and saying, "Yes, there we are, there it is." Also, having people in who are plugging a book, you hope if your producer has been doing a good job, that the book is worth plugging, or the film is worth watching. At least at some level worth talking about. But there's just occasional moments when that's not the case. I'm going to play another bit of a Melvin programme because you had a female presenter's friend, I should say, quite often, somebody who was in there as well to add to the mix of the programme. And on this occasion, your presenter's friend is Rosie Boycott. And the target of your disdain, if I could put it that way, is Kathy Let. Do you remember this fetal attraction, her novel? You didn't like it. I have actually met a lot of people, like the ones I sent up in the book. I mean, the English literati, glitterati, the clitorati. I mean, you know, the two Melbourne, they live in very vicious circles. The Porsche driving progressives, the ones that are about as relevant as a cover full of Nelson Mandela T-shirts. And they did deserve a few raspberries, I think. The ones who are always in the pages of Hello! magazine, with the, you know, the money... The glitterati are in the pages of the Hello! magazine. - The glitterati. - Well, that, you've moved from the literati... - The glitterati, I'm getting lost in the album. - Okay, let's make a new label. The celebrityocracy, then. The professional celebrity. - Whoops, you're an celebrity. - Yeah, I mean, what's all the same thing, isn't it? - No, it isn't, it isn't. - But you are, I mean, you need to take the book with a Siberian salt mine. I mean, it is humour. And the good thing about the English is that you do have a wonderfully self-deprecating sense of humour, and you can laugh at yourselves, which is why I don't understand why you're taking the book so seriously. - Did it make you laugh, mom? - For God's sake, say yes! - Kathy, you, you make me laugh, and I'm with you, but the book didn't, I'm afraid. - No, I didn't. - I think one of the reasons, and one of the reasons that both Rose and I already independently didn't talk about until this morning, both felt much the same about it, was because we thought this is going to be a treat. When we meet you, you're very funny, and you've written funny things, and it's announced as something going to be about the people that we sort of supposed to bump into, you know, TV people. And they're easy to stand up, and God knows their characterable, and goodness knows I've been characterated as much as anybody. And there you go, that's it. But I didn't get any hit on it. I didn't know the people you were meeting, and I'm not being funny. I just didn't know these people. - Lucky you is all I can say. - That was relatively rare, Melbourne, to get the guest on it, whose work you just couldn't get on with. Yes, it was rare, because one of the things that you do on programs like that is to choose books on start the week, and there isn't a program like it. It's to choose books that you think are very worth talking about, and that you're going to like, and absolutely true testimonies. If you like it, you hope that your audience will like it. In that case, because she banged on about it a lot, and I thought, what the heck? There you go, I didn't. - Anyway, notoriously, or famously, or whatever, Melbourne, you got pushed eventually, isn't you, for being political? - I wasn't political at all, and the program wasn't political at all, but I was put into the House of Lords as a Labour peer, and the powers that be thought that being a working peer in the House of Lords was not consonant with being the person who presented it start the week, and size asked to leave, and that was that, and I didn't complain in public, or much in private then, I'd had 10 great years doing one of the great programs on radio. - And quite soon afterwards, they got this program together, which eventually became... - You got this program together, you go on in our time, and on we bailed from there, but yes, I got pushed, I got fired, and the first time I'd ever been fired. - You and Kenneth Robinson both. It's a bloody disgrace, you should have said on it. - No, I didn't say that, and it was, yes. It's odd, because I mean, it's actually, I mean, we ended up discussing political grand political issues, I suppose, issues about freedom and responsibility, and this and that, but it's generally speaking relatively unpolitical program. We only have politicians on when they've written a book, or they've got some, you had Ted Heath on talking about his conducting, but you wouldn't have had Ted Heath on talking about his politics. - No, he really did get into rather a lot of trouble over that, because I was doing a concert with Ted Heath, and so we were going to have him on to talk about music, and that sort of thing. But of course, there were political implications of that, and because I knew him, I'd mentioned to him that we might perhaps do this without really consulting anybody else. - And of course, politicians tend to be too grand and too busy to do the homework required to come on to start the week, you very rarely find that. In fact, when Jeremy Paxman did the program, after you did it, Melvin, I think he had Kissinger, Henry Kissinger, famously on, who wouldn't stay, he did the first bit, and then he was so bored of the other guests, he just upped and offed, I don't think he stormed out as it was reported at the time, but he just upped and offed. - Did you have any stormings out? - No, no, stormings out, but Susan Sontak was a wholly admirable writer and an intellectual of the topology in America. She was on once, I didn't want to start the week, and it was quite clear that, after a few minutes, that she couldn't quite understand why everybody else was there. She wanted to talk all the time, she had all the answers for any questions, and she would look around in her other puzzled words, these other people as if they shouldn't be there at all. There are one or two others like that, but I think we'll keep quiet about it. That is, once you talk too long, the better than the ones who don't talk at all, I've had one gentleman a long time ago who simply said nothing, I would ask a long question, the being go, hmm, and I'd be a deadly pause, and I'd ask an even longer question, you know, and then turned away from the microphone, and that was another thing called sweat moment. - There's other things when people get stage fright, and that's awful to see, they get mic fright, and we all have ways of coping with it, and if you're live, or we are live, it's difficult to manage, it's difficult for everybody to manage, and that's a real worry, and have you ever heard mic fright doing it? - No, I haven't, no. - I had once, and I didn't quite know what to do, I just sort of drifted away, and couldn't get back and do it, and it was rather strange, did you? - I'd always like to have sort of names written on pieces of paper and things like that, my great sort of alarm is forgetting somebody's name at the appropriate moment, that's the form it takes with me. - Yes, I mostly forget people's names, that is true. - Mike Fright, it's more that I find I'm thinking about something entirely different, and I have to kind of grab myself, and that does happen occasionally. - Melbourne, I was very interested in this thing about Mike Fright, what form does that take? You just feel you can't speak? - Yeah, you just feel you've lost contact with the program. I had something I've suffered on and off all my life in various ways, but I thought I'd go over it, and then it comes about once or twice, you do absolutely no idea what to do. - But if you've got good people in the studio, don't carry on with that. - Yes, you have, once or twice I've had in the last 20 years. - Yeah, I guess just picking up the program recently, it does all come down to the mixture of people you get, and getting the unexpected conjuncture that, you know, there was an example we had, not so long ago, when we had the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, with David Bideal, the comedian, and the great children's and writer, and militant atheist, Philip Pullman. And that was a good example of where you weren't quite sure what was going to happen. We actually recorded it in Lambeth Palace, here's just a tiny little bit of it. - I think that a lot of the source of the problem that some religious people have in dealing with atheism is that they think that for some reason all ethics come from religion, and all moral teaching has to have a religious basis. I don't believe that. I think that we learn a moral standards, not only from what we do learn from religion, but we also learn from literature, from fairy tales, from myths, from common experience, from the experience of our elders and parents and so on, and our own experiences we get through life. So moral understanding seems to me has a much wider range of sources than just religion. - I think one of the things that you're raising is, you know, in a society that certainly in the West may be moving towards being more atheist, where would values come from? In a way for me, as an atheist, and I am an atheist, I don't kind of see that as the point in a way. I kind of think for me, as an atheist, the truth is that God doesn't exist, that is my belief, and as such the value is truth, and then where morality comes from out of that, I don't really know, but I have to start with what I believe is the truth. - Well, so there's an ethical imperative to the truth, if there isn't an ethical imperative anywhere else. - That's what I'm saying. And yet it seems to me, one of the sources of ethical truth may well be science itself, so for instance, something we've talked about in this program before, is the drive to be kinder to animals, itself driven by a growing understanding of animals, brains and consciousness, given to us by science, then produces a new ethical imperative that we didn't perhaps feel before. I don't think that comes from science. I think what science does is to extend the range of a moral capacity or moral sensibility that's there. If science shows me that animals suffer in a way that's rather like the way humans suffer, then it's not that science has told me, "So you must be compassionate to animals." It says, "The compassion you already extend to human beings, you now need to push a bit further." And the question then goes a stage further. So you have to arrange to an ethical understanding that was there already. - I'm sure that's right, I'm sure that's right. If you have a dog, you know it feels things, you know it senses pain, you know it senses unhappiness and fear and joy and so on. You don't need science to tell you that, but science, as the archbishop said, does extend our understanding of how this happens through the physiology of the nerves and so on, but the feelings there already. And for me then, the question is where does that feeling have its ground? And well, it's blindingly obvious to me that not everybody with serious ethical commitments has a religious commitment. I want to know where the unconditionality of that commitment derives. It may just be, and I think this is probably what you say, it's just there, you know. - In your mind it would have a divine source of base. - Yes, the universe is the way it is because it comes from God. But it may just be the case, I have no idea that there might be Darwinian need or there might be another origin for empathy. That's essentially what Philip and everyone is talking about even with animals. We have an empathy, we know how other people might feel, we know how other beings might feel, and therefore we don't want them to feel bad if we're not bad people. Now if you knew that empathy was a purely Darwinian thing that was therefore a survival strategy by another name, would you feel it in the same way? - I might do, I don't think I was an atheist, I wouldn't need to know that it came from God to feel it. - No, but if you were to say there are determining reasons why I feel empathy, I'd rather suspect that your empathy would feel different than you could have an override, an empathy override would come in. - I'm not going to do what my genes are telling me. - That's like listening to a sentence which is of the form x is only y, something is only this or merely this or no more than this or nothing but this and so on. I always reject that sort of sentence because x is always this plus something else, there are always other things that feed into it. - Which is why science I think doesn't in itself produce ethical insight. - No, it just adds to what we have, I agree with that. - Well I'm delighted that we end on a note of absolute consensus between the Archbishop of Canterbury and Philip Coleman. What a good place to conclude, thank you to all my guests. - That's quite a long way away from Kenny Everett saying bum or EDR mean playing the accordion. I'm interested in, without being sort of pompous about it, as to whether there's any lessons you can draw about the way the show has developed because it starts at a time when television is absolutely in a sense and Radio 4 takes a television guy, Richard Baker and does a sort of chat show and it's enormously successful and you'd never have thought that it would end up as the show it has ended up as would you. - Well I think you can say bum on Radio 4 on the one hand and I think you can have a perfectly serious conversation with the Archbishop of Canterbury on the other. If you have a group of people in the studio, if you hope that they will interact with each other and not entirely talk about themselves, I think the texture at that particular time on a Monday morning probably wants to be light, but that doesn't mean you can't do serious sanctions, Melvin. - What you did, you just set it up tremendously and we all owe you a great debt and so does the listening public. You've established one of the great programs throughout the week. We did change it, we wanted to change it and if I'd gone to the controller of Radio 4 at the time and said look, in about two years time I want this program to be nearly 40% scientists, about 20% historians, about 20% philosophers and we hope to hold the audience and maybe build on it. I didn't think they would have let us do it, not because they're ignorant far from it, but I think that they did not think that at that time on the morning the British public would take to that sort of content. Well they did and the audiences went up and they continued to go up and I think that tells us a great deal about the BBC, but a great deal about the British public. This and programs like it through the week at that time, at near peak time are completely denying the glib put down of dumbing down Britain. They are just denying it week in, week out, week in, week out and I'm very pleased that I're denying it. - Well I wonder if it's even further than that, there's a kind of treason of the clerks in the higher echelons of broadcasting and the media. It's constantly saying everyone's dumbing down, everything is getting silly and honestly, and actually, by doing so, are contributing to it rather than following where the audience really wants to go, which is a lot of the time, it can be light, it can be sharp, it can be funny, but they won't clever. I think that's been proved beyond that and they want information and they want people at the top level and actually what they want is continuing education, if I put it that way, they want the things they didn't learn, they want holidays of the mind as well as holidays in the sun and real vacations. Where you refresh yourself, they want to know what the world's about and I think that to provide a little bit of that is very, very worth doing and they come and listen and that's great. - Well I think that beautifully formed sentence is a very good place to end, that's more than enough naval gazing and oiling up to the listeners. Thank you to my fellow start the week presenters, Richard Baker and Melvin Bragg were back in the New Year on the 10th of January when we'll be putting the world to rights with them, be Sir Moyo, Stephen Kinser and Charles Clark, but for now, goodbye and have a happy new year. This podcast is sponsored by Wise, the app for doing things in other currencies. If you're sending or spending money abroad, you should use Wise. You'll have up to 40 currencies in the palm of your hand. Wise gives you the real exchange rate, which means you'll spend less on fees and more of your money gets where you need it to be. Download the Wise app today, or visit wise.com. 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Producer: Katy Hickman.