Melvyn Bragg Steps Down From Presenting in Our Time

Clicked on "listen on bbc" for the Ada Lovelace episode, 404. Sad.

I remember when that made the rounds on HN, it is one of the earliest examples of AI-generated classifications/summaries. I used to show braggoscope as an example in many talks... before vector databases, agents, etc.

> he was clearly finding it harder and harder towards the end

Very reminiscent of Sir Patrick Moore presenting his final episodes of The Sky at Night. (Sadly missed).

i wouldnt be surprized if hes been gently pushed out. unfortunately the clarity of his voice has noticeably worsened.

listen to a 10+ year old episode and he sounds much clearer

as a native speaker its all fine and intelligeable, but for anyone ESL it'd be challenging bc its so much mumbling now

Maybe it's just me but that always grated with me a bit. It felt sometimes a bit like a Today programme interview where "presenter style" was the product.

Not to take anything away from the content though. It's the sort of programme the licence fee was made for.

Yes, me too - he reminds me of the iconic (UK) public school teacher, shepherding bright but wayward charges through a complicated discussion.

While he doesn't throw blackboard dusters at them, he prods and harumphs when the egos and waffle of dons has them momentarily forget they aren't doing this in class but broadcasting to the nation...

Adds a bit of seasoning

He was great, had always done his homework!

It’s gone a bit overboard in the recent years. I do enjoy the full body of work though.

I don’t think you need a particular depth of knowledge. You need someone willing to do the pre-work -clearly there are notes from and conversations with the contributors beforehand, someone with curiosity to learn about things outside their areas of expertise. A good journalist would be fine

I know what you mean, but I have a feeling that if this series ends it's not going to be replaced by anything that's its equal in terms of intellectual depth. Feels to be like keeping the brand would keep the producers focused on what makes it great.

There is an episode on the Epic of Gilgamesh which is absolutely fascinating. Highly recommended.

I'll do the opposite: The P vs NP episode is aboslutely horrid. Probably the first and last time that they had any informatics people on the show. One major issue is that the experts didn't explain what we mean by "hard". Melvyn thought, as normal people do, that 'hard problem' means you've gotta be real clever to solve it, not that it takes a lot of steps to solve (and how the number of steps increases as the problem gets larger). When they had the example of purchasing Christmas gifts as a stand-in for maximum bipartite matching, coupled with Melvyn's misconception, the train wreck was a fact.

That's my memory of the event, that was a frustrating lunch walk.

I recently listened to the episode on The Antikythera Mechanism and found it quite fun - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0024x0g

Also, I wanted to mention something interesting - back when LLM-driven applications were just emerging, someone posted on Hacker News about how they categorized In Our Time episodes using the Dewey Decimal System with LLMs. Cool stuff - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35073603

The Photon

Climate Change

Cryptography

Electrickery

The one about Shakespeare featuring Harold Bloom.

I remember one about randomness/probability was my favourite

As I've listened to more and more of it, I start to gravitate not to particular topics, but to particular experts. There are many guests who are regulars when topics in their field come up, and the good ones make any topic in that field interesting. For instance, if there's an episode about religious history and Martin Palmer is on it, it's bound to be a banger (listened to one on Augustine's Confessions recently, for instance, and it was great). Same with Ancient Greece and Paul Cartledge and Angie Hobbs. If I'm looking for something to listen to, I just put one of those three into the search field of my podcast player, and I'm never disappointed.

I can't pick a favourite, but "Consciousness" (1999) definitely sticks in my mind as one of the most amusing due to the prickly debate.

Calendar was brilliant. I think it was the first time I fully appreciated the misery of the human mind in the face of various orbit periods that aren't simple integer ratios of one another. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00548m9

Great Fire of London too. Pepys burying his cheese! https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00ft63q

Politeness. Social barriers were coming down, you were interacting with people of different rank, how do you not get into a swordfight? Also, the letter from the wife complaining about her husband! https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p004y29m

I think they did all the big interesting things in history and then struggled with a lot of minor events that were hard to find interesting angles on.

The one about Victorian sewers is fantastic.

One of my favorites was the one on the evolution of crocodiles [1].

Aside from being surprisingly fascinating, I thought the guests were excellent. IOT's academics can sometimes be bone dry (sometimes not a problem if the subject matter is good, but sometimes it can sink the episode), and in this episode all three guests were both energetic and articulate, and there was some good banter.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000zmhf

Crocodiles

The Taiping Rebellion

>though he'd probably prefer I say English.

I'm curious why you say this. He's a member of the British establishment now. Has he spoken on the topic, or ...?

VPN to the UK and pull the back catalogue from the BBC using get_iplayer, don't get it from the podcast feed

They closed off the website to unregistered in the UK too, last time I tried to access content it asked me for a license number (I don't have a TV license).

I used to follow topical comedy podcasts but they put a large delay in their publication cycle so they're no longer topical.

They also nag you to install the app. They seem often to just repeat the worst habits of commercial media.

The thing that makes it work (aside from Melvyn's excellent hosting) is that they have an unspoken but fundamental assumption about the audience, which is that the listeners are intelligent. Like, it's ok to have nuance, to dig deep into topics, it's even ok for listeners not to follow every point precisely. But the listeners are smart people that appreciate hearing from people who know what they're talking about.

That's a very rare assumption in modern media, when most mainstream things seemed to be aimed at some sort of lowest common denominator.

> how well moderated a discussion among experts can be

I've been listening to the podcast for years. I don't think the format counts as a 'discussion among experts'. It's more like Melvin asks prepared questions individually to each expert--a hub and spoke model. The experts rarely talk to or debate each other, although they often agree which each other. Melvin largely controls the narrative and direction, which I think works better. Guests do get to free-wheel at the end of the podcast, however.

If you pay for Spotify and listens there, this removes the ads.

For what it's worth, the BBC has a premium podcasts subscription for the US and Canada, with no ads.

https://www.bbcselect.com/select-more/bbc-podcasts/

I believe it's currently Apple-exclusive, but if you enjoy BBC content, it's worth it.

I feel strangely offended that here in Czechia there are actually no ads on BBC podcasts …

Oh thanks! That one looks worth sampling this weekend.

Looking through the archives, this one with Melvyn Bragg might be interesting as a way to start: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001q0kd

Just wanted to say thanks. I burned through a few episodes this weekend on a trip and found them all quite interesting and thought provoking. The Allende and Nick Cave episodes were particular hits in our car.

For me, with a STEM background (and, I, suspect for many people here) the science episodes were never the most informative (though I would still learn a great deal about the history of the subject)

I'm not sure whether someone with a background in arts or history would say the same about the other episodes.

For those who want something entirely outside the STEM-heavy HN sphere of interest, there is another great BBC podcast about social science: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking_Allowed

> I know the pigeon story about cosmic microwave background already: please elaborate on the......

We know that story, but many non-scientists don't.

The genius of In Our Time is genuine academic discussions accessible to the lay man. I found the In Our Time discussions on ancient Greece and the arts fascinating, despite these being two subjects I have no background in and know sweet FA about.

In Our Time is meant to be a brief tour of basically every topic in arts, science, philosophy, etc. And yes, Melvyn has been an arts presenter for decades (his The South Bank Show started in 1978), science is not his forte.

Perhaps you'd prefer The Life Scientific with Jim Al-Kalili? More than 10 years of him interviewing scientists and covering their careers and discoveries: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b015sqc7

Alternatively, The Infinite Monkey Cage is more comedic and science themed than In Our Time, with two scientists and one idiot for every topic: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00snr0w

I felt you could really tell his enthusiasm was for the arts.

Which is fine, of course, everyone has preferences; but the contrast with the much more rote science episodes did make me a little sad.

yep, i skip those episodes

similar issues are with non european cultural topics. You often get what i'd label wikipedia-depth

I always thought it was appropriate that the UK nuclear deterrence fleet apparently would check for Radio 4 still being broadcast to check whether civilisation as we know it (at least in these damp isles) has ended.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letters_of_last_resort

> the amazing resources of BBC radio (that precede all modern internet podcasts and the best of which still wipe the floor with most of them) are often forgotten

I don't know, there are some definite bright spots like IOT but the typical output of Radio 4 is definitely not massively in advance of the big podcasts. The Rest Is History/Politics are clearly hugely popular inside the UK and basically constitute "the competition" for your average R4 listener.

I actually think that the podcast model is a big threat for traditional radio. Podcasts are much more lucrative for the makers, the reach is as-big (or bigger) and you don't have to negotiate with the government like R4 does.

> Its odd that ...the amazing resources of BBC radio ... are often forgotten.

> you may need a VPN outside the UK

Not that odd, really.

I do feel that IOT would benefit from being longer - it often feels rushed. Podcasts excel at "deep dives" in a way that radio is barred from doing: a podcaster can say "I think I'm gonna do 30 hours on George Jones this year" (real example), and nobody can stop them.

IOT's format has a lot of statements, but not many questions. Bragg doesn't often say "hold on, what are the consequences of that?" (unless it's a prepared question designed to move us through the biography). Ironically, this lack of curiosity gets worse on subjects he understands well (the arts).

The unscripted chat afterwards is often the best bit. I could do with 10 minutes of on-script introduction and 50 minutes of experts discussing something they're passionate about.

I'm British and live in the UK so BBC is a big part of my radio listening anyway, but I agree, the quality both in terms of content and recording quality is largely miles ahead of most podcasts.

Excluding things like political things which wouldn't land the same to international listeners, my favourites are:

The Kitchen Cabinet You're Dead To Me Crowdscience Inside Science Just a Minute The Unbelievable Truth Nature Table Take Four Books Witness History Last Word Gardener's Question Time A Good Read (I wrote a blog post a while ago about scraping the books using LLMs to extract from the text of the descriptions: https://rpep.dev/posts/a-good-read-extracting-books-with-llm...)

That was the best part of Bod.

> I have had an inkling to use some Machine learning system to gather the drinks options from each In Our Time.

This is a thought of whimsical genius. I do hope you go for it...

I hate to say this out loud but I keep going back to some particular episodes to help me nod off when insomnia grips. I'm not sure I know how the episode on the gold standard ends and I must have listened to it more than 10 timss.

If you want to add to that list, check out Only Connect on the BBC. Best quiz show for smart people in the world.

Also - obviously annual not weekly - don't forget the Reith Lectures (https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00729d9): long-form lecture series by (often) the most brilliant people of their time. Back catalogue available from 1948 in podcast form. Recommend starting with Bertrand Russell in the inaugural lectures - he's fantastic to listen to, even now.

For your listening pleasure, here's a supercut of Melvyn's iconic intro: https://pascalwyse.com/blog/2017/12/15/in-our-time-machine

Ha! I feel the same. So much better than the tiresome intros in modern podcasts.

I think the finest BBC documentary series was The Ascent of Man - probably because my father made me watch it when I was about 8:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ascent_of_Man

I found it so off-putting, I couldn't really listen to the show. On some episodes he would basically lead them through his notes, as if he were the expert and was having to suffer these people explaining things badly to him.

Bragg has been a strong force in intellectual culture in the UK for many decades. I remember my Mum and Sister being upset by a trailer for The South Bank Show back in the early 1980s, and he was a prominent "elder statesman" figure of the media by then, really - so he's had very good run.

But to be honest, I am hoping we get somebody a little bit less frumpy and grumpy picking up the space he will inevitably leave behind. I just hope it's not closed down and we end up with more middling dross.

That's the only way they managed to cover such big subjects in relative depth in such a short slot! All the guests are used to waffling for a full uninterrupted hour to captive audiences about tiny segments of each topic; without that pressure the show couldn't exist.

I mean his whole job was to make sure that the conversation didn't get too wildly off topic. I have to say I appreciated his nudging based on his notes.

In this day and age it seems like people get a soap box and get to say whatever they want without interruption. Someone needs to keep things in order and he did a fantastic job curating the show.

are there any science episodes on there? i don't see 'em

Sometimes I have felt his interruptions to be kind of rude, and have almost sensed an air of irritation by the interrupted guest. But I am not a native English speaker so may have misinterpreted it.