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" I wanted 'The South Bank Show' to reflect my own life and that of the team around me; to stretch the accepted boundaries and challenge the accepted hierarchies of the arts; to include pop music as well as classical music, television drama as well as theatre drama, and high-definition performers in comedy. "

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" I am 74 now. Looking back, I have a sense of not really being in control of my career. I just went where it took me. "

Melvyn Bragg

Looking

Control

I Am

" Once, the arts were opera, ballet, classical music, and everything else deemed highbrow. "

" Is it rather stupid and dangerous to take Magna Carta so much for granted, as many of us seem to do, and to think of this attitude as 'very English?' "

Melvyn Bragg

Dangerous

Attitude

" I love writing, and I love making arts programmes. "

" As the 20th century unspooled, a cultural warming melted down many frozen class characteristics. "

" If you look at the creative economy in this country, it's per capita way bigger than any other in the world. "

" The theatre always seems to be in trouble but always thriving. It's deeply comical to me that we agonize about our crap football teams and indifferent Test sides when in front of our noses is a great world success story that no one's interested in apart from those who work in it. "

" I do think the BBC could do more, but I've always thought the BBC could do more - I think there should be more arts programmes full stop. "

" Grime reminds me, if there is an echo, of sort of near enough like Liverpool in the very early Sixties. It's a lot of kids obsessed with music - obsessed with it. "

Melvyn Bragg

Early

Music

" Film has changed the way we look at the past. "

" There is an army of the informed wanting to be more informed. "

Melvyn Bragg

Informed

Wanting

" My life is not very different from what it was 20 years ago. In fact, my career hasn't changed much since I was 22. "

" I'm addicted to 'Game Of Thrones.' "

" The arts stimulate imagination. They provoke thought. And then, having done that, all sorts of other things happen. "

" There is some brilliant pop music and some very poor classical music. And why shouldn't comedy be treated as seriously as drama? "

" I'd been writing fiction for 50 years, since I was 19. And when you write fiction, it becomes a way of thinking: there's always a novel around. The strange thing was that after 'Remember Me,' there wasn't. "

Melvyn Bragg

Remember

You

" I'm going to try and make you take the Beatles and Eric Clapton as seriously as the Berlin Philharmonic and Simon Rattle. "

" I got the job I wanted when I was 22, and I'm not going to give it up now. "

Melvyn Bragg

Now

Job

" That's why writing is important to me. Time goes past, and you've been somewhere and come back that hasn't hurt you, and you've been somebody else. "

" There are two big beasts in the arts: the BBC and Sky Arts - challenging, leading the way. "

" I actually admire some of the books by a lot of the writers who write magic realism very much, but it's not for me. It's not what I can do, but even if I could, I don't really want to try. "

Melvyn Bragg

Admire

I Can

" We listened to a lot of drama, adaptations of books, comedy. There was a real love of music expressed in choirs, because you didn't have to have instruments except your voice. "

" Sometimes, you're just moved by people's journeys. "

" I was the only BBC graduate trainee in 1961 interested in arts broadcasting. I knew I wanted to write, and I had to make a living. "

" Class doesn't create culture anymore. "

" In 1997, the Labour government set out to strengthen funding for the arts - and achieved it. "

" Now, perfectly ordinary people will give each other hugs. I mean, it used to be that a hug was reserved for if you came back from Australia - you know, back in the '40s and '50s. "

" The BBC does a sterling job, but I'd like to see it do more. ITV does four arts programmes a year; it used to be 28. At least Sky, with its two arts channels, is trying. "

" We got a copy of the 'New Statesman' at my grammar school in Wigton, Cumbria, in the 1950s. It sat mint fresh every week on the library table, with two or three other bargain-offer magazines. The 'Statesman' came out of the unimaginable Great World. I started to read it then and have pegged along ever since. "

" The success of the arts has come through a mix of public subsidy, substantial private support, and good box-office receipts, but central to Labour's post-1997 programme has been a determination to increase access as much as excellence. "