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In 1977 I was happy at the BBC making two programmes - Read All About It, a paperback book programme, and Second House, a long format arts programme, for which I interviewed artists from Tennessee Williams to Pete Townshend. London Weekend Television, led by Michael Grade then as now, asked me to go across and start a new arts programme, virtually giving me a blank sheet. I'd always wanted to do an arts programme across the board and particularly an arts programme where I could say what I wanted about what the arts had become in the second half of the 20th Century. I was determined to start with Paul McCartney who at that time, bruised by the break-up of the Beatles and the criticism of Linda, was extremely difficult to prise into public. I got a lot of help from his friends and after three months of negotiations managed to land him. We filmed in autumn 1977 for the launch in January 1978. We met in the Abbey Road studios just around the corner from his London house. Linda came with him and took photographs with a reckless disregard for the price of celluloid. She crackled with good humour. Paul, as usual, was rather quiet, observing, witty. Already then he had managed to retain or construct for himself the character of the ordinary bloke despite all the evidence to the contrary. He was recording Mull Of Kintyre which did not please all the critics but became the biggest selling British single to date. Watching the record being produced was like seeing a jewel being cut. Nothing got through until it thoroughly satisfied, several times, the stereophonic demands of McCartney's ears. We sat at the piano for the interview - always useful with a composer. I asked him about the cascade of songs that seem to teem so effortlessly from him. 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. The idea that popular arts were shallow by definition and the traditional arts were profound was dead, I thought, and I wanted to prove it ... There were a handful of subjects who could not resist tweaking the process. Elizabeth Taylor very gently but very, very firmly coaxed the lighting man to reorganise the entire set-up so that she would look, as she did, stunning as usual. Ingmar Bergman, one of the greatest of all film directors, reorganised our interview set-up - not to pander to his vanity but to give the shot intrigue and depth. It did. When ITV3 commissioned six programmes and called it Celebrating ... The South Bank Show, I looked through what we had done and found that almost accidentally we had put together an archive of art and artists over the second half of the 20th Century. Because we concentrated overwhelmingly on living artists at different stages of their careers - starting out (Martin Amis, Coppola), mid-career (Norman Mailer, Nureyev), or near the end (David Lean, Laurence Olivier) - we corralled a choice herd, some of whose work will last for a very long time. There were risks. It's always safer to do the Great Dead and we failed sometimes. I keep saying we. The programme has benefited from a succession of very fine producers, directors, researchers, cameramen and film editors. It is no wonder that the creative industries are among the most successful in this country. It's extraordinary in world television that a commercial channel, ITV1, should carry more arts documentaries than any other, but not extraordinary if you know the people who work there. From Michael Grade, who hired me more than 30 years ago, to the newest researchers, there's always been the will to go for the best on ITV in the arts, as in drama and the news. And the new landscape out there has given us many bonuses. John Cleese, for instance, who began as a stand-up comic performer, went on to write the classic farces of Fawlty Towers and then moved effortlessly into films. I interviewed John in his house in Holland Park. He was a brilliant man but a little tense that time. His mother came into the room. He chatted a while and then she left but John suggested she come back. He was, I'm certain, totally serious. Looking back there's something in me that wishes I'd gone along with his suggestion but at the time I missed the great opportunity and persuaded him it might be better for him to talk for himself. That programme gained us one of the highest audiences we'd ever recorded. Nervousness has been a common factor both on my own part - I try to get my nerves over before the interview but sometimes it's quite difficult - and on the part of interviewees. Andrew Lloyd Webber, interviewed at the piano, was nervous about a song he had written for Cats. He was being accused of plagiarism - a centuries-old accusation not only of musicians. Not surprising as all art feeds on art. 'He said, "Yes. It sounds like $5million." ' Andrew burst out laughing and the song has circled the planet. When Dustin Hoffman was playing Shylock in Peter Hall's production of The Merchant Of Venice, he could not work out how to motivate a certain speech. So he translated it into foul-mouthed Brooklyn talk with four-letter words hitting the ceiling. 'That's it,' said Peter Hall. Hoffman then took that theory into Shakespeare's words. 'Perfect,' said Hall. We kept it all in. The Sun, among others, came out in a fury, damning our gutter standards. Yet a gently delivered remark by David Hockney, talking of a Picasso drawing with Picasso himself looking at a nude model, said: 'This is a picture I love ... He is looking at her,' he pointed, 'he is looking at her c***.' We put it out. Not a single complaint. It can be an even bigger shock when people appear to change character completely. John Osborne, the original Angry Young Man, ended his life as a rather reclusive country gentleman sipping champagne in a grand house in the Welsh borders and occasionally going up to London to his club. His invective remained. His targets had changed. 'Everyone is so mealy-mouthed these days,' he said at 11 in the morning, the third glass of champagne fully charged. Reality and champagne lead directly to Francis Bacon, whose paintings now sell for tens of millions of pounds but who lived in a dump and painted 'because I like doing it. I happen to be a painter, that's all'. The violence of his images not only rocks the salerooms but is probably the greatest of all influences on young artists today, Damien Hirst most particularly. I'd known Francis for more than 20 years. It's too long a story but eventually he agreed to do a film and he went totally flat-out. We met at nine in the morning in his studio - now transported to Dublin as a museum. It was tiny. The walls were crusted with dabs of paint - his palette. There was space for one easel, a few stacks of canvases propped against the walls. Half-spent tubes of paint littered the floor like fag ends. It was a real problem fitting in the camera. There was a narrow galley kitchen and one further room that served as a bedroom and living room, every bit as small as the studio. That was it. On the kitchen table we found heaps of photographs, all black and white, of boxers, rugby players, athletes at full stretch, faces and limbs distorted violently. We intercut them with some of his paintings and suddenly saw Bacon the realist. I asked him what his work meant to him. Rather shyly he unzipped a pocket in his leather jacket and read out a prepared statement. He had insisted we all drink the Bollinger he had lined up beside the sink and at the restaurant we drank rough red wine. I had been on the wagon for a few weeks in Cumbria working on a novel. This was an alcoholic waterfall. After the restaurant cleared, Francis and I pretended to have lunch and did the interview. We ate nothing but we drank on. We got very drunk. It showed. We slurred. Once or twice we all but stopped. Yet things were said by Francis that were utterly true to the man I knew. The optimist who believed in nothing. The man who despised almost all art save that in ancient Egypt, the mixture of courtesy and bitchiness. Later that afternoon in Muriel's, the Soho drinking club heaving with alcohol-loving artists, he ripped open the lining of the leather jacket to produce a comb to primp his hair in the mirror. A red-faced gargoyle offered a derogatory comment. Francis replied: 'I never use makeup. Keep your make-up to yourself, you old cow.' And then he laid into various American painters. We went on to Charlie Chester's gambling club next to some blurred drinking hellhole. At some time or other I found my way home, my liver leaping up to my ribs like a salmon. I saw what we had done a few days later. We were not entirely a pretty sight and there was plenty to laugh at but what Francis said was true to the devil in him and I kept it in. Still today art students like to say 'Cheerio Francis, cheerio Melvyn' and lift an imaginary glass of rough red. There could be a sub-section on encounters with the drinking artists. I first interviewed Eric Clapton more than 20 years ago and extracted an interview only because we drank glass for glass. He was in a bad way then but happy enough sitting surrounded by his vast collection of guitars, seeming sober even when confessing the contrary. A few months after that encounter he went dry and has not touched a drop since. When I interviewed him some months ago I found the model of a sober citizen yet still happy to open up - for instance he said that when he had gone sober he discovered that he couldn't engineer sex. In the intoxicated years, he said, he'd been on automatic or left the operation to be dictated by the ladies concerned. And, of course, Iggy Pop, one of the most enjoyable interviews I've done, in his neat house in a quiet suburb of Los Angeles, the old Rolls-Royce at the door, drugs and drink gone but the extreme nature of his performance remains. After his performance the camera followed him off stage where he all but collapsed and was carried back to his dressing room. A frame from our film filled the front page of The Mirror, hit other papers and television chat shows and curiously, I think, George Michael's blatant smoking helped kick-start the latest phase in his career. I interviewed Pavarotti in what could have been the set for an opera - the garden of his holiday house on the Adriatic coast. There were Arab dealers taking tea, there for the day to sell Pavarotti some new stallions. His mistress, who was to become his second wife, had joined him in public for the first time and the paparazzi were swinging off the branches. Somewhere beyond the Arabs were men from the music business shuffling contracts, and reports came every half-hour or so on the meal he was cooking for 16 friends and relations that evening. He was besieged. It was extremely hot. He could not have been more polite. We had talked a number of times as much about football as about opera. He had been a young, slim player of a successful local team, with proud photographs and medals to prove it. His first remarks were about Dennis Bergkamp, the Dutch player who had failed at Inter Milan, Pavarotti's favourite team, and had just been transferred to Arsenal, which I supported. Pavarotti was delighted to have got rid of him and even more delighted to tell me that we had bought a pup. He was wrong. He was badly wrong, but alas there was no evidence to prove that at the time. When we talked about opera he concentrated on The Voice. His voice. It was as if he were talking about a younger brother. How The Voice had been there 'since a boy when he had jumped on the table to entertain his family'. How his father, a fine singer, had found a local teacher of distinction to train The Voice very carefully, not rushing it. How eventually The Voice had matured and become 'The Voice of the tenor; it is The Voice of a wild animal'. He stroked his throat as he said that, forever anxious about its welfare. We talked to his mother and father. Mrs Pavarotti, a hat, a dark dress, a handbag clamped firmly and planted on her knees, sat beside her husband on a bench in the local piazza. Mr Pavarotti burst into O Sole Mio. It rang around the town. When he had done he said something to the effect that his son's voice was purer than his. But yours, said his wife, putting things in their place, is much stronger! He nodded. That is true, he said. There's Peter O'Toole climbing a ladder in Vienna to look into what had been Hitler's flat. Barbara Cartland abandoning me in a forest of her Norman Hartnell dresses. Seamus Heaney, myself doing the interview a second time because I thought it didn't work the first. I had the same experience with Victoria Wood. Cher saying: 'I can tell by your tie you're not interested in fashion.' And Alec Guinness the strangest and most unnerving of them all ... The longest time I spent on a film was with Laurence Olivier, thought by many to be the supreme stage actor of his day, an audacious film-maker, the true founder of the National Theatre, a compulsive risk-taker, inspirational but to some now and then a monster. It took us nine months to make the film, partly because he was desperately ill for some of the time, coaxing to health a body raddled from cancer. Sometimes we would stop filming and urgently race for the pills. He was determined to play King Lear and to carry Lear's dead daughter Cordelia in arms badly weakened by illness and so he swam and exercised every day. Who was he? My friend Jenny King, who was part of our team, had a birthday. What, she said, she most wanted but would never get was dinner with Olivier and myself, just the three of us in a nearby hotel. And he didn't just turn up for a drink and a moody starter. He starred. Somewhere between that generosity and his effortless mimicry and anecdotes was, I thought, the real Olivier. But, sod's law, the cameras weren't there! The next day we drove into Brighton where we were to meet John Osborne. Thanks to Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe's influence, the great establishment hero Olivier had been converted to Osborne's wrong-side-of-the-track work and took on the part of The Entertainer, in which he stunned half of theatre-going London and dismayed the other half. That morning he'd read an article that stated that drinking destroyed memory. He was incandescent that no one had told him of this until he was in his 70s (this was a man who could remember the whole of Hamlet). But he banged on about this as we drove down in the minibus - he would never drink again, I must never drink again, particularly the driver must never drink again, memory was precious, drink was destruction. Weary of the rant we arrived in Wheeler's in Brighton. Osborne was already there. At a corner table in the gloom. A glass of champagne in front of him bubbling sulphurously. Osborne at his most seductively satanic. Cue a mighty long lunch with much drink taken followed by a marvellous scene, the two of them talking high on a promenade above Brighton beach where the wind blew their straw hats down to the shore. Sometimes the programme has had unexpected consequences. Ian Rankin told me that seeing our Ian McEwan film had triggered his own ambition to write. Tracey Emin said: 'When I was a child about 10 years old when most kids were out playing I must confess I would sit in front of the mirror and imagine I was being interviewed by Melvyn Bragg.' She was terrific. There have been cries of dumbing down - not so. This year alone we have made programmes with Gore Vidal, David McVicar, Tim Burton, Kevin Spacey, Sarah Waters, Annie Lennox and Mamma Mia! - across the waterfront as we set out to do in 1978, but where's the dumbing down? On any range of evidence Britain is braining up. What confuses some of the critics is that new generations simply burst through old barriers. I heard a young violinist recently talking about her musical tastes. They went from Jimi Hendrix to Nigel Kennedy. Our signature tune - Paganini, reworked by Andrew Lloyd Webber - itself crosses boundaries. Nureyev told me he wanted to dance like Fred Astaire. Bryn Terfel and Kiri Te Kanawa had more than a passing fancy for rock and soul - he for Elvis and the sideburns, she for Tina Turner and the leather. Andy Warhol invested his art in rock stars and celebrities. It's a much more playful mixed-up, democratic world out there than ever before. The only rule we tried to follow was: What is really good? What's the best? • Celebrating ... The South Bank Show begins on ITV3 on Wednesday at 9pm. No comments have so far been submitted. Why not be the first to send us your thoughts? This is cache, read story here
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