Colm O'Regan: I'm the man for the BBC's best radio job, In Our Time

Melvyn Bragg attends a memorial service for Sir David Frost at Westminster Abbey on March 13, 2014 in London, England. (Photo by Chris Jackson/Getty Images)

I have never applied for a job via my column before, but now, as brazen as can be, I am saying: Hello BBC, I know we’ve not spoken in a while, but please give me the job of presenting In Our Time after Melvyn Bragg’s retirement in July.

Melvyn who? In Our What?

It’s ONLY one of the best radio programmes devised. It ONLY was a podcast 10 years before they were a ‘thing’.

In 1998, British broadcaster Bragg had to give up his job as presenter of BBC Radio 4’s Start the Week because he’d been made a life peer by the Labour government, so it was thought there was a conflict of interest.

He was given a slot on Thursday mornings at 9am that no one listened to, and he did the programme he always wanted to do — to talk to very clever people about interesting things. And so he did.

More than a thousand times since. Pick a topic, find the absolute experts on it who can travel to a studio and get them to talk about it in an entertaining — but not banterful — way. Absolutely NO time is wasted asking the guests how they are. There’s an atom to be split.

Take any list of consecutive episodes and there will be no pattern — the history of whales, St Paul, Elizabethan revenge, calculus. Just curiosity for its own sake. Not linked to any news story. Not part of any series. It could go on for infinity. (Infinity, covered on October 23, 2003). It’s about as close to a random as you can get. To find out what random actually means, try “randomness and pseudorandomness” (January 2011).

Speaking of pseud, it sounds on paper like a programme for and by people who like to think they’re fierce smart altogether, probably smarter than you.

But it’s not. Because of Melvyn Bragg. He is part of that great Bill O’Herlihy tradition of asking the best simple questions. He never let any big-brained people away from the end of a sentence if he thought he or we didn’t understand what they said.

“Can you develop that further?” he’d say to Penelope Harcourtfartington, Professor of Toes at St Scuttleforth’s College, Cambridge, as he invites her to get into verrucas. (In an episode about toes I just made up).

“Develop that” is one of his catchphrases.

Over the years, Melvyn has facilitated more development than our last 10 ministers for housing.

Because a lot of topics are far back in the past, it feels escapist. The Fish-Tetrapod transition (October 20, 2022) doesn’t jar with the present.

It happened 400 million years ago, after all, or rather before all.

At the end, there’s an extra bit for the podcast only. They talk about things they forgot to say in the radio bit of the programme.

It’s almost quaint that they’re only given five minutes.

Now in podcasting, they’d be given another few hours. And then another day for the Patreon subscribers.

At the end of that, these three intellectual titans are asked if they want tea or coffee, and they seem to lose their poise.

“I’ll just have a peppermint tea if you have it,” says a professor meekly, even though five minutes previously they were confidently explaining Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle to two million listeners.

The show has seeped into my mind. Just as we hum radio or TV show jingles or ads, so I know Melvyn Bragg’s introduction off by heart.

“This is in our time from BBC Radio 4 and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find on BBC Sounds and on our website … I hope you’ll enjoy the programme.”

I did. I still will. And, BBC, I don’t mean to Bragg but I’ll gladly help you make more.