I was saddend to learn Melvin Bragg retired from In Our Time. Whilst I understand some listener’s complaints, especially in recent years, of Bragg’s performance, I considered him essential to making the programme as legendary as it is. Undoubtedly, a show spanning decades with the same host will naturally have its ebb and flows. As with many such things, there are good and bad episodes, owed as much to Bragg as the guests. If I am perfectly honest, I think the structure of the show having three guests was, at times, a detriment, while Bragg’s occasional struggle with good diction, equal manner, and depth of knowledge, would sometimes restrict the quality of discussion.

On the other hand, Brag’s cranky – even prickly – ‘every man’ style is partly what made In Our Time, and its public intellectualism, so widely accessible and appreciated. Bragg made the show public rather than merely academic. Whatever one thinks of his flaws as a host, In Our Time has been one of the best things on radio for a very long time. The show was presented as an open exploration of a given topic, and within that framework there was often interesting discussion and rational debate among a panel of knowledgable experts. The show’s strength was in how it provided a rare space for listeners to take on and digest difficult ideas without being expected to already belong to a tribe.

Replacing Bragg and maintaining this balance and tone will be extremely tricky. It will need to be someone with strong intellect and equally strong intellectual curiousity, who can also present with balance and sound diction. I’ve read suggestions about Hannah Fry or Amol Rajan taking the reigns. I have no strong opinion about either as a host or presenter, but I’m not entirely convinced Fry or Rajan can carry a prickly everyman tone.

Having said that, one thing the news about Bragg’s retirement does enliven in me quite strongly is a fear for the dearth of the classic British public intellectual. Bertrand Russell, for me, is a personal hero and a perfect representation of a public intellectual. Rather than a pontificating intellectual speaking down to the nation, I see public intellectualism in Britain as belonging to a rich history of vibrant political, social, and cultural exchange that goes back to the Enlightenment tradition, in which theoretical and practical matters are connected through communicative rationality. This is a tradition that has been carried forth by many a great British scientists, philosophers, and academics. In his own way, I see Bragg as a classic public intellectual, and an admirable one at that. If what made In Our Time under Bragg so valuable was how it encouraged people to admire thought, and approach the world out of curiousity in effort to try and best make sense of it without dogma, but through reason – I think it is indisputable that he served as an important communicator of intellectual ideas.

I think this fear is stirred in me all the more by the strange paradox that we appear to live in these days. While access to intellectuals, and intellectual debate, is seemingly at an all time high – on Youtube or through podcasts or other easily accesible media – there is simultanously a lack of connection between television and alternative medias, the academic office and the factory floor and farmer’s field. Perhaps I am about to be guilty of a historical innaccuracy, but, on one side of it, and in a strange sort of way, I think one reason for this is because public intellectualism nowadays seems much too closely tied to the state. What I mean to say is that, this disconnect isn’t accidental. Even though we can now hear more academics and intellectuals than ever, the structures that decide who gets time, funding, legitimacy, and airtime have become more centralised and more risk-averse. Access has increased at the level of distribution, but autonomy has decreased at the level of production. And when intellectual work is shaped by institutional gatekeeping – often tied to the state through funding, regulation, or public-sector career pathways – the result is safer, narrower, more professionalised discourse, and fewer figures able (or willing) to speak across the boundaries that once connected academia, media, and everyday working life.

I’ll ground this opinion in an environment to which I am deeply familiar, and which is deeply relevant: the university. Long gone are the days of the rogue scientist with freedom to work on an idea not connected with the work of his/her university department. They will no sooner be out of the system since it has generally (although there are still some exceptions) become too professionalised and funding-generation-driven at the detriment of the profession. But great discoveries, like great ideas and great intellectual discussion, have always come with creativity, and especially with autonomy. There is something to be said about the person driven to study everything, to learn and understand about things they see and about any books they can get their hands on – to be rationally engaged with the world through sound epistemology, rather than ideology, even if it means raising difficult questions and not always subscribing to the status quo.

I very much doubt majority of British politicians could talk about the lessons of Popper, or Einstein, or Wittgenstein, or Spinoza, or Sartre, or Adorno. I’m not too sure of many scientists who could talk Spinoza or Hegel or even Russell either! Postwar, we had great philosophers, historians, scientists, and artists talking about the most fascinating and challenging ideas. They wanted to reach out to a broad audience and spoke about vital questions that were critical, sometimes deeply unnerving. The heights of rational discussion should have only increased – but, it seems to me at least, we are on a path of greater absence in television and radio of the best contemporary thinkers talking subjects, both rationally and with autonomy.

Bragg’s In Our Time had boundaries, don’t get me wrong. But its vast range of topics, and its often interesting roster of academics, in the very least served to create a melting pot of views and a type of discourse that kept a vision of intelligent discourse alive.