Time for a change
After 27 years of Melvyn Bragg there’s a new host of In Our Time. What will the seemingly modest Misha Glenny bring to the table?
Guy Levy
- Michael Hodges
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Misha Glenny really didn’t expect to get this job. “I was astonished, flabbergasted, absolutely thrilled,” he says of his appointment as presenter of In Our Time. In bagging the role, Glenny follows Melvyn Bragg, who presented the programme from 1998 to 2025. “This is one of the crown jewels of Radio 4 and Melvyn is such a towering figure,” Glenny says when we meet in Broadcasting House. “It’s an immense privilege and honour to be asked to take it on.”
Like many of the two million listeners keen to feed their curiosity, there was one episode that hooked Glenny; the “absolutely brilliant” January 2008 programme on plate tectonics. “I was late and rushing to get out of the house but just had to listen to the end. The conclusion was that without tectonic plates there would be no life. Who knew?”
Intrigued, Glenny later told BBC executives he’d want the job if it ever came up, but claims he wasn’t a shoo-in. “No, not anointed at all. The selection process included making a pilot and for three months I assumed I wasn’t going to get the job.” The 67-year-old already presents The Invention of… series on Radio 4 and until recently was Rector of the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. Glenny also wrote the 2008 non-fiction book McMafia, which became a BBC drama series starring James Norton, and won a Sony Gold Award for his radio reporting in central and eastern Europe in the early 1990s. He says he’d like more Russian literature on the show.
We've all experienced, with social media, the mushing of the brain
Misha Glenny
So, what else might change? “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, but the show might benefit from another guest, or one less,” he teases. He’d also like to tilt towards In Our Time’s many younger listeners: “It’s one of the most popular Radio 4 shows with the under-35s and that’s very important.” Mainly, Glenny says, he wants a smooth transition, so “people can build a similar confidence in me as they had with Melvyn. Frank Skinner said Melvyn acts like an ‘intellectual sheepdog’. That’s a beautiful description.”
Bragg could be sharp if he thought the conversation was becoming unfocused – can Glenny? “That’s Melvyn’s genius. I’m not argumentative. Fortunately, I’m married to Kirsty Lang, who’s an experienced presenter and a hard taskmaster. She’s already pulled me up on certain things. She says I have to be a bit tougher.”
One thing Lang can’t change is her husband’s background. Bragg, with working-class and northern origins, was a tribune for the people; London-born and public-school-educated Glenny is not that. “Someone who’s been a plumber since they’re 16 will generally have been much less privileged in terms of access to know-ledge than I have,” he admits. “I’m conscious I represent something else. I was brought up in what used to be called genteel poverty. My father, a brilliant translator of Russian literature, never really made any money; I was a direct grant fellowship kid. I hope my background will be countered by the fact I have had life experiences which are far from comfortable.”
Those experiences include covering the horrors of the 1990s wars in the former Yugoslavia. Glenny, who calls this period “deeply traumatising”, has just returned from Sarajevo, where he was recording The Invention of… the Balkans. “I wasn’t expecting to have quite such an emotional response,” he says of the trip. “At a museum about the massacre at Srebrenica, I was suddenly transported back to those days, and I felt overwhelmed. It was awful. All of us [who were there] carry the traumas in our own different ways.”
Melvyn Bragg, In Our Time host 1998-2025. Mark Johnson
Glenny has also encountered “unimaginable poverty and despair” in Brazilian favelas, and met witnesses to “terrible things” when he researched McMafia. He joined the Institute for Human Sciences, in part because his professional life had been “a series of rather traumatic encounters”. Did his job in Vienna save him? “If anything saved me, it was marrying Kirsty. But there was another event. Eleven years ago, my daughter took her own life aged 22. And that’s what I was recovering from, ultimately. In fact, it’s something you never do fully recover from, it is always there.”
His daughter was one of two children from his first marriage (Glenny chooses to keep the details out of the public realm). He also has a son with Lang. Didn’t his wife, presently fronting Round Britain Quiz on Radio 4, want the In Our Time job herself? “It’s the last thing she wanted. Although she’d probably be much better than me. No question.”
Much has changed since In Our Time started in 1998. Its podcast now has a wide international reach but the BBC, “a towering influence” during the Yugoslav Wars, has lost some of its international cachet. “Language services and the World Service have been progressively defunded and closed down,” says Glenny. “That’s a distressing phenomenon.”
There are new threats from streamers, social media and the rise of artificial intelligence. “The enormity and speed of technological change is a fundamental danger to sustained rational social relations. We’ve all experienced, with social media and the internet, the mushing of the brain, so that we are permanently distracted.”
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That’s even happened to intellectuals like Glenny? “Oh, God, yes!” How does he deal with it? “I make sure that for at least two hours a day, I read a book.” And perhaps listen to intelligent radio shows? “In Our Time works against the distractions because it picks subjects which you don’t know that well but have always wondered about.” The first three episodes recorded in the Glenny era are on John Stuart Mill’s seminal philosophical work, On Liberty, and the bloody gore of the Roman arena. And the other? “The Mariana Trench.” That’s deep, I joke. “Deep?” says Glenny. “It’s profound!”
Authors
Michael Hodges
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