 From a working-class East London background, Bryan Magee had a scholarship,
Oxford and Yale education (he was President of the Oxford Union) before going
onto a career of such breadth and achievement that it's a pity it isn't better
known. This must partly be because of its sheer variety: polymath public
intellectuals tend to fare better on the Continent. Magee has been an academic,
journalist, novelist, music critic, memoirist and politician (a Labour, then
SDP, MP from 1974 to 1983). And along the way, he made several significant
contributions to British television.
Magee's face became familiar to television viewers through his stint as one
of the regular reporters on Rediffusion's well regarded ITV current affairs
series This Week (1956-68). In keeping with his intellectual training, his
approach contrasted with the confrontational, populist style of fellow presenter
Desmond Wilcox. Magee's editions of the programme were models of clear
communication but distinguished also by their sobriety, and their interest in
probing beneath the surface of topical controversies to reveal the clashing
visions of society underlying them. A common thread is Magee's chronicling of
social change. One of his most influential This Weeks was 1964's 'Homosexuals'
(tx. 22/10/1964) - together with his spin-off book One in Twenty: A Study of
Homosexuality in Men and Women (1966), it contributed to the more liberal
climate in which practising homosexuality was finally decriminalised in 1967.
Also in 1966, Magee published a (slightly rushed) book about the techniques of
his trade: The Television Interviewer.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Magee regularly helmed This Week's
arts offshoot, then the LWT books programme Cover to Cover (1972-74). Then for Thames,
Magee briefly combined its discussion format with a return to current and
political issues. Something to Say (1972-73) was one of the most thoughtful programmes on
British television, ranging from a considered debate on Northern Ireland between
John Hume and Conor Cruise O'Brien to probing scrutinies of Eric Hobsbawm's
views on Marxism and R.D. Laing's controversial psychiatric theories.
However, Magee's most lasting small screen legacy is his two landmark BBC
series seeking to bring alive for the general public his own first love - the
history of Western Philosophy. Long in gestation, Men of Ideas (1978) consisted
of hour-long interviews between Magee and a stellar cast of modern thinkers -
including Isiah Berlin, Herbert Marcuse, A.J. Ayer, Noam Chomsky and Iris
Murdoch (speaking about the links between philosophy and literature). The
combination of Magee's own fluency for on-screen communication with the
erudition and charisma of his guests made for surprisingly thrilling and (given
the subject) popular television.
Magee perfected the form with 1987's The Great Philosophers. This history of
the subject took viewers from Plato to Wittgenstein, again via hour-long
interviews between Magee and a different scholarly expert each week. Awakening a
latent curiosity in non-specialist viewers, time and again Magee and his guests
demonstrated that the subject need be neither obscure nor forbidding nor merely
of technical interest. As with the earlier series, the transcripts went on to be
published in book form.
The Great Philosophers was screened on BBC2 early on Sunday evenings - a
relatively high-profile slot that it is hard to imagine such a subject attaining
today. Magee's now rather unsung work in public service television belongs to
its era. His programmes were squarely aimed at a wide public but unafraid of
applying rigorous logic to the ephemeral issues of the day, or of championing
high culture via a popular medium.
Patrick Russell
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FILM & TV CREDITS
