Lord Bragg has said he left the BBC before he was “pushed”.
The novelist and Labour peer, 85, presented the Radio 4 show In Our Time before stepping down this month after 26 years on the air.
Lord Bragg said his decision to step down from intellectual discussion show, which launched in 1998, was “the right path for me”.
Speaking to Radio Times, he said: “One way or another, we’ve all got to go sometime. And I just thought, I’ll go now. I’ll go before I’m pushed.”
The latest series of the programme, in which the broadcaster discusses topics from The Iliad to the age of the universe with a range of academic guests, aired earlier this year.
‘None of my business anymore’
He is set to present a new series for the BBC in 2026, but the details have not yet been announced.
The new presenter for In Our Time has not been announced either, and Lord Bragg said it was “none of my business anymore”, though he said it would not matter “in the slightest” if a woman took over.
Asked if he ever regretted the decision to step down, which was announced earlier this month, he said: “Sometimes I’ve thought, ‘What a stupid thing to do,’ but mostly I think this is the right path for me.”
Discussing the programme’s legacy at a time of the prevalence of anti-scientific social media conspiracy theories, Lord Bragg said he hoped it had served as a counterbalance.
He labelled some of the anti-science theories circulating as “disastrous, utterly stupid and destructive”.
“It’s disappointing that quite a bit of our public life is ignorant – but we’re not ignorant,” he added.
Melvyn Bragg had not yet decided to leave the BBC by the time the last episode of In Our Time was broadcast – Lauren Jacobs/BBC Pictures
Speaking about In Our Time being at the forefront of the BBC’s entry into podcasting in 2004, Lord Bragg said people had questioned whether it was good enough.
“Some people wondered whether In Our Time was good enough, or grand enough, or important enough,” he said, adding: “But we just did it, and the audience came to us in millions, and it came to us from around the world. Though, obviously, I’m very surprised.”
Lord Bragg, who has suffered from several health issues recently, also revealed he had not made up his mind to leave by the time the last series’s final episode was broadcast in July.
He said: “I found it quite a tricky one to do and later in the summer I had one of those moments where you think, ‘Well, which path do you take through the woods?’
“Then you take one, and that’s it.”
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