Captain Moonlight: The man who liked Melvyn

SO YOU think you've had a bad week? Cheer yourself up with Melvyn Bragg's. Last week Melvyn was called, in public and inter alia, horribly smug, arrogant, rude, menopausal and dreary. His novels were described as outrageously, appallingly bad, and absolutely unreadable. On Tuesday night he accepted the Literary Review award for the worst description of sex in fiction. His week started with one of Mr Peter Carter-Ruck's terrifying thunderers and ended with his first writ for libel.

Melvyn, sitting in his office on the 11th floor of the fog-smothered London Weekend Television building, was not smug, arrogant, rude, or dreary. He was slightly bemused but smiling bravely. Actually, I am in difficulty here. People who interview Melvyn either arrive disliking him and have their prejudice confirmed, or they arrive wanting to like him, but can't. It will do my credibility as a serious player no good at all, but I found him rueful and funny. Oh dear. The Journalist Who Liked Melvyn Bragg.

The thing is that there is this theory abroad that Melvyn has gone macho; that, for some reason, he has turned into an excoriating fury from whom no one is safe. Turn up for a pleasant chat about your book on Start the Week, his Monday morning radio programme, and you are likely to find yourself being cuffed across the studio (cf Kathy Lette, the Australian writer, and Peter Hall, who rashly suggested it was a plug show). Write a novel which becomes a television series taking fictional liberties with the Prince of Wales and you will get another Bragg broadside (and Melvyn gets that writ, from Michael Dobbs, via Mr Carter-Ruck). This guy makes Norman Mailer look like Beatrix Potter.

So, what's it all about, Melvyn? Well, as far as Dobbs and To Play the King is concerned, Melvyn, apologetically, has to consult his lawyer, which he does now. While we wait for the lawyer to call back, we consider this seething interest in Macho Mel, the Rottweiler of Radio 4. 'Very strange,' says Melvyn. 'I just think that I've got more into the habit of being able to say what I want . . . maybe I have relaxed a bit, maybe got a bit more edge . . . but we didn't sit down and say this will be the way we do it . . . but what a ridiculously disproportionate fuss when you consider what else is going on in the world.'

For Melvyn, it is all part of the media's obsession with the media, 'people writing about themselves all the time'. Quite, I muttered, head in notebook. The Daily Mail had published a large article about him last week 'ringing up people who think I'm a shit to say I'm a shit . . . who's interested? It's just silly, it just makes me laugh, but it's also a bit eeeugh.'

Why didn't people like him? Melvyn laughed. 'I can see a great number of reasons why people don't like me, but why should I tell you?' He relented under wheedling. He said some people didn't like him because he did too much: television, radio, books. Up to them, he said.

People thought he had too much power. But he didn't have power; he might be head, at LWT, of the largest arts department outside the BBC, but he had only a peripheral influence - he could perhaps make someone read a book, go to something. He was doing what he wanted to do, combining teamwork in broadcasting with the solitariness of writing, and he wanted to keep on doing it.

Despite the nastinesses, he says his novels have had 'a fair crack of the whip' critically: 'I could reel you off some good reviews, and I could reel you off some bad ones.' They are, he says, regional and unfashionable, 'but that's the way it is'. The bad sex award for A Time to Dance ('we twisted and tugged at each other's buttons and zips')? Melvyn turned up to get it: 'I'd rather be blokeish than chicken.'

Menopausal? 'I'm 55. I'm in a senile crisis, not a mid-life one.' What about the money and the socialism? Melvyn said his shares in LWT were worth more than pounds 2m; yes, he was a Lloyd's name, but that 'was a perfectly honourable thing to do'. You took risks, had returns and hits. How was he doing? Like his dad in Cumbria said about his gambling, 'Holding my own, Melvyn, holding my own.' The Labour Party needed wealthy people; Attlee hadn't been without a bob or two; to call him a champagne socialist was 'an easy one'. Melvyn laughed. Behind him was his Bore of the Year award, from Private Eye. The lawyer called. Melvyn was advised to say nothing. But he did keep smiling.

(Photograph omitted)