Survivor ... Melvyn Bragg
Photograph: Frank Baron
It took Darwin's Origin of Species to prove that dinosaurs existed, but do we need still dinosaurs to remind us of the fact? Apparently so: Braggiosaurous Melvinorus, whose survival of the numerous BBC ice ages must indicate fitness of some kind, is back with a hybrid book/TV show.
Though he's at pains to try and separate the book from the ITV show, Melvyn Bragg's Twelve Books that Changed the World has the fingerprints of hamstrung, 21st-century cultural broadcasting all over it.
Item one - the list. Where would literary programming be without a ramshackle selection for viewers to get into a froth about? From the BBC's Big Read to Richard and Judy's all-powerful Book Club, the simplicity and directness of the list format sweeps all before it. But is it any more than a handy format for programme-makers?
I doubt it. Structure is solved at a stroke - 4 programmes, 3 books in each - and in such a brutally straightforward way as to reassure viewers already nervous at the prospect of high-falutin' cultural fare. Sprawling, interconnected subjects are divided up into simple chunks that can be digested easily - the industrial revolution this week, the slave trade next.
The list also holds out the prospect of controversy and interactivity - the holy grail for post-Big Brother broadcasters. Though Bragg is careful to avoid the definite article, he's a seasoned enough hand to know that "it doesn't stop the Today programme from introducing it as 'The' Twelve Books", as he told the Observer yesterday, or the Sunday Times from starting a "debate" about the world's best books. Cue chatter from the cultural commentariat. (And here we are, falling for it already.)
I have another problem with the timidity of the project. Bragg calls his list "modestly titled", with an "ambitious argument", but the ambition of the argument seems to be only that of convincing people that books - mere books - have shaped modern life.
With many of the "books" he has chosen his argument seems in danger of retreating yet further. Bragg was unable to include a single novel, exhibiting his customary reverence for science and technology by including Newton's Principia, Darwin's Origin, Faraday's Experimental Researches in Electricity and Richard Arkwright's patent for a spinning machine. No one could argue that modern life would be possible without Isaac Newton's theories of motion and gravitation. The fact that he published his ideas in a book is neither here nor there.
But the thing that marks it out as a classic telly-box mish-mash is the sheer arbitrariness of the whole damn thing. Why 12 books that have changed the world? Why not 10, or two, or 112? Why books from Britain? Why not Belgium, or Belize, or Birmingham? Why not books beginning with "B"?
