The departure of Melvyn Bragg from Radio 4's In Our Time sadly brings to an end an era of intellectual broadcasting, says our Writer at Large, Neil Mackay

When I was a teenager in the 1980s, Melvyn Bragg was part of a stellar yet reassuring cast of working-class artists and intellectuals who made it clear that the factory wasn’t the only future for kids like me.

Around my 14th birthday, I decided I wanted to become a writer. Yet I was stuck in a concrete jungle housing estate. Back then, however, Bragg made the journey seem not only possible but achievable.

You can live the life of the mind. That was the message. Your horizon need not be limited by your class.

Bragg, who’s 85, is retiring from BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time. So we have an opportunity to celebrate the role both he and the show played in shaping our culture.

In Our Time will return with a new host, but his going diminishes one of the last intellectual redoubts in British life.

In a country which often sneers at art as pretension and intelligence as suspicious, In Our Time was a place where the mind mattered, where complexity was king.

Before In Our Time, Bragg popularised high art on TV with The South Bank Show. It was a Southbank interview with Arthur Miller – I’d become obsessed with The Crucible - that first switched me on to Bragg as a kid.

Around the same time, I decided there was only one matter which topped my love of books: girls. Bragg helped there too. Even as a teenager, I thought he was pretty cool.........

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