MELVYN BRAGG's LITERARY TASTE

For years Melvyn Bragg, famously the British cultural commentator with the biggest hair, has avoided devoting one of his South Bank Show arts TV programmes to Bob Dylan's work.

This may be because he feels this would make a worthwhile show only if Dylan agreed to a one-to-one chat (though this would also rule out focussing on anyone dead, for example - so disqualifying quite a few great artists), but he's also managed to give the impression that he views Dylan with suspicion, if not hostility.

Which would be just about tenable if The South Bank Show never dropped its sights below lofty levels of conventional high-culture achievement. But that's never been its stance, and last night the subject was the so-called Bard of Barnsley, Ian McMillan: one of the shallowest poets and most obnoxious Professional Yorkshiremen you could hope to avoid encountering. A man who mistakes clumping delivery for plainspeaking, and cannot offer a sentence without larding it in self-regard.

However joshing and Northern-laddish their telly twosome might have been (and the combined murk of their vowel sounds must have been terrifying), taking Ian McMillan seriously enough to profile him while remaining suspicious of Bob Dylan is like gobbling slugs while scoffing at bouillabaisse.