How McCartney and I helped put pop on the map

In 1977, when I set up the South Bank Show for ITV, I wanted Paul McCartney to be on the first programme. His unique talent apart, I thought he would be the key to unlocking one of my chief aims in the new programme, which was to disrupt the accepted order of play in which classical music, ballet and opera were at the top of the pyramid while down at the bottom was pop music. McCartney took some netting, but he came on and we met at Abbey Road Studios at about midnight and the programme was launched. Not without criticism: the Daily Telegraph critic wrote that as far as arts programmes were concerned, it drew the line at Lennon/McCartney. Those were the days. Clive James saw what the programme was trying to do and backed it and that was vital. Forty-five years on, pop music is now well dug in as one of the major creative springs in the arts and, at 80 years old, even more impossibly handsome, relentlessly prolific and immovably grounded, McCartney still seems to be a ruler in that world.