YES, as you will have gathered, I am an intellectual. That is why you will find me watching programmes such as this, rather than reading rubbish like Dan Brown or JK Rowling.

Basically, this programme linked a mass of old clips of novelists discussing why they wrote what they did, interspersed with comments from writers such as Martin Amis.

The archives were well and truly plundered and dusted down and the film cleverly stitched together in an attempt to tell the story of the 20th century British novel through the eyes of the authors themselves.

Of course, the whole thing was just an excuse to use old footage of authors which otherwise would never be shown, but it works.

Old footballers, pop, rock and film stars are always on TV, so why not writers?

This, the first of the series, concentrated on the years 1919-39 and featured grainy black and white interviews with the likes of H G Wells, E M Forster, a cantankerous Evelyn Waugh, William Golding, Robert Graves and Christopher Isherwood, plus interesting pieces on George Orwell and Graham Greene, as well as the only recording of Virginia Woolf in existence.

Some of it was slightly dull and some not really worth broadcasting other than for the sake of having that particular author, who otherwise may never be seen on television, on record.

The programme started with DH Lawrence telling us just after the end of the war that “the cataclysm has happened and we are among the ruins”, while HG Wells spoke fondly about Communism.

The writers talked about their post-war existence and The Great Depression of the early 1930s, and by the time I got through the Bloomsbury group — including the anti-imperialist Bertrand Russell and economist John Maynard Keynes — and listened to Christopher Isherwood talk about how his time with a working class family inspired his writing, Robert Graves on sexuality and the fact that he was in no way homosexual and PG Wodehouse about Bertie Wooster, I was left with the impression that literally everyone who put pen to paper in those days spent their childhood at the high end of the public school system.

E M Forster told us that, after A Passage To India, he decided not to write another novel as he wasn’t very good, and The Wide Sargasso Sea author Jean Rhys said she only wrote when unhappy: “When I was excited about life, I didn’t want to write about life at all, and when I was happy I had no wish to write.

“I have never wanted to write about being happy. You cannot describe it.”

The ghastly Barbara Cartland banged on about how her 700 romantic novels helped her escape getting a job and her readers escape reality after the war and Virginia Woolf said it was a time when English could live again as a language.

“English words are full of echoes, memories and associations,” she said, adding that the old words could be used to create “a new beauty, a new truth”. How did Cartland and Woolf end up in the same programme?

Evelyn Waugh was notoriously anti-publicity, but did agree to be interviewed, looking threatening, annoyed and amused at the same time, and managing: “If someone praises me, I think, what an a***, and if someone abuses me, I think, what an a***.” Excellent.

Meanwhile, as we approached the Second World War and the likes of WH Auden, we were informed that, despite working for the BBC for two years, the organisation did not preserve a single second of George Orwell’s voice.

Impressively, Graham Greene managed to agree to a film crew accompanying him on a dramatic overnight train journey across Europe, while not being captured on camera once himself.

He did, however, offer: “These Bulgarian sausages are terrible.” So, next time you’re in Sofia, go easy on that breakfast.