Bill's trip to the South Bank

Bragg attempts to demystify Bryson

By BBC News Online's Steve Schifferes

Bill Bryson is one of the world's most successful travel writers, on bestseller lists in both the US and Britain for such classics as Notes from a Small Island and A Walk in the Woods.

In an affectionate portrait on the South Bank Show, Melvyn Bragg attempts to discover the secret of his success.

In this he largely fails. Just as in his books, Mr Bryson delights in irony and a deflecting wit, which the gentle questions of Mr Bragg are unable to penetrate.

Perhaps the difficulty is Mr Bryson's familiarity. In the UK we are accustomed to his appearance on television, pointing out our foibles in such an affectionate way that we are all glad to be British.

Acerbic humour

Apparently this technique is harder in America, where his first - and arguably his best - book, A Lost Continent, was not an initial success because Americans failed to see the nostalgic affection for the Mid-West behind the acerbic humour.

Mr Bryson is a transplanted American who was born in Des Moines, Iowa - as he writes, "someone had to be" - but, it emerged, of a literary family. His father was a sportswriter on the local paper.

He moved to Britain in 1971, after visiting on a whim and meeting a girl, now his wife, and spent a decade editing journalists' copy on local and then national newspapers.

Bryson is now living in the USA again

His sudden move to Yorkshire to become a writer, like his arrival in Britain and his decision recently to return to the United States, was as much a mystery to his fellow journalists as it was to the viewers.

Yet perhaps it holds the key to his success - his insights are those of someone who has lived and worked in another country, not just a visitor, to whom small cultural differences can loom as large as stately homes in the pantheon of discontent.

Mr Bryson's literary gifts are on display when the South Bank Show commissions him to write some additional passages from his books.

These include a hilarious return to Bradford 10 years after he criticised it in Notes from a Small Island, and an encounter with a bear which he had always feared - but never saw - when walking the Appalachian Trail.

Mr Bryson is generally more effective on location, walking through small town America or seaside Britain, although that may be more difficult for his next book - the origin of life on Earth, which he says could take longer than a summer drive around the Midwest.

The South Bank Show is on Sunday 25 March at 2245 BST on ITV