Several days ago the BBC ran a program that the website is listing as “David Baddiel on John Updike.” Click on the pop-up option and you’ll be able to hear the 30-minute broadcast.

“There can be few successful novelists who so divide critical opinion,” Matthew Parris begins. “John Updike was one of the 20th century’s most read of serious American writers” whose style charmed most critics, but, he adds, most famously not Harold Bloom, who called him a minor novelist with a major style.

Parris talks to guest David Baddiel, who builds a case for John Updike, as well as Justin Cartwright, a novelist himself.

“I think it’s a huge mistake to think that the ‘mundane’ is easier to write,” Cartwright says, comparing Updike to George Eliot and Jane Austen.