Barry Bucknell

Barry Bucknell0:00

This is the

Speaker 10:01

B B C

Speaker 10:04

This download is the only extract the BBC has of this edition of Desertin and Discs. The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen sixty three, and the presenter was Roy Plumley.

Speaker 30:17

Your do-it-yourself programmes made a tremendous impact on television almost immediately.

Speaker 30:22

Don't you get blamed sometimes for taking bread out of the mouths of builders by telling people how to do these jobs themselves instead of Bringing

Barry Bucknell0:30

Well, just occasionally, not very often, because I don't think it really applies.

Barry Bucknell0:36

Um people are doing jobs for themselves anyway and are bound to because they can't afford to have them done. I think most people have as much done as they can afford to have done.

Barry Bucknell0:46

And the other point is that it does stimulate a great deal of interest in things in the home, and I in fact I think it starts a lot of jobs off.

Speaker 30:53

Mm-hmm.

Barry Bucknell0:54

It's extremely popular with women in your programme.

Barry Bucknell0:57

Well, a great many women do watch it. This of course does start a few problems, because they give a rather incomplete account of what went on with a lot of prods to their husbands, and I get extremely unpopular with husbands.

Speaker 31:08

And I get extremely unpopular.

Speaker 31:11

I believe you'll receive a a fantastic number of letters asking for further information.

Barry Bucknell1:16

Oh, the mail, yes, is certainly very high. In the last series alone, thirty-nine programmes, there were nearly four hundred thousand letters. Really.

Speaker 31:16

Oh, the mail.

Speaker 31:24

How do you arrange for these to be on?

Barry Bucknell1:25

Well, fortunately, handled uh mainly by the BBC.

Speaker 31:25

Well

Barry Bucknell1:30

But of the ones that I have to answer myself, I feel rather ashamed about this, because I have an enormous pile, and I'm only getting through it very slowly.

Speaker 31:37

Well, last year came Bucknell's house, that dilapidated property at Ealing. Whose idea was it to buy this old house and modernize it in front of the cameras?

Barry Bucknell1:47

Well, we'd always hoped to do something that was more realistic than jobs in the studio, but this was entirely the producer's idea, and I didn't think we'd ever succeed in carrying it out. Who found the house? In the end, it was found rather accidentally, because we had a difficult specification. We wanted the worst possible survey we could find. Wet rot, dry rot, woodworm. We wanted everything, yes, and we found it. And also, of course, a garden and a space for outside broadcast vehicles and so on.

Speaker 32:18

Some of the jobs must have presented problems to the cameramen.

Barry Bucknell2:22

Oh, cameramen, they were absolutely marvellous. They got into minute corners, they became contortionists, they managed to get the lenses clear of the brick dust when I pushed walls down and clear the snow away.

Barry Bucknell2:35

What was the trickiest part of the work so far as you were concerned? Well, I think trying to keep going in the frost when most people were stopped with outside work and we had to go to great lengths to continue with the drains and the concreting, warming everything up with electric wires.

Speaker 32:50

Yeah.

Barry Bucknell2:50

Uh

Speaker 32:50

Mm-hmm.

Barry Bucknell2:51

Uh

Speaker 32:51

Now everything you did to that house could be done by

Speaker 32:54

Any viewer, if he's just normally useful with his

Barry Bucknell2:57

Oh, any of the individual jobs. Yes, I said often, don't try and tackle a whole lot, but jobs individually were not beyond anybody, I think. And you don't encourage them to tackle, um for example, the electric mail. No, leaving out uh things like that, uh which we were subcontracted anyway.

Speaker 33:08

No, but leaving out the the

Speaker 33:15

O'Bucknell's House is now one of the tourist attractions of London.

Barry Bucknell3:19

Well, an awful lot of people have come to see it. I wish more people could have seen the inside. But after two days, we had to close the invitations because 60,000 people wrote, and we managed to get about 40,000 through. What's going to happen to it now? Well, it's being transferred to Ealing Borough Council, I think, at the moment.

Barry Bucknell3:37

Are you up to date with the do-it-yourself jobs in your own home? Ah, mm. Now, this is the most embarrassing question.

Barry Bucknell3:45

People saying to my wife, how marvelous it must be to be married to this man, because there's such a backlog.

Speaker 13:52

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For more podcasts please visit bbc.co. uk slash radio four.

Barry Bucknell4:02

This is the B B C. Yeah.