Sir Denis Forman

Speaker 30:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

Speaker 30:08

The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen ninety one.

Speaker 30:12

And the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:31

My Castaway this week is a man of the media, but that modern, all embracing description does small justice to a career which has been central to the development of independent television in this country.

Presenter0:42

After a childhood vivid and interesting enough to form the first volume of an autobiography, my Castaway went to Cambridge and then to War, in which he lost a leg at Monte Cassino in nineteen forty four.

Presenter0:54

In nineteen fifty five he joined the newly formed Granada Television, from which he retired last year as chairman.

Presenter1:01

He was the first producer of What the Papers Say and the man who originated Jewel in the Crown.

Presenter1:07

His private tastes are refined, and his life long ambition far reaching, to make popular television programmes that are good. He is Sir Dennis

Presenter1:17

You're also, Sir Dennis, an ideal desert island castaway, of course, because two of your greatest passions are music and fishing. Now, how excited are you at the prospect of endless time to indulge those?

Sir Denis Forman1:29

Well, I just hope the island's got some good fresh water streams. I mean, sea fishing is not much cop. But if we've got some nice rocky waterfalls and some trout, and preferably a short run of salmon at the bottom, fishing would be fine. And as for music, well, you're only allowing me a very limited amount, but I look forward to that too.

Presenter1:47

How long have you loved music, and when did it first touch you?

Sir Denis Forman1:50

Well, when I was very young, really, my mother was a musical person. She used to sing at the piano. She used to compose songs. And I began listening, really, on the radio. I heard two L O.

Sir Denis Forman2:03

and I heard music there that I found exciting. I did get interested in the structure of music. I can't tell you why, but it was I think an uncle of mine had been music critic for The Guardian and I fell heir to his scores, and the scores of the Beethoven symphonies are all marked with his markings. And I began to work out what these meant. And then I began to try and analyse the symphonies when I was about thirteen or fourteen, twelve I think I started.

Presenter2:30

So did that mean that you could walk around playing them in your head, as it were?

Sir Denis Forman2:35

Yes indeed. I got uh to know the Beethoven symphonies very well indeed. The first one I got was the seventh and worked sort of outwards from that, eighth, fifth, sixth, upwards to the ninth and downwards to the first. And when I used to go fishing I could actually play through a movement and was quite cross if I got stuck somewhere. And uh I began carrying the scores, but they got so messy with fish scales and water and things like that I gave it up.

Presenter3:01

What happened when you caught a fish?

Sir Denis Forman3:02

And you

Sir Denis Forman3:04

Actually, when you're fishing, the adrenaline runs so fast you've got no time for music.

Presenter3:12

Can can you still do it? I mean, have you still got these things in your head?

Sir Denis Forman3:16

I can still go through the symphonies. Um I do get stuck sometimes, particularly if I've been idle and not played one for a very long time. But on the whole I can get through the symphonies pretty well.

Presenter3:25

So you don't need to take a Beethoven symphony with you at all, because they're in your head. You've got those already. What are you going to take? What's the first record you'd play?

Sir Denis Forman3:34

Well, the first record I'd like to play is rather a special record. Um not only the piece, but the record itself. This was the first record I collected for the opera Die Meistersinger.

Sir Denis Forman3:48

I heard the overture, and on the radio I heard the opera, and I then wanted to collect.

Sir Denis Forman3:54

The opera and of course there was no complete set. So it was like stepping stones. You've got a bit here, a bit there, and a bit everywhere else. And in the end, I got the whole of the third act, Master Singer. But the very first record I got was the opening chorus after the overture. And I think it's a bit of a miracle even today. This record was recorded in 1928 in Berlin. It's the Berlin State Opera. And the recording quality and the excitement of that opening chorus still lives with me.

Presenter5:13

The opening of Wagner's Demeistersinger, played by the Berlin State Orchestra, conducted by Leo Blech.

Presenter5:20

What of course you wouldn't have, said Dennis, on this desert island, is an audience and um from what I've learned about you, that would not be to your liking, would it?

Sir Denis Forman5:28

No, I'd certainly miss uh an audience. Uh I think I I react better when there's an audience, and when I'm on my own I'm a bit dull.

Presenter5:36

Where and how did you first discover that that trait in your character, though?

Sir Denis Forman5:40

Well, I think it's true to say that I discovered it in the servants' hall, in the house where I was brought up. It was a big house in the country, and um there was a community inside that house of three different kinds. The top one was the nursery. There was a main nurse and um between six and eight children, depending on the time of year, and three or four under nurses, and then downstairs were the the gentry.

Sir Denis Forman6:05

On the main floor, and below that was the servants' hall. And there were eight women in the servants' hall. That was my first audience. And they were a very tough audience. You had to be good, first of all, to get their attention. And if you could get a smile from them, you were beginning to win. And if you could set the table in the raw, that was absolute glory. But what did you do?

Presenter6:26

But what did you do? Did did did you tell jokes or stand on your head?

Sir Denis Forman6:27

Uh

Sir Denis Forman6:28

Imitated people, um not so much tell jokes, but would tell outrageously um exaggerated anecdotes of what had happened to me during the day and imitate people around with the way they spat, the way they tripped over their own feet and things like that.

Presenter6:44

You say you had to be good in order to make them laugh. Of course the fact was for a lot of your boyhood you were really very bad, weren't you? You were very naughty boy.

Sir Denis Forman6:52

Well, I think it it became clear to me that if you were good no one paid any attention to you. But if you were bad you attracted a lot of interest. Some of it was negative and hostile. But after it was over, if you were bad in the right sort of way, you found that the grown ups actually quite relished some of the bad things you'd done.

Presenter7:10

Is is that a trick you've gone on pulling in your life? I mean, do you go on sort of rebelling, objecting, contradicting, challenging, so that people at least notice you?

Sir Denis Forman7:20

To begin with it was a ploy. But then I did find if you challenged authority, you often found that it crumbled, or there were holes in it, and there were things that you could uh discover by challenging authority. And so I have, I think, stuck to the practice of challenging the authority of governments, of people, of constitutions, to see whether they stand up to the challenge.

Presenter7:41

Also because you enjoy it, perhaps.

Sir Denis Forman7:43

Absolutely true.

Presenter7:44

I mean, isn't it also though born of a desire you were saying just now that on your own you're dull, isn't it also because you you have a dread of being boring and because your own boredom threshold is very low?

Sir Denis Forman7:45

Isn't it

Sir Denis Forman7:54

Yes, I think of all things in life I dread most it's boredom.

Presenter7:57

Didn't didn't you once set up a Boers match at university?

Sir Denis Forman8:01

Yes, indeed. I've always been interested in bores. I mean, uh although I dislike them, I've been interested in the sort of the the chemistry of boredom. And what we did at the university was um

Sir Denis Forman8:10

The people in my college heard others saying that in their college, which was Trinity Hall, they had the most boring man in the university. And this got our dander up, and we said to them, it's not true, we have the most boring man. So we set up a match, not only with one, but with three boars on each side. And we coached these fellows to be terribly boring. Mine was the number one. He whistled a chord. And it took him twenty minutes to explain how the columns of air actually made this noise. And we got these six into a party. They had no idea what was happening. And at a given signal, the match started. And umpires went around listening to the boars to decide which team was the most boring. And ours won, because we got the others. Having got our own boars going, we moved across to the other side and got them to be interesting, because we had to tell dirty stories and things.

Presenter9:04

Let's have the second record, what is it?

Sir Denis Forman9:06

I want to take with me

Sir Denis Forman9:09

something that reminds me of all Mozart's piano concertos. And out of the some seventy or so movements there are, I've picked the slow movement of the C major piano concerto, the big one, and it's played by Mari Pariah, who for me is the most perfect exponent of Mozart.

Sir Denis Forman9:28

and this I will cherish.

Presenter10:35

Mario Pariah playing and conducting the slow movement of Mozart's concerto, number twenty one, in C major, with the English Chamber Orchestra.

Presenter10:43

So you grew up, Sir Dennis, in this privileged setting, an estate in South West Scotland, with your family and five brothers and sisters, your maternal grandmother, and a host of servants. Who was your best friend amongst them when you were small? Who did you turn to in times of greatest misery?

Sir Denis Forman11:01

Well, I've had a strange um habit, before going to sleep at night, of putting in pecking order the people I didn't want to die, with the one I didn't want to die most as number one, and that was usually my nurse, the head nurse, who was called Nan.

Sir Denis Forman11:18

and second was my mother, and then usually third, I think, my eldest sister, Sheila and those were the three that used to be the top three.

Presenter11:26

Do you find it quite shocking that it was your nan, not your mother, that you put top?

Sir Denis Forman11:30

Not really, because I saw much more of Nan. But she was with us day and night, and um we went down to see my mother in the morning for about perhaps an hour, and then we were called down in the afternoon to play in the drawing room for perhaps another hour, an hour and a half, and she would come and read to us in the evening, occasionally.

Sir Denis Forman11:49

But um that was a treat, but it was rather more remote than the hurly burly life in the nursery, and Nan was there all the time.

Presenter11:56

But were you taught, nevertheless, that there was a kind of protocol, that there was an unbridgeable gulf between these social classes in which you amongst whom you lived?

Sir Denis Forman12:04

Well, that was accepted by the people in the the various levels of society, but not by the children. It took us quite a long time, I think, to learn what the social distinctions were.

Presenter12:16

How long did it take you then to unlearn that, as it were, as you went on into your life, and the century moved on?

Sir Denis Forman12:24

Well, I suppose the beginnings of uh understanding came in two ways. One was when we had a general strike and a whole gang of miners came down from Lanarkshire, blacked up. Um they called themselves Venega minstrels, and they performed on the gravel and I saw then with a considerable sense of shock.

Sir Denis Forman12:45

The distance between my father, who harangued them about the iniquity of the strike, and actually they then turned it in and went off in ill temper.

Sir Denis Forman12:54

And in another way,

Sir Denis Forman12:58

The people who worked on the farm, I became very friendly with them. I became a part of their society, and I began to feel that I was as much part of that as I was part of my family's society.

Presenter13:09

You didn't get on very well with your father, did you, Sir Denis? For some reason you found him rather a figure of fun.

Sir Denis Forman13:15

Well, he was undoubtedly an eccentric. For instance, he thought that hot water destroyed the oils on the skin, so he would not touch hot water. He always had cold baths. And he made his sons follow him down to the loch every morning to swim before breakfast in cold water. I didn't mind things like that too much. But um he was apt to laugh at me if I showed emotion or enthusiasm, and that hurt a bit, I think.

Presenter13:44

Did you then feel less than loved by him?

Sir Denis Forman13:48

I felt that he cared about my welfare and he wanted me to grow up to be um a good man and a credit to him and all of that. But no, I didn't feel that he had a very warm affection for me. No, I didn't feel that.

Presenter14:01

What did you want him to be?

Sir Denis Forman14:04

Well, I think I wanted him to be more fun, more intelligent, more of a companion, and less of a sort of uh sergeant major.

Presenter14:12

By code number three.

Sir Denis Forman14:15

Record number three. This is uh a record I want to take with me to remind me of the underdog composers. This is uh John Field.

Sir Denis Forman14:24

Other underdogs are people like Al Cern and Boyce and Scriben, but John Field is perhaps my favourite underdog, and he invented Chopin in a way, before Chopin was composing.

Sir Denis Forman14:37

This is a nocturne.

Sir Denis Forman14:40

of John Fields and if I didn't tell you that I'm sure a lot of people would think it was Chopin.

Presenter15:41

Rainer Kiriaku, playing John Fields Nocturne No. Seven in C.

Presenter15:46

You joined the Argyle and Sutherland Highlanders, said Dennis Foreman. As war was declared, you'd have been about twenty two.

Presenter15:54

Where did you first see action?

Sir Denis Forman15:57

I first saw action fairly mildly in North Africa, just towards the very end of the campaign, and then in Italy. I went across to Italy

Sir Denis Forman16:06

and moved up the Adriatic side.

Presenter16:08

What year was that?

Sir Denis Forman16:10

Forty three.

Presenter16:11

But then in March 1944, um the Battle of Monte Cassino, you were seriously wounded. I mean, can can you describe to me w what happened and how it happened?

Sir Denis Forman16:21

Well, what happened briefly was this, that um I was sent halfway up the hill. The monastery hill was a very high hill with this monastery on top.

Sir Denis Forman16:28

And we were attacking this hill, and I was sent up to

Sir Denis Forman16:32

a castle which was half way up, with a company.

Sir Denis Forman16:35

And there was a German attack.

Sir Denis Forman16:38

In the morning.

Sir Denis Forman16:39

And as they retreated, I took my lads to chase them out. And I said to my batman, Let's make for that shell hole, I said, because I just saw an empty smoke canister land there, and a shell never lands twice in the same place. So we went there, and a shell did land twice in the same place. It landed in my foot. So that was the end of that. I was up in the castle. It was a very steep descent for twelve hours and then taken down. I don't remember much about it.

Presenter17:07

Hmm.

Presenter17:08

You it's been said that you've said since that every step you took as you were going up that hill you were praying that you would be killed.

Sir Denis Forman17:16

Well, there were two options in the infantry. One was to be killed and the other was to be wounded. They were the only two options. I mean, the third was to run away, but that was uh not really countenanced by most people.

Presenter17:27

But there were people running away, weren't they, all around you as you

Sir Denis Forman17:29

Oh yes, there always were far more than official war histories would have you believe.

Sir Denis Forman17:34

Quite a lot of people run away, not so many officers, but quite a lot of other ranks.

Presenter17:38

So you went on walking up the hill'cause you were an officer and you had to?

Sir Denis Forman17:41

Well, you know, it it's it's hard to it's hard to recreate the mood of of a battle. And uh you go through phases of panic, euphoria, fear.

Sir Denis Forman17:52

Um

Sir Denis Forman17:53

But you keep plugging on, I mean see anything to do. And as I say, the ultimate destination is either under the sod or home, and I was lucky, I came home.

Presenter18:02

Where were you and and

Presenter18:05

What did you think, what did you feel, when you realized that you'd lost a limb?

Sir Denis Forman18:10

Well, first of all, uh enormously thankful.

Sir Denis Forman18:14

because uh I was going to live and I was going to go home.

Sir Denis Forman18:17

And a huge effort.

Sir Denis Forman18:20

Of um keeping up the fighting front which has to go on, that was over, and so the first one was was a relief.

Sir Denis Forman18:27

And um

Sir Denis Forman18:28

After that, I think fairly.

Sir Denis Forman18:31

fatalistic acceptance that this had happened and it wasn't as bad as all that. The fatal thing is to feel that you've been hard done by or something dreadful's happened, it's not your fault and it's unfair. Then I think you can upset yourself very considerably.

Presenter18:45

It had one, though, a th a very positive effect, didn't it, this this fact that you were seriously wounded. I think it it it um healed a rift between you and your parents.

Sir Denis Forman18:56

It certainly did that. I mean, the rift was not uh enormous, but there had been uh a coolness because they thought I was rather a bad young man and irreligious.

Sir Denis Forman19:07

And uh

Sir Denis Forman19:09

When I went to the war that to some degree made them feel differently, but after I was wounded I was a prodigal son.

Presenter19:17

Record number four.

Sir Denis Forman19:18

Yeah.

Sir Denis Forman19:20

Record number four is um

Sir Denis Forman19:23

Bach you see I must take some Bach to the island with me and um I've chosen this one because

Sir Denis Forman19:29

It's a nice piece, and it's wonderfully played by Marta Argerich, who plays the piano almost as if it was a harpsichord. I love it, so I'm taking this one for sure.

Presenter20:41

Marta Agarich, playing the Bourre from Bach's English Suite, No. 2. You started making your career in films after the war, Sir Dennis, first at the COI, the Central Office of Information, and then later as Director of the British Film Institute. But then in 1955 you changed tack completely and and you took a job with the newly formed independent company Granada. Now why was that? What was the attraction?

Sir Denis Forman21:06

But it was quite clear that there's going to be a lot of fun in television.

Sir Denis Forman21:09

And it was going to expand and there was going to be um

Sir Denis Forman21:12

Something

Sir Denis Forman21:14

Much bigger than would ever happen, I thought, in feature films.

Presenter21:17

As I said at the outset, you you know, you you've set it out as being your life's ambition to make popular programmes that are good. That's not as easy as it sounds, is it?

Sir Denis Forman21:27

It's the most difficult thing in the world. It's very easy.

Sir Denis Forman21:30

To make a popular program, particularly on a simple format like a quiz.

Sir Denis Forman21:36

It's much harder to make a really good programme, but it's not impossible.

Sir Denis Forman21:40

But what is exceedingly difficult is to make a really good programme that's very popular. That's very hard.

Presenter21:46

So it's easy to make a popular programme that is bad, is it?

Sir Denis Forman21:50

Yes, that's even easier than making a popular programme that's good.

Presenter21:53

Some people would say that if a programme is popular, it cannot be bad, that if people like it, you should be making it.

Sir Denis Forman21:54

People would say

Sir Denis Forman22:00

That is a view of humanity which I don't share. I think that if you make a bad programme, which you know to be bad,

Sir Denis Forman22:10

And it appeals to a lot of people.

Sir Denis Forman22:12

You are not really doing the job that a broadcaster should do. I mean, I only refer you to the press if you look at some of the popular papers today.

Sir Denis Forman22:21

I wouldn't be terribly proud to be an editor of one of those papers.

Presenter22:24

But what makes a television programme bad, do you think? Can you define badness in that sense?

Sir Denis Forman22:29

Oh, there are so many different kinds of badness. First of all, it can be boring.

Sir Denis Forman22:33

Secondly, it can be pretentious, it can be highfalutin.

Sir Denis Forman22:36

All of that end of the spectrum is being too posh, too highbrow, too silly.

Sir Denis Forman22:42

At the other end of the spectrum it can be slovenly, it can be incompetent, or it can be just plain vulgar nasty programme.

Presenter22:49

Where would a program like Neighbours, for example, stand on this scale of things?

Sir Denis Forman22:55

I think Nobers is okay. I mean, it's not as good as other soap operas. I could mention some. Not nearly as good as one. I could easily mention

Presenter23:02

I could eat.

Sir Denis Forman23:04

But it is a perfectly agreeable, amiable saga of rather boring Australian life. And it doesn't it's not an ounce of malice in neighbours, not going to harm a fly. And if it beguiles people, it's like Sam Johnson used to say about gin. It's a small sweetener of existence.

Presenter23:23

What what makes the one that you weren't going to mention, Coronation Street, which of course is is Granada's and you had a lot to do with what makes that different? What makes that good and popular, which presumably you believe it to be?

Sir Denis Forman23:37

Two things. One is taking pains, immense pains.

Sir Denis Forman23:40

and the other is talent.

Sir Denis Forman23:42

uh finding talent, the right talent for the street.

Sir Denis Forman23:46

keeping it together, but basically it is caring about the street and making it live up to itself and keeping it as good as it ever was.

Presenter23:55

Next record.

Sir Denis Forman23:57

This record is a one-off really. A colleague of mine, Douglas Terry, in the 1960s, he had this idea of launching a wind band as a commercial thing. And he got together about 55 of the best wind players in Britain. He got them into a studio and recorded a couple of LPs and brought them to me in the hopes that Granada would finance this enterprise. Alas, we didn't, but I'm left with one of the most wonderfully extravagant records. To hear this is a real joy.

Presenter25:33

Hayson's March, played by the Symphonic Wind Band. I I don't know about anybody else, but it reminds me of a certain advert for a vacuum cleaner, no.

Sir Denis Forman25:39

Yeah.

Presenter25:40

Is that the one and only record that?

Sir Denis Forman25:42

That's the one and only record.

Presenter25:44

Well now you, Sir Dennis Foreman, it was, who who brought the public the Jewel in the crown, the television dramatization of Paul Scott's Raj Quartet, which captured millions of viewers every Tuesday back in nineteen eighty four. Now how did that come about? Because it wasn't really a natural for the small screen, was it?

Sir Denis Forman26:03

The problem the only problem that bothered me at all with Joel from the start was whether the story could be laid out in sequence and be made into a narrative, because the way that Paul Scott wrote it, it's anything but a straight narrative.

Sir Denis Forman26:17

So the first thing I did was to try and straighten out that narrative. I took all the flashbacks out and I actually stuck wallpaper around the room, putting each episode in each book in time sequence, and eventually got, I thought, a narrative that would run from episode one to episode thirteen. In the end it was fifty hours actually.

Sir Denis Forman26:39

Once I was happy that that was going to happen.

Sir Denis Forman26:43

It was all gas and goaters. It was wonderful.

Presenter26:46

But it also must be very expensive to make.

Sir Denis Forman26:48

I don't believe that Joel was expensive in real terms. I mean, it was a lot of money to make the show. But um I think that if you really want to make a show and you get it right, you can spend quite a lot of money on it and get it back.

Presenter27:02

So we need another forman vision and lots of wallpaper hanging round the walls to write it on.

Sir Denis Forman27:06

Oh, I don't know about that.

Presenter27:09

Record number six.

Sir Denis Forman27:11

This is the trio when from Cosifantuti.

Sir Denis Forman27:15

where the two girls and uh Don Alfonso are waving goodbye to their two boyfriends, saying, Have a safe voyage and a fair wind. Of course the whole thing's a preposterous charade, but Mozart makes you feel that it's absolutely real.

Speaker 427:40

So

Speaker 427:53

God's the home.

Presenter28:25

Margaret Price, Ivan Minton, and Hans Sortine singing the trio suave sia ilvento from Mozart's Cosifan Tute, with the new Philharmonia orchestra conducted by Otto Klemper. Your parents didn't care much for Mozart, did they, Sir Dennis? They thought he was a dilettante who wrote pretty tunes.

Sir Denis Forman28:42

Yes, they were pretty well in tune with their generation there.

Presenter28:45

But did it make you very cross when you were young and that your parents said such things?

Sir Denis Forman28:49

One tended to take that as a you know, parents said a lot of things about a lot of people. Um I certainly noted the fact that I thought they were wrong.

Sir Denis Forman28:58

I didn't whether I expressed it or not, I don't think it's a good idea.

Presenter29:01

You probably did.

Presenter29:03

You of course have been involved at the Royal Opera House for the last decade as a director and now Deputy Chairman, a source of great pleasure, I'm sure. But the question one has to ask is why can't that be made more accessible, more popular in that sense, instead of so elitist, so expensive?

Sir Denis Forman29:21

Well, it's a real paradox of our age that uh you have a publicly subsidized art form like opera, and even with the public subsidy, uh the seats are a hundred pounds for a top class performance. So what you're doing is you're giving money to an institution that in the end only rather rich people can afford to go to.

Sir Denis Forman29:44

Uh on the continent the level of a subsidy for opera is seventy percent, seventy five percent.

Sir Denis Forman29:50

from public funds and the balance is made from box office and sponsorship, whereas with us it's only about forty percent subsidized, forty five percent subsidized, and all the rest has to be found, and that is why the seats are so very expensive.

Presenter30:04

But that obviously is true, and but it goes on being the excuse, haven't you got to find some other way, some other way round the problem, if the government isn't going to change and it doesn't look as if it is? Haven't you got to cut down on expensive sets and costumes and and bring the music to the people?

Sir Denis Forman30:22

You can do that. You can cut opera down to being a wonderful performance in front of black drapes with two pianos, or perhaps with a small orchestra. You can do that. But it is not the real thing.

Sir Denis Forman30:36

Uh you can take a photograph of a beautiful scene. It's not the same as being in the scene. Opera is all engulfing. It's it's a large thing.

Sir Denis Forman30:46

The sets have got to be big, the orchestra's got to be big, the voices have got to be big, it's conceived on a grand scale, and if you miniaturize grand opera, certain grand opera, you actually lose the texture, it doesn't make sense any more.

Sir Denis Forman31:02

The numbers make sense, but the general concept of opera disappears.

Presenter31:06

Meanwhile it goes on being for the rich only.

Sir Denis Forman31:09

Well, it doesn't go on being for the rich only if you get it on television, if you get it out on the plaza, on the piazza there, on a big screen. And we have always a quota of seats at a very, very low price, like five pounds and three pounds, which you can't book in advance. So if you're a really keen opera buff, you sit up all night on a camp school and you pay five pounds and you get a seat for any opera.

Presenter31:31

Some more music

Sir Denis Forman31:33

This is a piece composed by Wally Badaroo. He's a an African living in Paris, and he composed this on two small computers.

Sir Denis Forman31:43

And it's a piece that I play a lot.

Speaker 432:19

Oh look at that

Presenter32:44

Vesuvio Solo, composed and played by Wally Badaroo and two computers. Well, Sir Dennis, the the time approaches when we must cast you away. Um do you have any fears about how you're going to cope, or if you can be dependent on your own resources?

Sir Denis Forman33:01

No, I've got no fears at all. Um I've got a lot of music I can play in my head, in addition to this misery, you're letting me listen to in a real.

Presenter33:09

It's very generous, actually, eight.

Sir Denis Forman33:10

Satch.

Presenter33:11

But y you you seem, you see, to outward view to to be very self assured, very controlled, very stoical actually. I mean, even stoical about being cast away on a desert island. Does that control run deep, or is there another Dennis Foreman inside who's not quite as self assured as that?

Sir Denis Forman33:27

There's always another man inside, any man. I mean, it may be a very bold and stoical inside a man who appears to be nervous, or vice versa. I don't think I'm nervous, but yes, of course, I mean I have a a flow of feeling that goes on inside that does not show on the top.

Presenter33:43

And so as you sit there playing this music either in your head or on the old wind-up gramophone, contemplating your your life's work to date.

Presenter33:52

Is there a moment, is there a part of it, of which you will be proudest?

Sir Denis Forman33:59

I don't think I'm proud of any part of my life. I think some parts of it have been less unsuccessful than others, and I think there are bits of things that have come off fairly well. But I'm not I have not got any glow of satisfaction. I feel that I would like to keep on fighting to do something a bit better, rather than contemplate what was good in the past.

Sir Denis Forman34:24

Divine dissatisfaction haunts me all the time, and I just feel I wish things had gone a little bit better. Don't regret it. This wish had been better.

Presenter34:32

Professionally or personally.

Sir Denis Forman34:33

Oh professionally.

Sir Denis Forman34:35

Personally I've been lucky.

Presenter34:37

Your last record.

Sir Denis Forman34:41

This last one comes from the Messiah, but it's not the usual version of the Messiah. It's uh a rock messiah, and it's sung by a coloured lady called Madeleine Bell, and this particular number I find very moving. And I think it just goes to show that great music treated by a really musical person can

Sir Denis Forman35:02

be moved into almost any form.

Speaker 435:04

The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness Prepare ye the way of the Lord.

Speaker 435:21

Make straight.

Presenter35:33

Madeline Bell singing Comfort ye from Brian Gascoigne's Rock Messiah. So, Sir Dennis, which of the eight records is the one special one for you?

Sir Denis Forman35:43

I think I would have to take

Sir Denis Forman35:46

And the Mozart piano concerto is a special one, because the piano concertos have played such a big part in my life.

Presenter35:53

And a book.

Sir Denis Forman35:54

Well, I was going to beg for Grove's musical dictionary, but I believe that that's forbidden.

Presenter36:01

It's a reference book, I'm afraid.

Sir Denis Forman36:02

That's very sad. In that case, I'll settle for the Raj Quartet bound in a single body.

Presenter36:09

Well, if it isn't, we'll we'll get it specially done for you. Paul Scott's Raj Quartet, and your luxury.

Sir Denis Forman36:15

If you would allow it, I would like a satellite dish with a television set attached to it.

Presenter36:21

Even more television in in this in this lonely state you wish upon yourself.

Sir Denis Forman36:25

Do you wish upon your

Sir Denis Forman36:26

Yes, please.

Presenter36:27

Can never get enough.

Sir Denis Forman36:28

Yeah.

Presenter36:31

You shall have it. Sir Denis Foreman, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs.

Speaker 336:42

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