J G Ballard

Speaker 40:00

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 40:08

The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen ninety two, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:32

My Castaway this week is a writer. Since the early sixties he's been well known as an author who likes to dwell on the violent and horrific consequences of unpredictable events. More recently, however, he's reached a wider audience with two autobiographical novels. The first, Empire of the Sun, told the story of a boy from a wealthy English family in Shanghai, forced to spend three years in a Japanese prisoner of war camp.

Presenter0:57

The second, The Kindness of Women, recounts how the wife of a happily married man dies suddenly, leaving him with three children to bring up. He is JG

Presenter1:07

Uh you wrote then, Jim Ballard, for more than twenty five years, um, before you published anything that was remotely autobiographical. Why did it take you so long to write the about the real

J G Ballard1:18

See

Presenter1:18

Uh

J G Ballard1:18

It was a very long time to wait. I I started Empire of the Sun in nineteen eighty three, which is nearly forty years after the events I describe.

J G Ballard1:29

And I think I was just repressing all my memories of the war. It it had been...

J G Ballard1:35

even through the eyes of a

J G Ballard1:37

you know, about eleven, twelve, thirteen year old. It had been a pretty b brutal, and in some ways brutalizing experience. You can't help but have some of those sort of n nightmarish cruelties rub off on you.

Presenter1:50

Now these autobiographical writings ha have brought you much wider success, as I said, than your earlier science fiction works, although you don't like to call them science fiction, do you?

J G Ballard2:00

I I've never disowned the idea of being a science fiction writer, though I know that it's a thoroughly disreputable thing to be. I've been made to feel that many, many times, so I've always insisted that I certainly was a science fiction writer and very proud of it. I'm interested in the next five minutes. I'm interested in change. And it's always struck me that England is a country desperately in need of change. I think one reason I started writing SF back in the mid-50s was that England, this strange little country, actually began to change in a big way in the 1950s, and I wanted to write about it.

Presenter2:36

Well, now let me ask you about being cast away on a desert island,'cause you you strike me as perhaps having a a sharper perception than many as to what it might be like were you to be left to your own devices. Tell me what you imagine.

J G Ballard2:48

I thoroughly enjoy it, and I think I've spent all my life looking forward to being shipwrecked on on a desert island.

J G Ballard2:56

To some extent it's a sort of extended version of the the situation in which I find myself now. I'm sort of marooned on the British Isles, and I've lived like a castaway, many people would say, looking at my hom ramshackle home. I've lived like a castaway all these years. I I'd enjoy it very much.

Presenter3:13

So there you are, on the island, and you've got the wind-up gramophone, and you turn the handle hard, and you put the first record on it. What is it?

J G Ballard3:21

I'd like the Teddy Bears' Picnic. When I was a small child in Shanghai in the 1930s, I was given a wind-up gramophone of a kind that most people have never seen. No electric wires, you just turned a little handle and out came this creaky but magical sound. And I had one record, the teddy bears' picnic, which I played hundreds of times, so much that when I was in my twenties and thirties I detested it.

J G Ballard3:46

Bear, hear it. The curious thing is, about ten years ago, I began to like it again, and now I can hear it for ever.

Speaker 43:54

If you go down in the woods today, you're sure of a big surprise. If you go down in the woods today, you better go in disguise. For every bear that ever there was will gather there for certain because today's the day the teddy bears have their peer.

Presenter4:24

Henry Hall and his orchestra and the Teddy Bears' Picnic, and that was recorded in nineteen thirty two, and I have to say it sounded slightly like it. But it took you back, Jim.

J G Ballard4:32

I loved it.

Presenter4:34

Now, a fundamental difference between your real life experience in the prison of war camp and that of your hero Jim in the book and of course in the film is that you were not alone like him. You had your family with you, your sister and your mother and your father. Now why did you strip Jim, your hero, of his family?

J G Ballard4:52

I wanted to reach some sort of psychological truth in writing that book, which was a kind of expedition into my own heart and what makes me.

J G Ballard5:01

and the experiences that made me during this time. And as part of this investigation, I needed to sort of face up to

J G Ballard5:10

certain strains of solitariness and um

J G Ballard5:13

excessive self-dependence that I think came out then and making myself

J G Ballard5:19

alone in the book, but was truer to my actual experiences.

Presenter5:22

What sort of people were you mixing with? What were you doing?

J G Ballard5:25

Well, my favourites in the camp were the a group of about thirty or forty American merchant seamen who lived in another of the blocks. And I loved the American style. I loved their laid-back, slangy way of dealing with the world. They were very sort of democratic. They had none of the stiffness of the English. They had no sort of class obsessions whatsoever. And they had also all these wonderful things like copies of Reader's Digest and Popular Mechanics. And they had strange sort of fancy fountain pens and cowboy tie clips and sort of celluloid transparent belts. I loved those, which had just started to come in. And I used to run errands for them and hang around them. And I liked their kind of free and easy way of and they were very optimistic. This is the other thing. I think I was in love with America. A love that I've never lost, actually.

Presenter6:18

What about the your Japanese capitas? Did you get to know them terribly?

J G Ballard6:22

Yes, I did. We had in the first couple of years in particular, we had a sort of the children in particular had a very free and easy access to the um Japanese guards. Um they lived in a number of of bungalows on the outskirts of the campa which had been a a teacher training college before the war. And I used to go into these staff bungalows and put on the

J G Ballard6:48

Kendo armour and fence with the young Japanese guards.

Presenter6:51

You were in there for three years from the age of of the ages of twelve to fifteen.

Presenter6:57

And as you describe, you were mixing with all sorts of different people, people you would never have met in your normal existence, pre-war existence.

Presenter7:05

So did you in all of this really cease to be your your parent son, as it were? Was it difficult for them to to mould you in their image?

J G Ballard7:14

I think that's true. In retrospect I think I think a sort of estrangement took place between myself and my parents. It wasn't a an estrangement based on hostility, but just on circumstance. I won't say I was out of control, I wasn't, but I think also they were glad to see me.

J G Ballard7:30

Out of this little room we were cooped up together in this tiny little box, and they must have found me intensely wearing.

J G Ballard7:40

Ah, the fact that I was running around trying to cadge copies of, you know, Reader's Digest from these American sailors, or challenging the entire camp to sort of simultaneous chess, must have probably pleased them enormously.

J G Ballard7:54

Uh

Presenter7:54

Yeah.

J G Ballard7:54

Record number two.

J G Ballard7:57

Don't Fence Me In, sung by the Andrews sisters and Bing Crosby. When we came out of the

J G Ballard8:03

Cam.

J G Ballard8:04

We found that return to our house in Amhurst Avenue. We found that the house next door.

J G Ballard8:09

owned by a German family, had been taken over by two American officers, and they put on little film shows for my sister and I. And the first film they showed us was a film of the Andrews Sisters and Bing Crosby singing Don't Fence Me In, which I thought really was tremendously ironic.

Speaker 48:26

On my cayuse, let me wander over yonder, Till I see the mountains rise. Ba-doo-ba-ba-doo!

Speaker 48:36

I want to ride to the range where the west commences.

Speaker 48:43

I gaze at the moon till I lose my senses And I can't look at hobbles And I can't stand fences

Speaker 48:53

Oh advanced

Presenter8:56

Don't Fence Me In, sung by the Andrew Sisters and Bing Crosbie. Give me an idea of uh your life before the war, Jim, the the Shanghai that you knew, that your father, I think, said was the most advanced city in the world.

J G Ballard9:09

I think it was in the nineteen thirties. But Shanghai was really created by Americans and Western Europeans in its modern form in the twenties and thirties, and it was

J G Ballard9:21

advanced in every conceivable way. I mean, our the house we had wasn't a particularly spectacular house, had air conditioning and double glazing and, you know, huge American style kitchens and bathrooms and all this sort of thing.

J G Ballard9:34

Everybody owned American cars as a matter of course. And of course there were absolutely no restraints on life in Shanghai. There were I think at one stage there was in the thirties there were something like four hundred night clubs in the city. It was described as the wickedest city in the world, the Paris of the Orient.

J G Ballard9:53

It was unlimited entrepreneurial venture capitalism, carried to the nth point, and I adored it. I thought it was exciting and a collision of all these different cultures. That's why I've always believed in, you know, in in m sort of multiracial societies and the m c hottest possible ethnic mix. I think it produces excitement.

Presenter10:16

But how much did you, as a boy, know of all of that? Because you were kind of nannied and nursed and gardenered and chauffeured, weren't you?

J G Ballard10:16

Yeah.

J G Ballard10:22

Yes, I was, but I I from a very early age I was quite sort of uh devious and I used to tell my my nanny or or my mother at the age of oh seven or eight this is in the late thirties that uh I was popping round the corner to see some friends of mine who live further up Amherst Avenue and instead I would get on my bike a small, you know, half-sized little little bike and set off for downtown Shanghai through this sort of maelstrom of trams and

J G Ballard10:53

trucks and huge American cars, thousands of rickshaws and pedestrians, a place full of

J G Ballard10:59

gangsters and pickpockets, beggars on the sidewalks. And full of danger, really, for the boy. Yes, there yes, it was. It was a miracle. There were a lot of kidnappings. I mean, my my father kept uh an automatic pistol among his shirts in um

Presenter11:03

And full of danger really for the for the boy of a

J G Ballard11:15

In the wardrobe in his bedroom, which I used to enjoy playing with when they uh from an early age when my parents went out in the evening. Uh miracle I didn't shoot myself. Um

Presenter11:25

But again, i in your books your your hero, Jim, witnesses some terrible scenes in the streets of Shanghai from the kind of cushioned comfort of the chauffeur driven limo. Did you actually witness Rick Shaw Cooley's being beaten to death?

J G Ballard11:38

Oh, God, yes. I mean, the that was a violent place. Dead dead Chinese commonplace on the streets of Shanghai. Most had died from disease and famine, of course. But

J G Ballard11:49

It was a tremendously brutal place.

J G Ballard11:55

I'd like put the blame on Mame from

J G Ballard11:59

The film Gilda, starring Rita Haworth, who's always been a

J G Ballard12:05

someone I have admired tremendously, particularly when I think of the great film she made with Orson Welles, The Lady from Shanghai. And of course that was made in nineteen forty eight. And sh she must have been in Shanghai at about the time I was. And I've always liked the notion that

J G Ballard12:22

Obviously she was probably a bar girl, or something even worse, but she might, like a lot of bar girls in Shanghai, worked as a nanny, and she might conceivably have been my nanny.

Speaker 412:34

When they had the earthquake in San Francisco back in 1906.

Speaker 412:42

They said that old Mother Nature was up to her old tricks.

Speaker 412:52

Sorry, bad web.

Presenter13:00

The blame on Mayboy.

Presenter13:04

Put the blame on Mame from the film Gilda, starring Rita Hayworth. So you were shipped here to England immediately the war ended with your mother and your sister. Can you recall your first sights and smells of the place?

J G Ballard13:17

Yes, I can. I remember we docked at Southampton. We'd come in a former

J G Ballard13:22

Refrigerated meat vessel called a Rawa.

J G Ballard13:26

which had been converted to a troop ship.

J G Ballard13:28

during the war and we docked at Southampton and I remember looking down at this very very grey light

J G Ballard13:36

And um

J G Ballard13:38

These tired little streets.

J G Ballard13:41

which were unlike anything I'd ever seen before. I think when you move from a northern latitude to a southern, or from a southern to a northern, you immediately notice the difference in light.

J G Ballard13:52

Everything seemed very grey, and these little

J G Ballard13:54

side streets were lined with, um

J G Ballard13:57

strange sort of black perambulators, which I thought were some sort of mobile coal scuttle used for bunkering ships. In fact, they were they were English cars.

Presenter14:08

What about the people you were directly concerned with? Because you went to Cambridge, didn't you, to live with your grandparents? What did you think of of life in Cambridge at the time?

J G Ballard14:13

What did you

J G Ballard14:16

I went to school in Cambridge as well, and then I went on to the university to to become a medical student.

J G Ballard14:23

I don't know. In I mean, there's no doubt that Cambridge was and is still a great university, but

J G Ballard14:30

with great strengths, of course, in scientific research. At the same time I felt the university was a kind of Gothic pageant. It was it was a theme park before its day. All these Gothic colleges encouraged a sort of

J G Ballard14:45

Nostalgia and a dream of English life that had gone for ever.

Presenter14:50

But in the end you gave up medicine. You went into advertising, which didn't do much for you.

Presenter14:54

Then you went into flying.

Presenter14:56

And you joined the RAF. Now, obviously, planes and flying an aircraft is something very close to your heart, isn't it?

J G Ballard15:04

Yes, I think from the wartime period.

J G Ballard15:09

Not just during the war, but in 1937 when the Japanese were bombing Shanghai. And then later, of course, during the war when the Americans started bombing Shanghai in 43, 44, and we saw tremendous air battles over the camp.

J G Ballard15:23

I think the the sight of these huge American bombers, these great B twenty nine's, two of which of course dropped the Nagasaki and Hiroshima bombs, seeing them come over

Speaker 115:25

Do you

Speaker 115:28

Double.

J G Ballard15:33

They they looked like the future. They were in a they were these huge streamlined high tech planes. I think I needed to get I wanted to get behind the controls of a plane and and see what it felt like.

Presenter15:46

Some more music.

J G Ballard15:48

I'd like Marlena Dietrich.

J G Ballard15:50

Singing Falling in Love Again.

J G Ballard15:53

My favorite song of all, I think.

Speaker 415:55

Falling in love again, never wanted

Speaker 416:02

What am I to do?

Speaker 416:05

I can't help it.

Speaker 416:09

Love's always been my game, lead it how I may.

Speaker 416:16

I was made that way. I can't help

Presenter16:22

Arlena Dietrich singing Falling in Love Again. Eventually y you you married in the mid fifties and you had three children and you lived in um uh very happily in a semi in Shepperton where you still live, just west of London. It's difficult to believe, after everything we've just heard, you know, that you had been through, that you could settle down to a neat and tidy suburban existence. Could you?

J G Ballard16:45

I settle down to a neat and untidy suburban existence. I think the untidiness is is uh something that people who who used to come and visit us

J G Ballard16:56

And people who still come and visit me first notice, I mean.

J G Ballard17:00

That's a huge ramshackle nest.

J G Ballard17:02

But

J G Ballard17:04

I think I was looking for um

J G Ballard17:07

peace in a way and uh not that not that young married life was very peaceful, but I wanted I think I need I think I I realized that if I was to become a writer, I needed to sort of settle myself down and I needed to

J G Ballard17:23

measure my own past and my own imagination against the sort of basic yardsticks of marriage, human emotions and relationships, children, childbirth.

Presenter17:34

It was when your children were, I think, aged seven, five, and four, and you were thirty four, that your wife died very suddenly. What happened exactly?

J G Ballard17:45

She we were on holiday in Spain and she caught a rare form of pneumonia and died.

J G Ballard17:53

Oh well.

J G Ballard17:55

What about twenty-four hours?

J G Ballard17:57

That was a

J G Ballard17:59

Completely unexpected.

J G Ballard18:01

Tragedy that absolutely bowled me for six.

Presenter18:05

Tell me about bringing up the three children by yourself. You you set about being a writer, taking them to school in the morning, and then you wrote all day, and and you ran the ship, as you say, it was a ramshackle, untidy, but loving nest, and and it and it worked. Uh people, I presume, over the years have said, Good heavens, fancy your being able to do that but it sounds to me as if it came fairly naturally to you.

J G Ballard18:26

Yes, it did. I found it an extremely uh

J G Ballard18:29

Natural and happy thing to do, though

J G Ballard18:32

Of course, in the mid sixties when I when I found myself as a single parent with these young children,

J G Ballard18:38

People were much less tolerant of the idea of fathers being single parents than they are now.

J G Ballard18:44

It was very, very rare in those days for a man to bring up three children and

J G Ballard18:49

It was made absolutely clear to me by all kinds of people that I shouldn't really be doing it, that

J G Ballard18:56

Uh I mean people quite seriously

J G Ballard18:59

Told me that, um

J G Ballard19:01

in no you know, in no uncertain terms, that my children had suffered an immeasurable loss from the death of their mother, and no father could ever take the place.

Presenter19:11

What were you supposed to do about it?

J G Ballard19:13

Well, I I suggested that I farm my children out to various relatives, which I refused to do. But the the general assumption was that a man could never take the place of

J G Ballard19:24

A mother a man could never be a mother.

J G Ballard19:26

I never tried to be one. I'd I'd simply try to be a father. All all you need to do is to love the children and let them

J G Ballard19:35

To look after you. I mean, I I I've also said that, of course, I didn't bring up my children. They really brought me up.

Presenter19:43

Through more music.

J G Ballard19:46

I like Girobino's love song from The Marriage of Figaro, one of the most beautiful songs ever written.

Speaker 419:53

And some people cause a stroke cause of that But if we're gonna slow

Speaker 420:12

I'm not sure if I can do it.

Speaker 420:20

Maybe it's gotta turn up for the

Speaker 120:21

Yeah.

Speaker 420:24

God bless you!

Speaker 420:46

Put me for me for the first time.

Presenter20:56

Anne Murray singing part of the aria non so pu cosa son from Act One of Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro with the Vienna Philehamonic conducted by Riccardo Mutti.

Presenter21:06

Can we talk, Jim Ballard, some more about your earlier work, particularly your book Crash, which you wrote during the sixties, and which was very much about mangled flesh and metal and

Presenter21:17

I think at that stage some people thought you were definitely quite sinister and maybe even mad.

J G Ballard21:22

Yes, I think that's that was probably a very sort of fair reaction. Crash was a kind of

J G Ballard21:29

supreme test of the reader really. I was how to provoke the reader to to face up to what I saw.

J G Ballard21:37

as this sort of inversion of all human values, what I call the death of feeling.

Speaker 121:42

Death.

J G Ballard21:44

And I I I staged my exhibition of Crash Cars in nineteen sixty nine, before I wrote Crash, as a as a sort of and it was a conventional art show in all in all senses at the uh

J G Ballard21:57

New arts lab in Camden. I mean, I just exhibited three crashed cars. There was no

J G Ballard22:03

no um supporting material of any kind designed to um in incite the audience to any kind of

J G Ballard22:12

any kind of reaction. But in fact all the time the cars were on show for the month they were attacked by people who came in who tore off wing mirrors and broke what glasses.

Presenter22:22

Why? Because they didn't think these things should be on display, or because they were shocked by what they saw, this crushed and mangled metal.

J G Ballard22:28

I think they were reminded of all of the violence that was in the air in those days. Remember people were watching a non-stop diet of violent imagery in films, on television, and in newspapers and magazines.

Presenter22:43

But did you also feel so strongly about that because you, as we've heard as a young boy, witnessed so much meaningless death and because your wife had died for

Presenter22:54

Apparently no reason.

J G Ballard22:55

Yes, I think all these things fared together. I think my wife's death was an inexplicable event. There was no way in which one could find anything positive to say about an event like that. I mean, nature, I felt, and still do, had committed a a dreadful crime against this young woman and her children.

J G Ballard23:15

And

J G Ballard23:16

But there was no seemed to be no

J G Ballard23:18

No way of rationalizing it. And then I watching the sort of television in the sixties, watch seeing Kennedy shot to death beside his wife, and then seeing the strange macabre celebration of his death, which took place over subsequent years, where it was reduced to a kind of design statement, then seeing the sensationalizing of

J G Ballard23:42

of violent imagery through the later sixties. I suddenly felt, I think, that if I could find a key to this, I could find a key to my wife's death. And in a way I think all these things fed in and crash represents the sort of

J G Ballard23:56

A desperate attempt to make sense of violence in the world.

Presenter24:01

Some more music.

J G Ballard24:02

Uh

Presenter24:02

Yeah.

J G Ballard24:04

I'd like the girl from Epanema.

J G Ballard24:07

Beautiful song, and reminds me of a visit to Rhea which I made in nineteen sixty nine when I remember on Coppacabanner Avenue actually seeing a tram with the signs Coppacabana Eponema, and it seemed more magic even than

J G Ballard24:24

A street car named Desire.

Speaker 424:27

And ten and young and lovely The girl from Ipaninga goes walking And when she passes he smiles But she doesn't see

Speaker 424:52

Yeah.

Presenter24:57

The Girl from Iponema, sung by Astrud Gilberto. Women have obviously played Jim and do play an important part in your life, and yet in those early works they're often grotesquely represented as kind of sexual emblems, and then, you know, you end up at this end of your writing career writing The Kindness of Women and saying

Presenter25:18

How wonderful they've been to you. What was the truth?

J G Ballard25:22

I think the kindness of women actually very much describes my feelings about women, whom I've always been tremendously fond of. I'd much prefer the company of women to that of most men.

Presenter25:34

How will you manage without one on your desert island, I wonder?

J G Ballard25:37

That's going to be a problem.

Presenter25:40

What about without people in general? I mean, you've uh confessed to being

Presenter25:45

quite reclusive. You don't like the literary world and all its parties and launches. You shun all of that part of your success, don't you?

J G Ballard25:53

Yes, I'm not really all that happy with uh other writers, with one or two exceptions I may add.

J G Ballard26:01

Among my closest friends are one or two uh English writers, though they're mostly women writers. I'm much happier with painters and sculptors I know. I think in many ways I'm a sort of disappointed painter. I've always wanted to be a painter, but I've simply lack the sort of technical ability, lack the talent. And um in fact people say my novels are tremendously visual and in a in a sense I sort of paint my novels and

J G Ballard26:26

They're the life work of a frustrated painter.

Presenter26:30

Record number seven.

J G Ballard26:32

I'd like the overture to Rossini's Barber of Seville, which many people will

J G Ballard26:39

I've heard as the background music from a wonderful theatre ad that was shown on television a few years ago. I think my favourite T V commercial of all time.

Presenter27:51

Part of the overture of Rossini's The Barber of Seville, played by the Orchestra of La Scala Milan, conducted by Ricardo Shailli.

Presenter27:58

You went back recently to Shanghai, forty five years almost exactly since you left it. BBC Two's bookmark programme took you. You even went to the small room that you lived in in uh Lunghua camp.

Presenter28:11

It must have been a very traumatic experience for you.

J G Ballard28:14

Actually, I wasn't dramatic at all. It was like going home. That was the strange thing. I'd had one or two offers, particularly after Empire of the Sun was published, and then again when Spielberg's film was released in nineteen eighty seven, I'd had a number of offers.

J G Ballard28:33

To go back. But I I didn't want to go. I wasn't ready.

J G Ballard28:37

And so when I uh went back in July with the BBC Bookmark team,

J G Ballard28:44

I was in a sense I was expecting the worst in in many ways. In fact, it was a wonderfully uh

J G Ballard28:53

fulfilling experience. I mean, I mean we found the old Ballard House in Amherst Avenue without any difficulty. It's now an electronics library, and I stood in my old bedroom there.

J G Ballard29:04

the same bold blue paint and everything sort of undisturbed for forty five years really.

J G Ballard29:12

Then had a tremendous job finding the camp, which was about eight miles south of Shanghai, because during the war

J G Ballard29:18

The cam.

J G Ballard29:19

Stood.

J G Ballard29:21

Isolated in the sort of countryside south of Shanghai, surrounded by these abandoned paddy fields. This time, of course, we just found the whole area south of Shanghai had been built up, massive industrial estates, cement works, huge blocks of workers' flats that completely screened the camp from sight. It took us about two days to find it.

J G Ballard29:44

Anyway, eventually found the site of the camp, which is now a a Chinese boarding high school, and miraculously actually found the old Bannard Room.

J G Ballard29:54

looking like a a sort of rubbish tip, which it was, and I stood in the debris of all my memories and I felt at home for the first time.

Presenter30:04

So are the are the ghosts laid to rest now, then? Is it all sorted now? It took forty years for it to rise to the top, for you to be able to write about it, forty five years before you could return and see it.

Presenter30:17

Is that it now? Is it sorted for you?

J G Ballard30:19

Yes, I think the ghosts are laid to rest, and it's curious that it was sort of done via the medium of film and television, because that says something about, in a way, life in the late twentieth century, the the film of of events, the T V programme of of things.

J G Ballard30:37

They're more real than the originals, and we need in a sense to see things on T V and on film to be convinced that they're real. They're now after all extensions of our central nervous systems, and merely experiencing something at first hand isn't enough for us any more.

Presenter30:56

So now you've got it on videotape.

J G Ballard30:58

I've got it I've got myself on videotape, and I know that I'm real.

Presenter31:04

Last record.

J G Ballard31:05

I've always liked Cole Porter's music tremendously, and No Card's, so No Card singing, let's do it.

Speaker 131:13

Richard Rogers, it's true, took a more romantic view of this sly biological urge, but it really was Cole who contrived to make the whole thing merge.

Speaker 131:26

He said that Belgians and Greeks do it

Speaker 131:30

Nice young men who sell antiques do it let's do it let's fall in love

Speaker 131:37

Monkeys, whenever you look

Speaker 131:39

Do it.

Speaker 131:41

Helikan and King Farooq

Presenter31:43

Blue electric.

Presenter31:44

Noel Coward singing his version of Let's Do It. Now, if you could only take one of those records, Jim, which one would it be?

J G Ballard31:51

I think the

J G Ballard31:53

Marlena Dietrich falling in love again.

Presenter31:55

Cole Porter's actually the ghost at this feast, really, isn't he?

J G Ballard31:59

Yes, he is, I think, about three of these choices of being coporter.

Presenter32:03

Yes, don't fence me in Anne, let's do it. What about a book? You've got the Bible and Shakespeare waiting.

J G Ballard32:08

I think Moby Dick, which I've been reading and never finished.

J G Ballard32:12

for thirty years, and with a bit of luck sitting on the beach I might actually see a white whale. Of course I wouldn't be allowed to go out and harpoon it, but I might sort of entice it ashore and build a little uh marine world for it. And your luxury.

J G Ballard32:28

I take my unicycle, which when I was sixty my girlfriend Claire bought me. Known her for twenty five years, and she knows that my one dream is to ride the unicycle, and I'll have lots of time to practise on the island.

Presenter32:42

Might get stuck in the sand.

J G Ballard32:44

Well, I won't try too hard.

Presenter32:47

Jim Ballard, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs.

Speaker 432:58

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