Phil Redmond

Speaker 20:00

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 20:08

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

Presenter0:29

My Castaway this week is a television producer. Born and brought up in Liverpool, he's always stayed close to his roots in the North West. In the late seventies and early eighties, he conceived, wrote and produced two of British television's most enduring and influential series, Grange Hill and Brookside. As a result, he's risen from a poor working class background to become one of the country's highest paid television executives. But his programmes still reflect the man, independent and radical, but always anxious to entertain. He is Phil Redmond.

Presenter1:02

What was the driving force behind your inventions, Phil? Was it the desire to put across a message, to entertain, or simply to make money?

Phil Redmond1:10

I suppose the the the crass answer is to make money and behind that is the avenue out of the traditional working class background in the council estate, the the comprehensive school. And where do you go after that? And the traditional routes out were always entertainment or sport. Or through education. I was a social experiment really, a a guinea pig in the educational system in the late fifties, early sixties when comprehensive schools were first thought about.

Presenter1:36

Well you were the first child, as it were, one of the first generation to go.

Phil Redmond1:36

Yeah.

Phil Redmond1:38

Yeah, I was one of the first two percent to enter the comprehensive system and instead of going off to the the Jesuits to have education beaten into me, I went off to explore the brave new world of mixed ability teaching and things like that and I event I was at a comprehensive school that had at its height two thousand boys all under one roof, um which was every day was become more of a lesson in survival.

Presenter2:02

But but was it that experience that made you, do you think, more determined to to to get out, to get on, to make money? Or was it something inherent in you anyway?

Phil Redmond2:11

I always felt that it there was more to life than I'd known up to about the age of sixteen, seventeen, eighteen.

Presenter2:16

So you felt more trapped than most, do you think?

Phil Redmond2:19

But yeah, I felt less content with the vision that was in front of me of sort of going off into a a factory or ev even an office, you know, sort of um and just sort of plodding on day to day, you know, sort of going to work.

Presenter2:28

But what made you think that television was the answer to your dreams, was going to give you the way out?

Phil Redmond2:33

Oh well, I think I was one again, I was one of the first children of the electronic age. I mean, growing up in the fifties and seeing uh the BBC come online properly, then seeing IT V come online and the early work of Loach Garners, uh Z cars, all those things, Monty Python, it all seemed to be so exciting, so you know, so vibrant and

Presenter2:50

Let's hear about you and your music. What's the first record you want to take to your island?

Phil Redmond2:54

Well I think the first one is a Vaughan Williams piece. I mean it's called The Larkess Ending and I came to classical music quite late and I really discovered that there was you know there was life beyond you know heavy metal and and rock and things and I just like this piece of music because every time I hear it it's so evocative. I I lived in the last road in the city before the country started and at the end of our street the countryside proper started and the summer it was all cornfields and things and things like that and I used to tra we used to travel twelve miles through the country to the new town in Kirby to go to school. And so I've got great memories of long hot summers of going out of the city into the country and just messing around out there and this The Larkess Ending always kind of brings that back to me.

Presenter4:37

Part of Vaughan Williams' The Lark Ascending, played by Pinker Zuckerman with the English Chamber Orchestra conducted by Daniel Barrenboym.

Presenter4:44

Grange Hill you invented in nineteen seventy eight, it revolutionized the view of of school children on television really, because before that it had just been Billy Bunter and kind of Enid Blytonesque stuff.

Phil Redmond4:55

Yeah.

Phil Redmond4:55

I came up with the idea for Grange Hill when I was joining one of the summer VACs, um, because I went back to the university as a mature student'cause I you know hasn't come to this sort of working class background and I went off to be a trainee quantity surveyor and my dad thought that was marvellous'cause I'd actually made it into the professions and things. But five years on I thought there must be more to life than counting bricks and bags of cement, so I went back to um Liverpool University to do social studies. And I did the sociology of education and I don't know, I had been to a comprehensive system, my mum was a school cleaner. While I was a quantity surveyor I'd become an expert on building and renovating schools.

Presenter5:28

So you knew all about schools, and you knew what we got on the telly was not what it was about.

Phil Redmond5:29

And you knew what we got on the

Phil Redmond5:32

That's right. And I remember just walking into the um

Phil Redmond5:36

The labor exchange is collecting your summer dough. It just sort of hit me as I was walking in. Why didn't I just write about a school? Because that was.

Presenter5:43

But it's one thing to have the idea, it's another thing to get it accepted. I mean, presumably you bombarded people and they all said, Go away, you're very boring.

Phil Redmond5:50

Oh yeah, I mean I see I'd I'd started in television in the IT V system through Doctor in Charge and I was a sitcom writer really. So I went around all the all the IT V companies and said this is what I want to write and a couple of them said it was interesting but they wouldn't put the budget up for it'cause it would be expensive'cause they'd have to film a lot in school. So I thought I'd go over to the BBC and have a chat and I met Anna Hume who was who's now head of children's project but then was executive producer Children's Drama. But I told her I wanted to write a drama series about school and I remember her smiling and leaning back and opening a drawer and a desk and she took this folder out and on it was written school project. And she opened it up and there was nothing in it, you know. And I think actually if I would have said to her, you know, let's do a remake of Billy Bunter, it probably would have got to her.

Presenter6:33

Which is exactly what it wasn't, of course. I mean, it was very, very scary, wasn't it? The children were smoking, and there was bullying, and there was militancy.

Phil Redmond6:35

Yeah.

Phil Redmond6:40

Obviously I'd been through a comprehensive system and Grange Hill was a was like a butland's holiday camp compared to most inner city uh comprehensives. I mean the the real issues were you know we'd never been allowed to make it in children's television. And um and I used to always do the research very uh meticulously and and the the rule I always had is that I'd visit about ten or twelve schools each season to ask what they thought of what we'd done and what were the issues that were on their mind, what were they you know all talking about. And I've if I came away from those ten or twelve schools with sort of three ideas which they were all talking about, I used to think well that would that would be a legitimate area for the drama point.

Presenter7:13

Teenage pregnancy.

Phil Redmond7:15

Teenage pregnancy, I mean that was something which I actually vetoed for years and years, um because uh well for two reasons. One I thought it was actually really sort of past age drama, really it was really easy to do, very sensational. And secondly, um again I I was very concerned about the fact that we if we did it we'd have to be very very careful about not actually promoting promiscuity, you know, and saying it was okay or whatever.

Presenter7:37

But you veto and have always vetoed glue sniffing.

Phil Redmond7:40

Yeah, yeah.

Presenter7:41

Goodbye.

Phil Redmond7:42

Well glue sniffing is the one subject where if you have the wrong type of metabolism and you smell the wrong solvents, one sniff can actually do ir irre irreparable brain damage and it can actually be fatal. And I just thought that with an audience of eight million watching, the the risks of somebody just deciding to smell one solvent just to see what it was like is just too great.

Presenter8:06

Echo number two.

Phil Redmond8:08

Well record number two I suppose, I don't know, perhaps it might be a Liverpool cliché, but it's you'll never walk alone with Jerry and the pacemakers. Growing up in the fifties and sixties I was a great sort of Liverpool football club supporter. I was a fanatical copite, you know, I was born and bred and raised under Bill Shankley. And in a sense, some of his management philosophies are running the club I've adopted when I set up Brookside and the whole thing about it's the team is bigger than the individual and the strength and depth of that you train your own people so you don't have to ever go out and buy expensive people or indeed have to worry about injury because you've always got somebody to step into. It sounds ridiculous but these are all formative year things aren't he. And every time I hear you never walk alone it takes me right back to all those black and white days and those grainy television pictures of the great, you know, sort of Roger Hunt and Ronnie Yates and even St John and all them, you know.

Presenter9:25

Jerry Marsden and the Pacemakers, and you'll never walk alone. You mentioned that you've aped uh Bill Shankly's management techniques. Uh you apparently run Mersey television rather like a strict headmaster. I mean no smoking, no drinking. Everybody must be punctual, is that right?

Phil Redmond9:32

Yeah.

Phil Redmond9:40

Um in a word, yes.

Phil Redmond9:43

But what

Presenter9:43

But why? I mean, you must have tried, you must have experimented with a kind of hippie style of management in the beginning.

Phil Redmond9:48

Well, I did, yeah. I mean, I um I started in eighty one, eighty two. I mean, you you come along with all those great kind of um altruistic ideas and things, and I suppose being brought up in a socialist Jerusalem, it never leaves you, you know, and uh but I found after six months uh uh six weeks rather of um waiting for consensus management to appear, nothing would ever get done, you know, so in the end I decided to throw the hippie school of management out the window. Just go back to the classic Victorian, I say what gets done and we do it, you know, but you're also a parent.

Presenter10:18

But you're also apparently quite quite hot on the budgets. I mean quite tight control or

Phil Redmond10:21

You have to be because I mean when we started in 82 we were independent production was so totally new then and we were we were trying to attempt something which nobody had ever done before and uh since they found out that nobody had ever tried to do it in a whale before and that was to set up a company that would actually own all its own equipment and be uh two hundred miles away from what was regarded as the s the epicenter of the broadcasting universe in London.

Presenter10:45

How much was your first ever wage packet, can you remember?

Phil Redmond10:45

How much was

Phil Redmond10:49

My first ever wage packet as a trainee conservator was um four pounds sixteen and tenpence hate me I think, something something like that.

Presenter10:58

And what's the turnover of Mersey television today?

Phil Redmond11:01

Um it's considerably more than that.

Presenter11:04

Twelve million?

Phil Redmond11:04

Um round about that, yeah. Yeah, I think that's a yeah.

Presenter11:09

So we've got to be pretty professional about it. Record number three.

Phil Redmond11:13

Number three is um is Beethoven's number nine. It's simply because this was the first classical piece that I ever listened to that I actually enjoyed as a piece of music without somebody having to explain to me what it was all about and then say, Oh, I see what you mean, yes, you know, and sort of get into all that kind of nonsense. And I suppose also it came out of my Roman Catholicism because of the inspiring hymns and anthems like Faith of Our Fathers and things, which have been drummed into me since I was started to walk, you know. The recording I really sort of uh play a lot now is the Bernstein recording, which was done when the Berlin Wall uh came down. And I think I remember the Berlin Wall actually going up and I remem now remember obviously the ball coming down and I think the idea of using this thing which is old, Ode to Joy, and then changing the name to Ode to Freedom for the concert, I thought was pretty good, you know.

Speaker 412:03

Hi, hi!

Speaker 412:08

I say it again.

Presenter12:49

The Ode to Joy from Beethoven's Symphony No. Nine, conducted by Leonard Bernstein at the Berlin Wall in december nineteen eighty nine.

Presenter12:56

So, Phil Redmond, Grange Hill was established and then in the early eighties you turned your sights to grown up telly, to making a a so-called soap for Channel Four, which w what what can they have wanted? What can they have said to you at that stage? Because it was roth that's rather a down market concept for Channel Four.

Phil Redmond13:13

I don't know where the channel four would agree with you on that.

Phil Redmond13:15

Channel four was the new channel, innovative, no hang-ups. And I just went to them and said, Look, you know, every single channel throughout the world has to have a soap opera or a long-running programme, simply because they sell the rest of the channel around it and you know, they can promote the rest of the programmes, brings in audiences, all profile, all those kind of things. And Jeremy Isaacs was chief executive at the time. So I said to him, I'd really like to do a soap opera and he said, wow, you know, well, so would we, Phil, but, you know, we can't afford it. And I said, well, Jeremy, you know, I was trained as a quantity surveyor, you know, so I got an idea of how we can actually bring the cost down. So he said, well, go off and do whatever you need to do and come back. So I went off and thought about it all. And I came up with the idea that at the time it was costing about thirteen thousand pounds per half hour in just sec construction and storage costs. And each of the houses on Brookside was going to cost twenty-five thousand pounds. So two episodes a week would pay for the actual purchase of each house. And we took that philosophy and just spread it across to buying all the lights and the cameras and everything. So I was able to go back to Channel Four and say, Look, traditionally it would cost you eight million, you know, but the way I can do it this way, we can cost you three million.

Presenter14:23

So you bought the six houses in the close?

Phil Redmond14:25

I remember going into the sales office of this big estate in where Brookside was was was set and saying to the girl on the counter, I said, How much of these houses are here? You know, and she said, Well, they're twenty five thousand miles. I said, Great, I'll have thirteen on'em So when she realized I wasn't a lunatic and stopped reaching for the phone, you know, we um talked with the builders and I gave them very brief character profiles and they talked to their marketing people and they said, Well, these type of people would buy these type of houses. And we talked to the architect department and they said, And we'd build them in this configuration.

Presenter14:54

So the research is very precise and it's not a problem.

Phil Redmond14:55

Absolutely, yeah.

Presenter14:57

But but you got it wrong at first, didn't you? There was too much bad language, too much sex, viewers didn't like it.

Phil Redmond15:00

Too much said.

Phil Redmond15:03

Yeah, I wouldn't say we got it wrong. I think we uh we we made an alternative choice that the viewers didn't quite go along with.

Presenter15:08

It was too realistic.

Phil Redmond15:10

It was and um

Presenter15:11

Street language.

Phil Redmond15:12

There's great interest now in Brookside, because it's 12 years old, it's part of the establishment, and there's a great interest in the archive now and things like video and satellite channels. So I've been um because of the furore, the swearing, the channel and I agreed years and years ago that we'd never show the first year again, you know, because we didn't want to reopen all those old wounds and things like this. But anyway, eventually we decided that, you know, we'd go back and look at it. And I sat I've sat and looked at the first twenty or thirty episodes and I am actually astonished at how little swearing is actually in the programme. By today standards. By today standards.

Presenter15:41

By today standards. Yeah. Record number four.

Phil Redmond15:45

Well of course inevitably it's going to be the theme from Brookside, isn't it? But it means so much to me because it's changed my life so drastically and it's opened so many avenues and so many doors to me throughout my uh past twelve years. Every time I hear this piece of music it doesn't remind me of Brookside, it means you know what Brookside has actually meant to me.

Presenter16:37

A theme from Brookside.

Presenter16:39

So how much do you personally have to do these days, Phil, with the storylines of Grange Hill and Brookside?

Phil Redmond16:45

With Grange Hill I meet with the producer and script editor each year and we sit down and spend a couple of days going back and forward on probably what we think should be in the programme. And I review the storylines as they come through.

Presenter16:58

So you have an overview, but you have writers. How many writers at any one time writing books?

Phil Redmond16:58

So you have an overview, but you have right

Phil Redmond17:01

Well on Bookside I chair two long term planning meetings a year. We have two every six months and they are to try and project where the programme should be twelve to eighteen months ahead. Um that's a four day conference and we t we have twelve writers and we take them all away. And we usually go somewhere, you know, abroad, just to be aware, you know, it's that whole great stretching the budget.

Presenter17:22

Stretching the budget a bit, isn't it, for a man who likes to control these things?

Phil Redmond17:24

No man likes to

Phil Redmond17:25

It's well, it's it's value for money, that's the whole point. Um, and actually the it they are good because I mean the whole show is driven from those those two meetings.

Presenter17:27

Uh

Presenter17:33

But the big difference, as I understand it, between Brookside and other soaps, like Coronation Street and East Enders, is that it's shot on one camera. It's shot like a film, isn't it? Now why do you do that?

Phil Redmond17:40

Yeah.

Phil Redmond17:42

I wanted to try and capture the controlled atmosphere of the studio, but with the vibrancy of location. That was the idea of just building Brookside as a real set, so it would be real houses. The actors wouldn't have to worry about slamming doors or falling against the walls'cause they wouldn't fall over. But at the same time, it would be under our control. And we would shoot it like film so that we would not have this these sort of five dinosaur creatures cameras sort of moving around the studio. And in a sense, in the end, we being at the behest of that sort of that tyranny of technology, so uh actors were having to sort of like told to lean forward, bend to the left, you know, now twist round to the right.

Presenter18:18

Because you had to coordinate several actors at one time. How many directors do you have going at any one time?

Phil Redmond18:24

Seven at the moment, yeah. Um and Shooting Brookside is like having seven feature films in production at any one stage.

Presenter18:30

So that's the core of your business, plus Grange Hill and the videos and the T-shirts and so on and owning all your own machinery and so on. How many people do you employ?

Phil Redmond18:33

Vidya.

Phil Redmond18:39

There is a hundred and twenty people actually on uh the Mes Television Brookside payroll, um, plus about another eighty or so, like writers, actors, freelance people on on long term contracts.

Presenter18:52

Which must make you one of the biggest producers in the independent sector.

Phil Redmond18:55

Yeah, I mean there's about two hundred at any one stage and probably about another hundred people who come in and out just to serve as Brookside. So if you're not sure.

Presenter19:01

Do you take it all for granted now, or do you still pinch yourself to think that this is how far you've got?

Phil Redmond19:06

I don't take it for granted because it's still you know, we still have to manage it properly because it's it's just running constantly. It's been a long, hard road to get there. But what I never forget is that I never forget the benefits it's brought me and the the privileges it's brought me, um when I look back to what my past was and what my future might have been if I if it hadn't have been through this career.

Presenter19:28

More music.

Phil Redmond19:29

This one in a sense is part of that sort of th thing about thinking about privileges and and things because I mean I have made quite a bit of money and that means we travel a lot and we go to America a lot and in America you always seem to find this pastoral music playing in the background and when we bought a house a few years ago we decided we'd build a pond and we wanted some sort of pastoral water music. We were searching everywhere and there was a feeling that we wanted a Japanese type feel to the music. And eventually we just sort of came across this piece which is by James Galway. It was James Galway playing in the forest. And so every time we hear this it's not only sort of reminds us of our place you know with the pond area but it reminds us of our travelling times and things. So I choose it because I was thinking on Desert Island I'd also like something not just take me back to my roots but take me back to other places that I'd been and seen in the world and this one would do it.

Presenter20:51

James Galway, playing Into the Forest. You were called in, Phil Redmond, as a consultant on Emmerdale, the country soap on ITV, to advise on storylines. I think'cause their viewers were falling away. And you know, what do you know? But not long afterwards, an aeroplane crashes on the village, rather as as uh the jet did on on Lockerbie, and the viewing figures went up. And you were much criticised for that, weren't you? I mean, is it is it not a bit cheap, that direct link between crisis and viewing figures?

Phil Redmond21:18

We took a situation that can happen anywhere in the world to any one of us, and that is that we can be walking down the street and a huge chunk of metal can fall out the sky, which happened to be attached to a plane or be part of a plane. The point about the consultancy was that YTV were a bit concerned about the future of the programme. And because I'd been involved with YTV in the bid against Bernarda a few years earlier, I obviously knew them, and because of my background with Brookie and they were just chatting to me about it, what would I do with the programme? And the first suggestion they didn't like, which was to scrap it and get a new one for me. And so they said, well, bar that, what would you do? And I said, well, I think it really needs an event to do two things. One is to actually inject some new life into the programme so we can refocus it because structurally there were a few problems with the programme. But secondly, you need such an impact to change the perception of the programme, which was that it's a very sleepy, slow soap, and that's why the audience were beginning to drift away because the pace of television had started to increase. Now, when I looked at what could actually happen to a small, sleepy village in the Yorkshire Dales, no motorways, no railway tracks, no chemical works, no scenes for great sort of drama. And for drama, read disaster because that's what we were looking for, one big, massive impact. And the only thing that could actually really happen to that kind of village is something fall out the sky.

Presenter22:46

But it's a method you've employed before you've employed it in Brookside when viewing figures were falling off. You suddenly killed off two favourite characters, didn't you? Or you suddenly have some large crisis happen. I'm d you obviously don't

Phil Redmond22:49

Thank you.

Presenter22:59

feel at all ashamed of that. You think that's a perfectly legitimate measure.

Phil Redmond23:01

That's part of the I mean, that is part of the craft and that's part of the storytelling. I mean, I've said it quite flippantly in the past. It is they they can be described as cynical ratings grabbing exercises. But at the end of the day, that's what we're there for. I mean, Brookside is there to stay on top of Channel Four's ratings chart.

Presenter23:18

So if the ITC, the the Independent Television Commission or or the or the Broadcasting Standards Council attack you for this and say that this is all all gratuitous violence I mean you had somebody murdered with a bread knife not long ago in Brookside they've attacked you for that as well, haven't they? You say, I'm sorry, but this is my job and this is the best way of doing it, do you?

Phil Redmond23:37

Yeah, I do. And I think there's a certain amount of hypocrisy when the regulators come out and say, you know, Oh, look, you're on a you're running on two commercial channels here, you know, which is the whole job of the programmes is to get ratings so that they can attract advertisers to get revenue to pay for the to provide the money to make the programmes in the first place. I think there's a certain amount of hypocrisy when they come in and say, Oh, but don't do it too effectively, you know,'cause that that's what they're saying.

Presenter23:58

Record number six.

Phil Redmond23:59

Well this one is Bob Seeger, it's a track called Roll Me Away and I remember years and years ago being stuck in one of these really hot London summers and the traffic was just gridlocked, nobody was going anywhere and everybody was getting frustrated and and then this track just came on the radio and it was Bob Seeger and Roll Me Away talking about a guy who's fed up with everything'cause he decides to go up and get on his just walk out, get on his Holly Davidson and ride across the American West and it just sounds like what a great idea at the time.

Speaker 424:28

Oh, roll me away, won't you roll me away tonight?

Speaker 424:34

I too am lost, I feel double crossed, and I'm sick of what's wrong and what's right.

Speaker 424:42

We never even said a word, we just walked out and got on that base.

Speaker 424:54

World clean out of sight.

Presenter24:59

Bob Seeger and Rome Away. So are you a Harley Davidson man, then, Phil?

Phil Redmond25:03

Yeah, I'm afraid I am. I um I came late to biking because I again, because of that kind of uh poor background, the cache just wasn't there.

Presenter25:11

So you like the idea of getting away, getting out but but nevertheless the routes are very important to you, aren't they? You wouldn't have budged out of the North West, come what may, would you?

Phil Redmond25:19

That's a very, very difficult one because I mean all my family and friends are up there and Brookie's all based up there and everything. But I did move away when Grange Hill started because I found in seventy six, seventy seven, I found I was travelling so much up and down because everything was focussed out of London that it just seemed ridiculous. I was just trying. So I, like many of my predecessors before me, f followed the yellow brick motorway down here and sort of set up home and everything. But it's only when Brookside came along that I thought, well, you know, there's no better place to go and spend three or four million a year than back home, so off I went.

Presenter25:50

You failed, as many will remember, to win the Northwest IT V franchise a few years ago, and I'm sure you'll never forget it. You offered thirty five million. Granada offered nine million, and they won. They got it.

Speaker 426:00

Yeah.

Phil Redmond26:02

Yeah.

Speaker 426:02

Uh

Phil Redmond26:02

Shit.

Presenter26:02

You were said to have failed the quality threshold. That must have hurt.

Phil Redmond26:07

Um yeah, it did it did at the time and actually it hurt the uh some of the other members of the consortium more than myself in a sense. And I think the the best answer we got out of the uh regulators in the end was that um yes, Phil, it was uh we realized it was quality, but it wasn't the quality we were looking for.

Presenter26:24

It was very much people vision, wasn't it? You were going to kind of hand cameras out to people. You you were going to show themselves to themselves. Is that the future, do you think? I mean, what what where does television go, really, in the decades to come?

Phil Redmond26:35

I'm just so optimistic about the future. I mean, there's just going to be so many channels and so many choice. The big challenge is how people will actually select what they want to watch, you know. But people like Microsoft and BT, they're all working on that software. So you'll program your television to your taste or your radio to your taste. So when you buy it, you'll tell it that you're interested in programmes on fishing or motoring or politics or whatever. And when you come in and press the what's on button, it'll say there are sixty-five programmes on about fishing, eight of which you've seen, thirteen I've recorded in the memory ranks. And don't forget you wanted to watch the Irish Championship tomorrow night. And that's the way technology is going to move.

Presenter27:08

Nice.

Presenter27:12

Record number seven.

Phil Redmond27:14

This is uh the Beach Boys in Cocomar. I was a great Beach Boys fan when I sort of grew you know, when I was growing up. I got remarried five years ago and and this record was out at the time and it was it became almost like the theme of the of the wedding. It's just an another ev nice evocative memory.

Speaker 427:30

Aruba, Jamaica, ooh, I wanna take it. Bermuda, Bahama, come on pretty mama, Kilargo, Montego, baby.

Speaker 427:43

And then

Speaker 427:45

The key

Speaker 427:50

There's a place called Coca

Speaker 427:54

That's where you wanna go to get away from it all.

Presenter28:01

Beach Boys and Kokomo. What about Phil Redmond on a desert island? Will it be a pretty sight? I mean, is he competent, efficient?

Phil Redmond28:07

Yeah.

Phil Redmond28:08

I'm quite a practical person. I'd be able to build a shelter and all that kind of thing.

Presenter28:12

And escape? Would that be on the cards?

Phil Redmond28:13

I'd like periods of solitude and periods of being on my own to think, but I'm not an isolationist. I'd I'd need to get back, you know.

Presenter28:21

And how much would you miss television?

Presenter28:24

'Cause you have a pretty low opinion of most of it, don't you?

Phil Redmond28:27

Well, as I've said, I've said many times in conferences and lectures, I mean, we make as much junk as everybody else in the world, you know. You just can't have every single programme being, you know, fantastic. I mean, you've got to have turkeys in there to flesh out the schedule. It's inevitable. But we

Presenter28:42

But would you miss it if you could never watch it again?

Phil Redmond28:44

I'd missed some things. I don't think I'd miss the whole thing.

Presenter28:46

How much of it do you want?

Phil Redmond28:48

Well, like everybody in the business, I don't watch as much as I should do, you know. And I'm a great, um, grazer, now. My home can get every single channel from everywhere.

Presenter28:57

But as a lecturer, which you are from time to time to media studies students at uh John Morse University in Liverpool, you presumably

Presenter29:05

constantly try to inspire young people that television is a worthwhile career, that it's still all there to be had if only you you try hard enough and you're ambitious enough like you were. Do you still believe that that's true?

Phil Redmond29:19

Oh absolutely. I mean I think I say I'm very optimistic for the future. And what I try and say to the students is that don't let them I tell them not to be distracted by either the people or the institutions who are in place at the moment. I mean I think that everything passes and it's up to them to find new ways to use the technology. Just let their imaginations roll, you know, and see what it can do, because the future is they're going to have the choice of so many channels and all those channels have got to be filled.

Presenter29:46

But at the end of the day it's only television.

Phil Redmond29:47

At the end of the day it's only television, and if we stop tomorrow nobody dies.

Presenter29:51

Last record.

Phil Redmond29:53

The last one is Carlos Camina Burane. And I was introduced to it by a guy who lived in a flat next door to me and I was a struggling writer and he was a classical composer. And I just kind of it immediately hit me, the rhythm of it and the cadences and all that. And I quite liked the idea of it being sort of based on sort of baudy songs that were written by monks in the mediev from the medieval age. That was kind of kind of appealed to me. And then even more appealed to me that when I found out in some quarters it was deemed not quite right, you know, as a classical piece, because it had more in common with rock music. I thought, well, that's for me.

Speaker 430:25

Come on.

Speaker 430:55

Second man is a song.

Speaker 431:14

So

Speaker 431:16

Then from the

Presenter31:22

Oh Fortuna, from Karl Orff's Carmina Burana, with the Philharmonia Orchestra and Chorus conducted by Riccardo Mutti if you could only take one of those records, Phil.

Phil Redmond31:31

Just for emotion and memory, it'd have to be the um the theme from Brookside because every time I heard that piece of music it would take me beyond, you know, through m so many different kind of doors in my memory. It would be, you know, yeah, I think it'd have to be there, I'm afraid.

Presenter31:46

That's all right. Then you've got the Bible waiting for you, and you've got the complete works of Shakespeare. What about another book?

Phil Redmond31:47

Yeah.

Phil Redmond31:52

Well I know you don't you usually when you're cast away in Desert Downs you don't get a opp opportunity to deal before it all happens but I think I'd I'd really like to try and swap the Shakespeare for the for Dickens instead I mean'cause I think Dickens is in a sense is a is a lot closer to my cultural background and my cultural world and so I'd I'd try and do that deal and I'd also like to say if people are getting a bit tested, well no you can't do that, like I said, well I'll tell you what, I won't take the Bible either because having been brought up as a Roman Catholic, I'd always be very worried that another castaway would roll roll up on the island with their version of their holy book under their arm and we'd immediately get into loggerheads about whose God was the best and therefore we we'd start off not creating civilization but starting the end of civilization all over again, you know.

Presenter32:37

What about a luxury?

Phil Redmond32:38

I'd like to take a magnifying glass with me because I I realize if I'm on a design this age my sight will probably start to go so I'd probably need my magnifying glass to read Dickens and whatever and also to you know look at the flora and everything all around me. But also you see with a magnifying glass I'd then be able to harness the sun's rays. Don't tell me about the

Presenter32:55

Don't tell me about the practical value of it.

Phil Redmond32:56

Yeah.

Presenter32:58

Otherwise you can't have it. I can imagine what you do with a magnifying glass.

Phil Redmond33:01

The map.

Speaker 433:01

I was saying

Presenter33:03

You can have one as long as you look at the flora and fauna. Phil Redmond, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs. Thank you.

Speaker 233:17

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