Maurice Saatchi

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.

Presenter0:30

My Castaway this week is an advertising man. He came to this country from the Middle East at the age of one. He went on to achieve a first class degree at the London School of Economics, and soon after that he set up an advertising agency with an elder brother.

Presenter0:45

Over a period of twenty years their approach became synonymous with commercial and political success. The Tory party and British Airways were just two of the beneficiaries of their astute campaigns, and the brothers became very famous and extremely rich.

Presenter0:59

But the company overreached itself. Late last year there was a shareholders' revolt, and my castaway found himself driven into exile from the firm he'd created. He vowed revenge, and already in a new company he's once more casting his spell across the world of advertising. He is Maurice Sauchi. Are you still intent on revenge, Maurice, or is the passage of time taking the sting away?

Presenter1:24

I didn't quite vow revenge, Sue, but I did take the view that the people who had taken control of Search and Searchy weren't people with whom I could work. You went away and you've since set up on your own. What you've taken, and this must have been quite sweet revenge, is you took that British Airways account, which is said to be worth some sixty million or so. How many others have come across with you, clients? Well, quite a few, because I think what happened is that perhaps people misunderstood that Search and Searchy is more than a company and is, I think, an attitude.

Presenter1:56

And many people inside the company and many clients of the company thought that this particular approach to advertising had been somehow betrayed by these events, and therefore, a large number of clients and a large number of people

Presenter2:09

Did

Presenter2:10

Protest. But of course what it hit was the balance sheet, which presumably was a kind of sweet revenge, because you said at the time that the people who'd effectively ousted you were accountants, I think bean counters you called them.

Presenter2:24

Yes, it wasn't my word, but um well, I I think they've had a difficulty because it was a company that was making around forty five million pounds pre-tax and

Presenter2:33

Now is making nothing.

Presenter2:36

Apparently not.

Presenter2:38

They say that revenge is is a dish best eaten cold. Are you sort of thinking up a menu that you might savour at a later date? No, the only the only unfinished business is concerning the name.

Presenter2:50

It is, I think, one of the great names of

Presenter2:53

Advertising.

Presenter2:54

And it's hard to see how you can have two searches.

Presenter2:59

competing with each other. So at some point that will have to be resolved. But you've set up with your own name, quite understandably, M and C Saatchi in R now, as opposed to Sauchi and Saatchi.

Maurice Saatchi3:07

Uh

Maurice Saatchi3:09

Yeah.

Presenter3:11

Yes, exactly. Well, you can sit and ponder all this on your desert island.

Presenter3:15

Tell me about the first record you'll play when you get there. This first record is by Saint-Seon. It's called Habernese.

Presenter3:22

I've chosen it because it is the saddest piece of music that I know, and I imagine that

Presenter3:29

On the desert island there would be many days or moments of intense sadness.

Presenter3:36

So this would, I imagine, fit the mood of a castaway.

Presenter3:41

Rather well.

Presenter4:40

The beginning of Saint-Sans Avenaise with Itzak Perlman and the Orchestre de Paris conducted by Jean Martin.

Presenter4:47

You and your brother Charles, as Saatchi and Saatchi, epitomized the Thatcherite dream, really, didn't you? Because you you entered a market, you were new, you were different, you were radical, you bought up some of your rivals and you competed and you won.

Presenter5:02

How much do you think that success had to do with the woman herself, Margaret Thatcher?

Presenter5:07

Well, we owe a great deal to the Conservative Party and to Mrs Thatcher because

Presenter5:12

When she chose us to work for the Conservative Party when she was leader of the opposition in 1978.

Presenter5:18

We were probably a little known in the UK and not at all known in the rest of the world.

Presenter5:23

But by the time we had worked on her nineteen seventy nine election campaign and she had become Prime Minister, she was a hero around the world and therefore we had been blessed. One of the first ads you did for them, if not the first, was Labour isn't working with that long queue of doleful people. It's said to have been so effective that it deterred the Labour Party from calling an election Jim Callahan from calling the election in

Maurice Saatchi5:38

Yeah.

Presenter5:47

1978. What was it did it work that well? It certainly had a very galvanizing effect on the Conservative Party and a demoralising effect on the Labour Party and

Presenter5:56

To that extent it may have it may have had some minor impact on the date of the election.

Presenter6:02

But, um, I really don't know, and only Lord Callaghan would know. But you.

Presenter6:07

You got involved at quite a deep level then in politics, didn't you? I mean, as I understand it, you used to sit down with ministers and and sort of help them analyse what their message was. You went into it in some depth. Well, we worked for the party for four election campaigns, and they all worked. We were only ever a weapon in political wars. We were a blunt instrument.

Presenter6:31

And that's what political advertising should be.

Presenter6:34

Before we started, and I think one of the reasons people say that there was some kind of revolution at that time that we began.

Presenter6:42

was because I think before then

Presenter6:44

The most famous Conservative Party poster had been, as I am told, in the nineteen fifty one election campaign.

Presenter6:50

It consisted of a very bright and energetic young Tory type.

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getting up out of bed looking very alert.

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In the morning, under a headline which said Get up and go with the Conservatives.

Presenter7:05

And this poster was printed by the thousand and sent out by central office all around the country and was about to be posted up when somebody noticed that the

Presenter7:14

Alarm clock on this chap's bedside table said quarter to ten.

Presenter7:20

So the posters were all withdrawn.

Presenter7:23

No, our style was a little bit more robust.

Presenter7:32

I think it's impossible to do the kind of work that we've done for uh another party. We couldn't do it. You really have to be a believer. You have to believe and you have to be committed. Echo number two. This is um a track recorded by Ahmad Jamal, who is a jazz pianist.

Maurice Saatchi7:44

This

Presenter7:50

in around the nineteen fifties. It is to me proof of the erotic power of music.

Presenter7:58

Because my memory of it is hearing it wafting out of the bedrooms of my two older brothers whenever they had

Presenter8:05

Girls in their rooms.

Presenter8:07

So I attributed great magic powers to this track which is called Point Siana.

Presenter9:01

Ahmed Jamal with Poinciana or The Song of the Tree and Memories of Your Brothers and Vicarious Sex.

Maurice Saatchi9:09

Thank you, Avas.

Presenter9:10

You have three brothers. I do. Two older, one younger.

Maurice Saatchi9:13

Uh

Presenter9:14

One of your elder brothers is your partner, Charles. What do the other two do?

Maurice Saatchi9:16

Which they

Presenter9:18

My older brother David lives in New York in the Hamptons and is now a sculptor, and my younger brother is a musician songwriter.

Presenter9:27

And you were all brought up in great comfort in Hampstead in North London. But your parents weren't English. Tell me about their origins. They were Portuguese by origin and lived in Baghdad.

Presenter9:40

And I think, um, after the war it wasn't very comfortable to be Jewish in one of the Arab countries and therefore they

Presenter9:48

Very wisely decided to leave.

Maurice Saatchi9:49

What did your father do for

Presenter9:51

He was in textile exporting. So they spoke your parents Portuguese or Arabic or Hebrew? Both Hebrew and Arabic.

Presenter10:00

And what were you brought up then speaking? English. From the beginning. Yes. But was it a traditional Jewish upbringing, the synagogue and the bar mitzvah and so on? It was a very religious home, and my father was president of the Spanish and Portuguese synagogue here. And how important is that religion to you today?

Presenter10:21

I'm afraid that all all um the four sons have rather lost their religion.

Presenter10:26

Which is a pity. Is there a reason for that?

Presenter10:29

If there is, it's one I'd like to analyse on the desert island.

Presenter10:34

What were you like as a young boy? How would you describe yourself? What kind of chap were you?

Presenter10:40

A model student.

Presenter10:42

Took my studies very seriously.

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There was the possibility of my being a brilliant cricketer, but I was struck in the um this area by a ball.

Presenter10:55

While starring as the number three bat for our school team.

Presenter10:59

And was carried off the field. That was the end of my cricketing career. Some people who know me now think that I never actually recovered from that blow.

Maurice Saatchi11:03

Cricketing career.

Presenter11:08

Uh but you were clever. I did well in school, that's true. And you did well at the L S E. You got a first. I did. In economics and sociology.

Presenter11:18

Because profilers like admin, I suppose, like neat and tidy stories, what what they like to present is that you are this as you're admitting, a studious, serious, very clever chap, that your brother Charles and your older brother Charles

Presenter11:34

Was actually rather more of the maverick, and that he's the kind of artistic inspiration behind everything that's happened, and you're this polished front. You're the conventional front man, the suit. I am the suit. I think that's a very accurate description. Is it? Do do you not mind? That makes you sound like the boring one. No, I think that's how I'm that's how I operate. And I quite like him. So, did you and he identify this quite early on, that this is this is a partnership that could work?

Presenter11:59

Yes, Charles was running a very successful creative consultancy, and I had gone to work in publishing.

Presenter12:07

It appeared one day that it would be possible to start an advertising agency.

Presenter12:11

And um we hit upon the unlikely name of such and such and

Presenter12:14

The rest is history.

Presenter12:16

Tell me about your third record. I thought it would be interesting to play one of the songs sung in the synagogue by my father.

Presenter12:25

He recorded this tape not long ago. He's now in his.

Presenter12:28

eighties, and his voice is a little more frail, but still very beautiful. And I sadly can't tell you the meaning of the song or its place in the service, but um I recall it very fondly.

Maurice Saatchi12:43

Yeah.

Maurice Saatchi12:45

Hasher Ma la Beterim Cor is

Maurice Saatchi13:01

Take no

Maurice Saatchi13:06

Qu'ai rafson gaul as a maiser, che cruel.

Presenter13:21

My castaway's father, Nathan Saatchi, singing in the Spanish and Portuguese synagogue in Maidevale, North London. So you left university, you went into publishing, as you said, you went into Haymarket Publishing, which was part owned or wholly owned by Michael Heseltine. It was, yes. And it was he, was it not, with together with Mary Quant, who put up the money.

Presenter13:41

To set you and Charles up in business? That is an unknown aspect of the history of Saatchi and Sanchi. So I'm not in a position to either confirm or deny that today. But what kind of money would you have needed to set up such a business?

Presenter13:57

Fair amount, but

Presenter13:59

The main criteria was that it was enough to spend on a full page advertisement in the Sunday Times.

Presenter14:04

Entitled Why I Think It's Time for a New Kind of Advertising.

Presenter14:08

which we did with a large proportion of the capital that

Presenter14:11

Um people are generous.

Presenter14:13

Why are you so coy about these people, whoever they were?

Maurice Saatchi14:14

We

Presenter14:17

Well, because it was a private company and

Presenter14:20

people can make in investments in private companies privately.

Presenter14:24

And did you do all that awful business, that cold calling, you know, ringing people and saying, Hello, I'm Maurice Sarty and I think I could do things for you. Yes, I did that myself.

Presenter14:34

It was very effective. And you also did, I understand, what I suspect many small companies do, which is every time you got a telephone call, you sort of passed it around to your one other telephone as if you were. From the production department to the international finance department to the um

Maurice Saatchi14:44

Yes, we did from under production.

Presenter14:49

Accounts department, etc.

Presenter14:51

Yes, we did that, and then finally through to the person the caller wanted to speak to. Who was probably the person who was aware of the money? It called the illusion of size, almost certainly.

Maurice Saatchi14:55

Who was probably the person who first spoke of the money?

Maurice Saatchi14:58

Yeah.

Presenter14:59

What about today? Uh do you do you practise the same things twenty five years on, now you've set up again? I'm glad to say we don't have that we don't have that need. More music. This is a piece by Bach, his double violin concerto in D minor, because it was played often in the home of the father of my first wife, Gillian, who lived up the road in a very

Presenter15:22

Grand House.

Presenter15:23

And he died very sadly recently, and I thought I'd like to play this. He was very fond of it.

Presenter16:21

Part of Bach's double violin concerto in D minor performed by Yitzhak Perlman and Pinka Zuckermann, conducted by Daniel Baremboim.

Presenter16:29

What was different about Saatchi and Saatchi Morris as a whole from, say, J. Walter Thompson, an existing advertising agency? We keep saying you were radical, you were different, you were young and enthusiastic. What did you do that was different?

Presenter16:42

I said at the beginning that

Presenter16:43

We took the view that our company was more

Presenter16:47

of an attitude and a company.

Presenter16:49

And the attitude that it has, I think, was best summed up in the phrase nothing is impossible. There was a generally can do confidence about the place which was very special. Companies are a a culture more perhaps than anything else. And the mark of a great company, in my experience, is a company that

Presenter17:09

Has precisely that, a very strong character that runs all through the organization and that is palpable. It's in the air. But what you had that was.

Speaker 317:16

But what you had them

Presenter17:20

To me reading about you is that you got inside the companies who were your clients. You you didn't just let the advertising be something that was dealt with by the marketing department. You said to British Airways, right, Lord King, come here, this is what you ought to be doing, didn't you? You you attacked the kind of corporate thing as a whole.

Presenter17:35

Well, advertising very often does does lead the way in terms of a company's culture. And British Airways is a great example because Lord King and Sir Colin Marshall

Presenter17:45

Altered completely the culture of an airline that had been a nationalized industry and made it one of the

Presenter17:52

Most successful and most dynamic companies in the world.

Presenter17:57

And if our advertising played a part in that, it made a very important contribution. I think it probably did. Was it inevitable, therefore, that you

Presenter18:07

Became corporately ambitious yourselves, that you were working on the inside of all these big companies and you realized that you could also play that game, you could also form mergers and perform takeovers and so on? I don't I'd like to think it wasn't that. I would like to think it was more rational than that. Our desire to um move onto the world stage, if you like, was bred from nothing more grand than insecurity.

Presenter18:33

Because we had grown to become the

Presenter18:35

the largest agency in Britain by some distance, and we would still occasionally lose a client.

Presenter18:43

On the basis that the advertiser wanted to coordinate his advertising across several countries, if not the whole world.

Presenter18:51

And that if you didn't operate in all

Presenter18:53

60 countries of the world.

Presenter18:54

You were at a disadvantage. But you seemed to get yourself a bad name around that time. Didn't you s people started calling you Snatchit and Snatchit instead of Saatchi and Saatchi? Because we made a lot of acquisitions. Well, we did make a lot of acquisitions and um

Presenter19:08

I think we had to we had to do that in order to establish these networks. So you went international, I think, in'eighty two. You'd gone public in'sety six. By'8y six, you were handling five percent of the world's advertising market.

Speaker 319:16

You got

Speaker 319:21

Get through it.

Presenter19:22

Employing thousands of people, 14,000 people. Something like that, yes. Petty stuff.

Speaker 319:22

Something like that, yeah.

Speaker 319:25

Uh

Maurice Saatchi19:25

Yeah.

Maurice Saatchi19:26

Yeah.

Presenter19:28

Hmm.

Presenter19:29

Stop and pinch yourself sometimes and think, Is this Charles and me here?

Presenter19:33

I don't think I did, actually, because it had been a steady progression. We had.

Presenter19:38

We have been blessed for.

Presenter19:40

At that stage about

Presenter19:43

Um seventeen years of uninterrupted growth, averaging about

Presenter19:50

Thirty three percent.

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A year for seventeen years.

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Echo number five.

Presenter19:56

This is a piece from Falla's Nights in the Gardens of Spain. It's called At Generalifi.

Presenter20:02

And I chose it because, um

Presenter20:04

I don't know another piece of music which is so evocative of

Presenter20:09

Place. If you've visited the Alhambra Gardens, this piece of music conjures up what it's like to be there in an extraordinary way.

Presenter21:17

Atener Alife from Faller's Nights in the Garden of Spain, performed by Arto Rubenstein on piano with the Philadelphia Orchestra, conducted by Eugene Ormondy.

Presenter21:27

I think the um shares in Saatchi and Saatchi went to kind of fifty five or fifty seven pounds each at one point. You also notoriously paid large amounts of money to people to work for you. Is it true that when you wanted someone to work for you you'd park a large red Ferrari outside their door?

Presenter21:44

Well, metaphorically speaking, yes.

Presenter21:47

Only metaphorically, I thought we did it literally. I think on one occasion we did, yes. We have over the years had had um

Presenter21:55

Many brilliant people working for us, and we've been very keen that they should feel very well rewarded.

Presenter22:01

for their talent.

Presenter22:02

So the expansion of Saatchi and Sauchi was swift, as we've said. It was great. It culminated perhaps the high watermark was in nineteen eighty seven when you attempted to take over the Midland Bank. You smile. You laugh. I laugh. Yes. The famous high watermark.

Maurice Saatchi22:18

Yeah.

Presenter22:19

That that was ambition gone crackers, wasn't it? Well, I think people did generally regard us as having um.

Presenter22:27

Finally gone one step too far. Yes, and having become far too big.

Presenter22:33

For our boots. Do you think that's the case now, looking back?

Presenter22:38

Well, I I can see that we weren't perhaps a um

Presenter22:41

Credible purchaser.

Presenter22:43

And the world was very

Presenter22:45

Different then.

Presenter22:46

There is that

Presenter22:47

Famous opening line

Presenter22:49

The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.

Presenter22:54

And the atmosphere of the eighties was so different to today.

Presenter22:58

So

Presenter23:00

Yes, it's gone down in history as the bridge too far for us.

Presenter23:06

But surely if you did go for that bridge too far, and if the share price did plummet.

Presenter23:12

over the years that you were in charge from fifty five quid to two quid.

Presenter23:17

You were in the wrong.

Presenter23:20

Well, I mean th this company has now been functioning for twenty-five years and it was

Presenter23:26

In the stage of recovering from a very hard period, in common, I think, with many companies who found the recession in the latter part of the

Presenter23:35

1980s and early 90s very difficult. So you don't really feel that you were were were

Presenter23:41

Guilty of anything. You believe you should really still be there, do you?

Presenter23:45

I don't think in those terms at all. So what's happened to Search in Search is a tragedy so far as I'm concerned.

Presenter23:52

in in terms of what's happened to the company and the people in it.

Presenter23:57

Record number six.

Presenter23:59

This is a record which drove me mad on an occasion.

Presenter24:03

It's um since Samuel's piano concerto number two.

Presenter24:07

Josephine had gone into hospital for a minor operation.

Presenter24:11

I made the mistake while I was waiting in the room of playing this particular piece of music.

Presenter24:16

And it had the effect of

Presenter24:19

causing me to become very certain that this was to be the thousand to one disaster.

Presenter24:27

in which the anesthetic was wrong or the anaesthetist had.

Presenter24:32

It's central.

Presenter24:33

Anyway, I worked myself up into a terrible state of anxiety, so much so that I determined that I had to go back down to the operating theatre and find out what had happened. I went to the lift, waited for it to come up, and just as I was going to get in, they came out with her.

Presenter24:48

and she was wrapped in a sort of silver foil round her head and was in a very dazed state.

Presenter24:55

And as they were wheeling her along the corridor, I

Presenter24:59

kissed her a lot and told her how much I loved her and

Presenter25:04

And then, um, to my complete horror, as we came to the room, her room, they wheeled the woman on the trolley past.

Presenter25:13

Her room

Presenter25:14

and along to another room.

Presenter25:16

And I realized that I had been

Presenter25:18

Kissing the wrong

Presenter25:20

Woman

Presenter25:21

The wrong patient. It was a moment of pure horror.

Presenter26:27

The beginning of the third movement of Saintson's Concerto No. two in G minor, again performed by Otto Rubinstein, with the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Eugene Ormonde.

Presenter26:37

Your wife is Josephine Hart, her whose first novel was Damage, which was made into a film with Jeremy Irons. She's told interviewers that it was you who made her write. You sort of shut her in a room and said, Get on with it, is that right? Well, Josephine had always wanted to write, and I didn't do any more than encourage her to believe that um she could do it.

Presenter26:58

And you have children?

Presenter27:00

A stepson from Josephine's first marriage, Adam, and our son Edward.

Presenter27:05

And you have three houses, one in London, one in the south of France, one in Sussex. Yes.

Presenter27:11

The garden in Sussex is your pride, I understand.

Presenter27:15

I do like that, yes. Describe it to me. I'm going to describe it again when I come to my luxury, because it is, um, very important to me, and I would need to.

Maurice Saatchi27:22

And I would

Presenter27:24

Have it on my desert island.

Presenter27:26

So, I mean, if you love all of that so and and gardening takes up a tremendous amount of time.

Presenter27:32

Wasn't there a great temptation, um, you know, when the proverbial hit the fan at the turn of the year, wasn't it to just turn your back on all this advertising business and just go and garden? You don't have to work, do you? There was. Um and really the the main motivation for not doing that was that

Speaker 327:43

Yeah.

Maurice Saatchi27:43

Yeah.

Presenter27:50

There were people in the company who I thought had behaved with extraordinary loyalty to me.

Presenter27:56

and clients who had behaved in exactly the same way, and I thought I wanted to respond to that.

Presenter28:03

And my my own personal motivation was

Presenter28:07

related to the name and to the impossibility, as I saw it, of leaving behind in

Presenter28:14

The Wrong Hands.

Presenter28:16

A great

Presenter28:18

Name. I do take some pride, although not sufficient to turn into

Presenter28:23

Boasting, I hope?

Presenter28:25

But I do take some pride in the fact that if you try to reflect upon

Presenter28:29

What British brand names there are?

Presenter28:32

Since the war.

Presenter28:34

All over the world.

Presenter28:36

It's a very, very short list.

Presenter28:38

And it is now a brand name, and I'd like to protect it.

Presenter28:42

Back with number seven.

Presenter28:44

This is a record by Van Morrison called Coney Island. It was first played to me by my brother Philip, who is a musician and a songwriter. He told me he thought the lyrics were wonderful, and I think they are.

Presenter28:55

It's a very simple story of two people walking across Ireland.

Presenter29:00

And as Josephine is Irish and has on many occasions taken me to Ireland,

Presenter29:06

Uh I think of Ireland and the Irish and their legendary ability with

Presenter29:12

words with great admiration.

Presenter29:18

Coney Island.

Speaker 329:28

Try.

Presenter29:29

Back from Diane Patrick.

Presenter29:30

Stopping off at Saint John's Point.

Presenter29:35

By all day birdwatching in the crack is good.

Presenter29:43

Stopped off its trying Ford Locke earlier. Van Morrison with Coney Island.

Presenter29:48

How much would you miss your professional life on a desert island?

Presenter29:52

I'd miss every aspect of my life on Desert Island. I'm sure you'd miss the personal. You really would miss the professional, would you?

Presenter29:58

Yes, I like I like um this world.

Presenter30:02

You quoted the opening line of The Go-Between earlier on, that the past is a foreign country. What about the opening line of your wife's novel?

Presenter30:09

Let me put that to you, uh the opening line of damage.

Maurice Saatchi30:10

I think it's a very good thing.

Presenter30:12

Damaged people are dangerous, they know they can survive.

Presenter30:16

Yeah. Do you think that applies to you?

Presenter30:19

Almost certainly, yes. It applies to many people. I think it's a it's a most brilliant observation of the world. But who are you a danger to, this this damaged advertising executive?

Presenter30:31

Only myself.

Presenter30:32

In what way?

Presenter30:34

Well, uh when we come on to talk about my book, we can discuss the many ways in which individuals are flawed.

Presenter30:43

in their makeup and

Presenter30:45

I'm sure many of those um apply to me.

Presenter30:49

All right. Well, we'll we'll wait for it. We'll have your last record while we wait to hear what the book is.

Maurice Saatchi30:53

Wait.

Presenter30:54

This is a song that Kurt Veil wrote for Lottie Lenya, it's called Surabaya Johnny.

Presenter31:01

This is a song of unrequited love.

Presenter31:06

in which a young woman's lover is sailing away.

Presenter31:10

and leaving her and breaking her heart.

Presenter31:15

And it features as a very happy part of our ritual on Sunday.

Presenter31:22

Because um

Presenter31:24

I think pretty much at the end of every Sunday lunch with our two boys, Josephine likes this to be played, so we do.

Speaker 231:35

So

Maurice Saatchi31:37

Hey you're Johnny.

Maurice Saatchi31:40

Barum peace to Zoro.

Maurice Saatchi31:44

Sooraby, Johnny, me Gott undich lib dir sou.

Speaker 231:50

Uh

Speaker 231:52

Surabaya Johnny.

Speaker 231:56

I barum benichni throw do hast kind heralds johnny.

Presenter32:04

Lotta Lenia singing Kodval's Surabaya Johnny. Now why on earth would Josephine want to play that after Sunday lunch every week? I don't know, it makes us it makes us very happy as a family.

Maurice Saatchi32:12

Okay.

Presenter32:15

Now, tell me of of those eight records, if you could only take one of them. Do you know which one? It would have to be Surabaya Johnny because it's Josephine's favourite.

Maurice Saatchi32:20

You don't have to be

Maurice Saatchi32:22

Because it's

Presenter32:24

Memories of roast beef.

Maurice Saatchi32:24

M is free.

Presenter32:26

Yes, exactly.

Presenter32:28

What about your book now? What is this one book? My book, which I have before me. Uh I was told that I needn't choose Shakespeare because the castaway would get all the works.

Speaker 332:38

Awesome.

Presenter32:39

But I wanted to have this particular volume. It's an eighteen ninety seven.

Presenter32:44

Edition of Hamlet.

Presenter32:47

And I'd like very, very much to have this particular edition with me, because I know every line break on every page in every scene.

Presenter32:58

But you connected it earlier on with flawed personality. Yes, I did, because of course Hamlet's fatal flaw is his.

Presenter33:06

Indecision.

Presenter33:08

And it is endlessly interesting to try to determine

Presenter33:13

The reason why

Presenter33:15

Hamlet, delayed, which is of course the fascination of the play.

Presenter33:20

in carrying out the revenge which his father, his dead father, willed on him.

Presenter33:27

And is there some personal analogy here for this fascination?

Maurice Saatchi33:30

I haven't

Presenter33:32

And we hear this word revenge coming up again, you know.

Presenter33:36

Yes, he

Presenter33:37

Tamlus did in the end, of course, take his revenge, but.

Maurice Saatchi33:37

It almost did in the end.

Presenter33:40

Only at the cost of his own life, so I'd hate to think that was in any way analogous with

Presenter33:45

Anything, but

Presenter33:47

People the world over find Hamlet a gripping character, and I'd I'd like to spend a long time on this island.

Presenter33:58

Trying to understand him better. Now, tell me about this luxury that you've been advertising. It has to do with your garden, you say.

Presenter34:05

Yes, it does, and it would be a way of having my garden with me, with the wonder of new technology. My stepson Adam, ably assisted by my son Edward, who are both computer wizards, would pre programme for me a virtual reality

Presenter34:21

Headset, which would of course have solar-powered batteries, I would be able to.

Presenter34:26

step out onto my virtual reality terrace in Sussex. I would be able to turn the headset round one hundred and eighty degrees and look at the beautiful wall.

Presenter34:38

of my house.

Presenter34:39

and marvel at the inspired plantsmanship which involved juxtaposing Paul's Himalayan musk.

Presenter34:49

with the fading flowers of Wisteria.

Presenter34:53

I would then be able to carry on my walk down to the lake.

Presenter34:57

Get into my virtual reality boat, go across my virtual reality lake and arrive at my virtual reality jetty.

Presenter35:06

Because this was virtual reality, everything would be timed to perfection, and Josephine would have arrived at the jetty at exactly the point that I arrived there in my boat.

Presenter35:15

She would get into the boat and she would lie down.

Presenter35:18

beside me and I would be able to look up at the

Presenter35:23

Blue sky.

Presenter35:25

And it would be the blue sky of Sussex in my virtual reality world, and I would then be able to take off the virtual reality headset.

Presenter35:34

and look up at the sky on my desert island and very happily go to sleep.

Presenter35:40

Happily, but you'd be all alone.

Presenter35:42

Yes, but it would um be almost real.

Presenter35:47

Maurice Saatchi, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs. Thank you.

Speaker 235:58

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