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Desert Island Discs
Presented by Roy Plomley
Journalist and radio critic who pioneered radio criticism and created the series 'Hail Variety'.
Eight records
Hail Variety
The Fingers of Private Spiegel
Meet the Rev
The keepsakes
The luxury
Not recorded.
In conversation
Presenter asks
How could you endure complete loneliness on this island?
I'd try, I'd have to, I'd endure it, but I don't like loneliness. In fact … my whole hobby has been collecting people because of my profession and because it's fascinated me. And that, of course, [is] the people who are associated with the records I shall choose, are to my mind rather more important, in fact, than the music itself.
Presenter asks
You started work as a reporter on a Plymouth paper. Your father was a writer before you, wasn't he?
Yes, he was a solicitor who became an expert on copyright, and he was particularly interested in heraldry, and he wrote a number of books on heraldry, which I am glad to say are still regarded as authoritative.
Presenter asks
Did you take it for granted, as a boy, that you were going to write?
Well, I think I always did. I edited the school magazine and all that sort of thing, and as soon as I'd won a penknife in a Titbits competition and got half a guinea for an article about a walk on Dartmoor, I knew there was no other life.
The recording
Timestamps play the recording from that turn
Gale Pedrick
This download is the only extract the BBC has of this edition of Desert Island Discs. The presenter was Roy Plumley.
Presenter
It is just about forty years, isn't it, Gare?
Gale Pedrick
It is forty years, and they say the first forty years are the hardest.
Presenter
Do her
Gale Pedrick
I gave my first broadcast from Plymouth, from five PY, and that was a a little station in Athenium in Plymouth, and I gave my first talk on Some Giants of Fleet Street. I was a young reporter at the time, never been to Fleet Street in my life.
Gale Pedrick
I just had enough sense to see that radio was going to be something and there were guineas attached to it, and I had this talk broadcast.
Presenter
How could you endure complete loneliness on this island?
Gale Pedrick
I'd try, I'd have to, I'd endure it, but I don't like loneliness. In fact
Gale Pedrick
Some people have said that I have no hobby at all. In truth, my whole hobby has been collecting people because of my profession and because it's fascinated me. And that, of course, the people
Gale Pedrick
who are associated with the records I shall choose, are to my mind rather more important, in fact, than the music itself.
Presenter
Hm. Well the people are more important, but is music important?
Gale Pedrick
In your life? Music is important. It's always been a great part of my life. My mother was a very good violinist, but I never got further than being able to play her accompaniments in public.
Presenter
Where was that?
Gale Pedrick
When that was at home in Plymouth we used to give a tremendous number of concerts round about the hospitals, even in Princetown at Dartmoor, and I remember my dear old stepfather used to say to me, My boy, haven't they suffered enough?
Presenter
You started work as a reporter on a Plymouth paper. Your father was a writer before you, wasn't he, Geo?
Gale Pedrick
Yes, he was a solicitor who became an expert on copyright, and he was particularly interested in heraldry, and he wrote a number of books on heraldry, which I am glad to say are still regarded as authoritative.
Presenter
Did you take it for granted, as a boy, that you were going to write?
Gale Pedrick
Well, I think I always did. I edited the school magazine and all that sort of thing, and as soon as I'd won a a penknife in a titbits competition and got half a guinea for an article about a walk on Dartmoor, I knew there was no other life.
Presenter
Yes. How old were you when you started?
Gale Pedrick
a little short of sixteen.
Presenter
And you were doing everything inquests and police courts and flower shows and funerals?
Gale Pedrick
Yes, the police courts especially.
Presenter
How long did you stay on the Plymouth paper?
Gale Pedrick
Five and a half years.
Presenter
Benwood
Gale Pedrick
And then I went to Manchester, which was a tremendous change going from the rather soft countryside and the people I knew to the north. But in fact I had two of the most happy and exciting years of my life in Manchester.
Presenter
Manchester was a very active theatrical town in those days.
Gale Pedrick
It was. Every new show seemed to start in Manchester. The Cochrane Reviews, the Share of Grace, and Wake Up and Dream with Jesse Matthews and Sally Hale and so on. They started there. But of course to me the great joy was being able to go to the Halley concerts.
Presenter
Yeah.
Gale Pedrick
But that really was something.
Presenter
Once again you were doing all kinds of journalism.
Gale Pedrick
Yes, in fact, I had three nom diplomes at one time. One was Wotan.
Gale Pedrick
I wrote about music and interviewed all the leading musicians who visited the town, and another was Romany, the hiking correspondent, and the third was Buccaneer, the theatre columnist. All for guineas.
Presenter
And when did you come to London to meet the giants of Fleet Street in person at last?
Gale Pedrick
I came to London in in nineteen thirty and went on the Star as a kind of general utility man specializing in the theatre and films and radio and that was thirty odd years ago.
Presenter
You were doing a pioneer job, really, as a radio critic. There wasn't a great deal of
Gale Pedrick
There wasn't at that time a great deal of radio criticism, not of true criticism. There were three or four really well known names, but I was lucky enough to join that rather exclusive little group.
Presenter
There wasn't at that time.
Presenter
Had you started writing for radio yourself?
Gale Pedrick
I started writing for radio, of course, in my early days, and did quite a number of talks not only in the West Country but in the North but so far as any ambitious shows were concerned, that really was five or six years before the war, when the first series I did was Hail Variety.
Presenter
But the s
Presenter
So that was the Pattengale until the war started, Fleet Street and Freelance Radio Job.
Gale Pedrick
Yes. Then I joined the Queen's Royal Regiment and met a great number of interesting people there, particularly Peter Churchill, I remember, who was in the same platoon as I was, who became famous as a resistance chap during the war.
Presenter
And eventually you began to work in entertainment.
Gale Pedrick
Well eventually after quite a long time I found myself with a staff job in Western Command and because of my interest in entertainment I got permission to form the Western Command Symphony Orchestra which was a really pretty fine body of musicians because we had a number of the Halley people with us and I also formed the Western Command Opera Company and that got me into a bit of trouble because we toured Paliacci throughout the command for about six weeks and I had a very haughty question asked in Parliament, who is this Major so-and-so who is carting a hundred soldiers and ATS throughout the whole of the command at great expense to play an Italian opera?
Presenter
Yeah.
Gale Pedrick
But of course I had a sympathetic general, and as we made many thousands of pounds for army charities, we got away with it. But it was rather strange, I must say, that within two months I found myself flying to North Africa.
Presenter
What
Gale Pedrick
I don't know if there's any connection.
Presenter
He went to North Africa to start a radio station in
Gale Pedrick
Yes, my brief was to start the Forces Broadcasting Service in North Africa for the benefit of our troops there. And we started under considerable difficulties, but by a monumental bending of the rules and writing down six lorries instead of two transmitters and that sort of thing, we eventually got on the air on New Year's Eve, nineteen forty-three.
Presenter
And we eventually
Gale Pedrick
And we eventually started a station for the Eighth Army, which the Eighth Army regarded as their own personal property. And I remember playing in a monastery garden, actually in a monastery garden, which I think must be the first and only time it's happened.
Presenter
And eventually as a colonel you were put in charge of broadcasting for the whole army.
Gale Pedrick
Yes, I I came back to the war office just a few months before the end of the war to do that.
Presenter
Yes. And when the war was over?
Gale Pedrick
But when the war was over, I I went back to Free Street for just a year, and then the BBC paid me the compliment of asking me to be their first script editor. Uh during the war a tremendous number of scripts had come in and I was faced with the job of dealing with thousands and thousands of these scripts. Uh and in the time I was there I must have interviewed uh between two and three thousand would-be writers.
Gale Pedrick
I stayed there five and a half years.
Presenter
And since then you've been a freelancer? Yes. Now you've written literally thousands of scripts.
Gale Pedrick
Well, I I don't know whether it's anything really to be proud of, because quantity doesn't always mean quality, but you're quite right, I have.
Presenter
One of your plays has become a radio classic, The Fingers of Private Spiegel. How many times has that been broadcast?
Gale Pedrick
That was done seven or eight times in Britain and a number of times overseas.
Presenter
Back in the late forties a series in which I took a great personal interest was was Meet the Riv. I believe I played Hugh Morton's Batman on about a hundred occasions on radio and television. We used to marvel how you found a brand new plot for us every week.
Gale Pedrick
Yeah.
Gale Pedrick
Well, somehow I managed to do it, but I was determined that Father Brown shouldn't be the only closeman detective.
Presenter
You've also been radio's historian in these Radio Times, which ran for several years.
Gale Pedrick
Yes, that was an extremely interesting series to do. We ran that for a great many years, and I think we did interviews with four hundred and fifty famous people in that.
Presenter
And you've done many biographical programmes.
Gale Pedrick
Well, a great many, and I I'm only sorry that some, like Noel Gay and uh Ivanovello and Vic Oliver and so on, were
Gale Pedrick
About people who are no longer with us.
Presenter
Then some of them had to be written very quickly.
Gale Pedrick
with very short notice, sometimes at less than twenty-four hours notice for an hour share.
Presenter
And now your radio's champion listener, having to listen to practically everything to prepare Pick of the Week.
Gale Pedrick
Well, I do in fact have to listen probably more than anybody else in this country, but I've got uh two or three television sets and seven or eight transistors scattered about in various parts of London and the country. And just to let you into one trade secret, of course it's impossible to listen for four hundred hours a week.
Presenter
Yeah.
Gale Pedrick
But anything that I think is promising I do have recorded off transmission and then can listen to when I have time.
Presenter
Now we've talked about your large and distinguished output for radio. You've done a lot for television too, haven't you?
Gale Pedrick
Yes. Particularly uh This Is Your Life is the programme that is most associated with me, I think. I did the first forty programmes of This Is Your Life when it was started in this country.
Presenter
And books. You've recently published a book about one of your own family.
Gale Pedrick
Yes, a great-uncle of mine, who was a very well-known Cornish artist, who has a picture in fact hanging in the National Portrait Gallery and another one in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, which is quite a distinction for an Englishman, lived with Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, for about twenty years in his home in Cheney Walk. I was lucky enough to come across between 150 and 200 letters which Rossetti had written to my great-uncle, and that formed the basis of the book.
Presenter
The books of yours.
Gale Pedrick
Um well, I I had the temerity to write a book about writing for radio and for television, and I also wrote the first book of the Steptoe stories to be published.
Presenter
Mm-hmm. And for the future, have you any one big ambition, Gil?
Gale Pedrick
Well, I'd like to write a good play. My ambition is to do something once. I wrote a book. Well, that's fine. I don't particularly want to write another book. And I've written
Gale Pedrick
a reasonably successful film and I don't want to do another, but I would like to write a good play.
Presenter asks
And when did you come to London to meet the giants of Fleet Street in person at last?
I came to London in nineteen thirty and went on the Star as a kind of general utility man specializing in the theatre and films and radio and that was thirty odd years ago.
Presenter asks
And for the future, have you any one big ambition?
Well, I'd like to write a good play. My ambition is to do something once. I wrote a book. Well, that's fine. I don't particularly want to write another book. And I've written a reasonably successful film and I don't want to do another, but I would like to write a good play.
“Some people have said that I have no hobby at all. In truth, my whole hobby has been collecting people because of my profession and because it's fascinated me.”
“We used to marvel how you found a brand new plot for us every week.”
“I'd like to write a good play. My ambition is to do something once. I wrote a book. Well, that's fine. I don't particularly want to write another book. And I've written a reasonably successful film and I don't want to do another, but I would like to write a good play.”