Peter Nichols

Presenter0:00

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.

Presenter0:08

The programme was originally broadcast in the year two thousand, and the presenter.

Speaker 30:12

was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:31

My Costaway this week is a playwright. His own experiences have often formed the basis of his work, most notably in A Day in the Death of Joe Egg, about a couple with a severely handicapped child, and in Privates on Parade, a musical about the entertainment corps in Malaya just after World War Two. These and his other successes, the National Health, Poppy, and Passion Play, were all produced in a glorious fifteen-year period from the sixties into the early 80s. But their author then fell out of love with the theatre, tried to write novels, failed, and has never enjoyed a return to popularity until now. Those earlier plays are being revived, and the man who wrote them, sometimes called awkward or self-destructive, is philosophical. He quotes Raymond Chandler: Don't get complicated, you get complicated, you get sad, you get sad, your luck goes. He is Peter Nichols. Your luck went, but it's come back again, really, hasn't it, Peter?

Peter Nichols1:25

Yes, largely because of a director, which is often the way with a playwright. You know, you you're dependent to some extent on people wanting to do your stuff. And this time it was Michael Grandich who decided he'd like to do it when the Don Mar asked him if he'd would do a production. He said yes, I'd like to do passion play.

Presenter1:44

It's a kind of fickle business, huh?

Peter Nichols1:46

It is a fickle business, yes, and one over which you have very little control.

Presenter1:51

It's quite a range, though, your work, as I was saying in the introduction there, from from Joe Egg to Privates on Parade. Have you always written autobiographically? Is that your main inspiration?

Peter Nichols2:01

Perhaps it's true to say that most writers write autobiographically, but I don't dress it up as much, and my brother said to me, I don't mind your writing about the family, but couldn't you disguise them a bit more?

Presenter2:13

Hmm. That's the problem, isn't it? They must be aware it must make it a bit uneasy with friends and relations because you're always the observer as well as the participant.

Peter Nichols2:22

Yes. My mother uh used to get very annoyed about it and when she came to Born in the Gardens, Beryl Reid, who was playing the mother, came across to me in the party afterwards and said, Your mother's over there saying she is not represented in this play. I said, Oh, well that's what I told her and uh it's true actually. Um but she says she's going everywhere repeating it to everyone. I am not represented in this play.

Presenter2:46

We'll come to the the detail of your family life and how you've mirrored it um later on. But Privates on Parade, of course, which was your hit musical, which was made into a film with Dennis Quilley and John Cleese, that was directly from your own experience the concert party, as I say, in Malaya, just after the war. With some incredible, extraordinary talent you were out there, weren't you?

Peter Nichols3:05

Kenneth Williams, Stanley Baxter, John Schlesinger, who was then a conjurer. I mean, I think this is a measure of how.

Peter Nichols3:11

Autobiography doesn't necessarily come into it because Stanley told me he went to see Privates in fear and trembling and he said I came away very disappointed because it actually wasn't about us at all, was it?

Presenter3:23

But what it was was a mixture of comedy and pathos. It was both moving and hilarious. And that's really your recipe, isn't it? That that you are often comic in style, but fundamentally the content.

Presenter3:37

Mazzin Joe Egg is is incredibly serious.

Peter Nichols3:41

Yeah, well, I suppose laughing's a way of getting through.

Presenter3:44

Is it is that autobiographical too? Is that how you've got through your difficult times?

Peter Nichols3:48

Yes, I do think that's true. Yes. We've now got five grandchildren and we've started again doing with the babies the same technique as we did with the handicapped child. We put words into their mouths as we had to do with Abigail because she couldn't say anything. So we do it the way people do with their cats or pets, you know. So that I think this kind of jokey way of talking helped us a lot.

Presenter4:13

I want to talk to you some more about that, but let's have your first record on this desert island. What is it?

Peter Nichols4:17

Well, it's Fred Astair. I remember watching him doing Dancing Man, and I looked up at my wife, and we were both in tears. And it wasn't because it was sad, it was because it was beautiful. So here he is singing No Strings.

Speaker 34:34

I wake up every morning with a smile on my face, and everything in its place as it should be.

Speaker 34:43

I start out every morning just free air

Peter Nichols4:44

Yeah.

Speaker 34:46

The breeze my cares upon the shelf Because I find myself With no strings and no connection, No ties to my affections I'm fancy free and free for any

Presenter5:02

Fred Astaire with Leo Reisman and his orchestra singing No Strings, and and memories Peter Nichols of Irving Berlin, I gather.

Peter Nichols5:08

During the war, when I was a schoolboy, I walked down a few hundred yards to the Victoria rooms to see this is the army. And that was my first experience of an American musical. And then they just said, and now, ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Irving Boleyn. And the curtain went up and there was this little man squeaking in this funny little voice.

Peter Nichols5:29

I saw him.

Presenter5:30

So musicals were were very much what informed you as a boy. O other things too? Pantos?

Peter Nichols5:36

Pantos, circuses, films of course, and uh

Peter Nichols5:41

Dance bands

Presenter5:42

It was the show that you liked. Was it was performance? It wasn't sort of

Peter Nichols5:45

It wasn't sort of that's right. An Illusionist, you know, big conjuring show, so I loved Illusionist.

Presenter5:52

And a lot of humour in it all as well, which is also what appealed to you. And yet, if one reads what you've written about your early life, and you've done an autobiography over the years and so on.

Presenter6:01

It doesn't sound as if home was a bundle of fun, and and your play, certainly, Forget Me Not Lane, the kind of voyage round your father, portrays him as really rather a a Victorian figure.

Peter Nichols6:12

He was a Victorian figure, teetotal, non-swearing, non-smoking. I used to dread passing a group of, say, builders who might use such a word as ruddy, and my father would round on them and say, don't use that sort of language when I'm here with my wife. He was a very prim Victorian figure, but also a lavish and extraordinary comic.

Presenter6:36

So he didn't write, he didn't that's not where you got it from, but somehow

Presenter6:40

No, there was no l

Peter Nichols6:41

No, there was no literature in our family really. I think Dad read one book, which was Don Bradman's My Cricketing Days. But apart from that, I don't think there were there were a few books up in the attic, but I wasn't guided in any way.

Presenter6:54

Cool. Tell me about that one.

Peter Nichols6:55

Well, this is really about Sidney Becher, who I think is a great artist and was.

Peter Nichols7:01

spotted in an extraordinarily prescient way by the conductor Ernst Ansomé in 1919 when he was playing in London and Ansomé said this young man may be playing the way the world will one day follow and I think that's the most extraordinarily prescient thing to have said because after all we've had jazz, swing, rock and roll, they all came out of that sort of music and in this case he's playing Scott Joplin's Maple Leaf Rag.

Peter Nichols7:56

Grace under fire, I think what could cover up.

Presenter7:59

Scott Joplin's Maple Leaf React, played by Sidney Becher and his New Orleans feet warmers. Um you went on stage yourself in the first place, didn't you, Peter Nichols? What was your finest hour?

Peter Nichols8:10

That would be hard to say. I think Dracula was probably the nadia. And I can remember sitting in the dressing room and just preparing to go into the wings to stand above a smoke box and collect enough smoke to walk onto the stage in my cloak and then release it. And I can remember sitting in the dressing room and hearing over the tannoy the laughter of my friend Phila de Law. And I thought she's laughing even before I come on.

Presenter8:38

I read in in one article about you um something that makes you sound slightly unusual. Apparently you had two ambitions. One was to get a play performed and the other was to to get married, which is absolutely fine, except you were thirty two at the time, so it makes you either sound like a a late developer or pretty desperate anyway.

Peter Nichols8:55

I was and am a late developer. I think almost everything's happened late. I made a resolution that year.

Peter Nichols9:02

that I would get a play on

Peter Nichols9:04

and get married. I had no prospect of either. I didn't know who I was going to marry. I didn't know how I was going to get a play on, but they both happened.

Presenter9:12

And she was practically the girl who'd lived next door all your life, really, was she Thelma?

Peter Nichols9:16

She's gone out with my brother before me, but my brother was pinched by a friend she brought along on a date. And the friend said, Who's that smashing boy? and she said, Well, that's Jeff Nichols. And Jeff Nichols eventually became the leader of the Avon Cities jazz band and so on.

Presenter9:34

And his brother didn't do too badly either.

Peter Nichols9:35

No, he didn't do it to that.

Presenter9:36

Is that the next

Presenter9:37

But uh tell me, I mean, we're back to the autobiographical stuff, but you were both schoolteachers at the time, you and Thelma, wh when you were married. The father in in Joe Egg is is is very rueful about the sex life he missed out on as a young man. In fact, I think the Lord Chamberlain, who tried to get the play rewritten in all sorts of places, said that it was obviously written by an oversexed Bristol schoolteacher. So there's quite a bit of view in there, isn't it?

Peter Nichols10:01

You know, if you talk to anyone of my age, and I suppose you have to come into this question of what sex was all about, but I think what mystifies me a little bit is how when I went away, I wasn't like all those people you see in documentaries saying, Oh, we didn't know what it was all about, you know, Well into the 50s. I knew what it was all about, and I went after all away at the age of 18 because I was called up and went to India and then to Singapore. So I was freed from all those British restrictions that bugged everybody else well into the 50s.

Presenter10:32

So like one of the characters in Private on Parade you you lost your virginity in Malaya or

Peter Nichols10:37

No, I didn't. No, that's the whole point. I didn't lose. I should have done. No, it took me a very, very long time before I finally managed to lose mine.

Presenter10:45

And it took you a very, very long time before you managed to write a play, but you you did in the end, and and you won a competition with it. That's how you got to fulfil that ambition, isn't it?

Peter Nichols10:54

BBC West Region, a competition they were having for playwriting and I had never seen a television play at that point. In fact, I'd never seen television. What year was this then? Oh, 58, 59. I was very snobbish about it. I think everybody was snobbish about television. There's an old joke. Because the aerials in those days were shaped like H's. We used to say that people who dropped their H's put them above their houses.

Presenter11:21

Ha how snobbish. Terribly snobbish. But anyway, in the end you did it.

Peter Nichols11:22

But anyway

Presenter11:24

You did it and you won. But what you really wanted

Peter Nichols11:24

It is engineered.

Presenter11:27

Was the theatre. What you really wanted was a live audience, wasn't it? That's always been the most important thing to you. Why? Why?

Peter Nichols11:34

Yes, that's right. Yes, yes. I don't know why. Something e entered me about theatre that uh is still there and I can't get rid of, almost like a recurrent rash.

Presenter11:45

And it's something to do with that engagement with the audience, isn't it? It's the kind of breaching of the fourth wall, I think, is the phrase that has been used about what you've done. And certainly you've been very influential. I think Michael Freyne has said exactly that, how much you influenced him in that somehow not regarding the audience as just sitting there reacting, but

Peter Nichols11:53

What you?

Speaker 111:53

And certainly

Presenter12:03

You have to get across and and involve them.

Peter Nichols12:06

Yes, I don't think of them as passive telewatchers. I think of them as people who can be embarrassed, made to laugh, and then choke back their laughter as much as to say, What the hell am I laughing at?

Presenter12:18

Record number three.

Peter Nichols12:19

This is Ponchinella. Stravinsky wrote this ballet music. It's lovely. It's the beginning of Stravinsky's neoclassical period.

Presenter13:25

The overture from Stravinsky's Ballet Pulcinella, played by the City of London Sinfonia, conducted by Richard Hickox. So, Peter Nicholls, A Day in the Death of Joe Egg was written. You were nearly forty and you had had a severely brain damaged child, yourself, Abigail, and the play is about how the parents cope or don't cope.

Presenter13:45

How old was was your daughter, Abigail, when you wrote it?

Peter Nichols13:49

She was about six, I suppose, because it took actually quite a long time to get that play right. Uh it was a very very descriptive, naturalistic play.

Peter Nichols14:00

And then gradually it evolved and I realized I couldn't write it properly as long as it was about me and us, so I wrote it about two other people. So the characters in the play are actually based on two completely other people.

Presenter14:13

But it was also, of course, very much about you, isn't it, and and how you cope.

Peter Nichols14:17

Oh, yeah. People think: oh, yes, isn't it wonderfully descriptive of how you might deal with a handicap child? But in fact, it's a very grotesque way of dealing with a handicap child. I mean, to actually put words into her mouth and talk about her as though she's an animal.

Presenter14:30

Which is what you say you're now doing with your baby grandchildren?

Peter Nichols14:32

Yes, exactly. And it's it's a it's a sort of humanizing thing. I mean, if the child can't do anything, it's just as well to uh pretend she can. And so

Speaker 314:41

Uh

Presenter14:41

And

Peter Nichols14:42

Ours became a kind of ironic joke. That was the image that began.

Presenter14:47

And you had the daughter on stage. You did shock and embarrass your audience because the daughter did have epileptic fits in full view.

Peter Nichols14:56

Joegg was one of the last plays that the Lord Chamberlain had jurisdiction over. He could have banned it.

Peter Nichols15:02

So, Michael Blake Moore, the director, and I had to talk to them about the various things they objected to. And apart from all the swearing and sex and stuff, they objected to the fact that she was having fits. And they said, I mean, do we have to show the child? Couldn't she be offstage? This would be like, you know, a 19th-century novel, putting the lunatic back in the West Wing, you know, at Grace Pool or something, and hearing all these shouts. And then he said.

Presenter15:26

Yeah.

Peter Nichols15:28

Yes, he did. He did. He said, yes, couldn't we have a sort of Charlie McCarthy kind of thing?

Presenter15:33

And the the there is a discussion in the play about putting the child, Jo, Josephine, i in a home, and the father contemplates suffocating her. He in fact, he pretends at one point, doesn't he, that he has killed her upstairs.

Presenter15:48

How close

Presenter15:49

Did you come to that kind of thing in your own life when you were in the middle of the morning?

Peter Nichols15:53

Well, I think we both came pretty close to it. It would have been both easy and difficult to withhold the sedation.

Peter Nichols16:02

which would have meant that she died of epilepsy.

Peter Nichols16:05

But you get into one of these

Peter Nichols16:07

Traps where you give her sedative to stop the epilepsy and then every every time she approaches au grandmale you have to give more sedative and then of course the child is so sedated that she can't cope with the mental disturbance anyway. So you're in one of these traps and you think, well, is this really a life?

Presenter16:28

What happened in the end?

Peter Nichols16:29

Ah, she died when she was about eleven.

Peter Nichols16:32

I think it was eleven, ten or eleven. I mean, she just had a series of illnesses and got worse and worse and worse, really, and just was being kept alive by artificial means. And here we have the obverse side of of medicine, which is um

Peter Nichols16:45

You know, it's fine that it helps us to do all these things, but when it helps t to keep alive a child who should really have died, and if we had the moral courage, we would have said, let her die.

Presenter16:56

Hmm.

Presenter16:57

Of course, the play itself, despite all sorts of people's concerns about it, including your agent and all sorts of West End managers, was a huge success. And it eventually went to Broadway and it was made into a film.

Presenter17:10

Um Janet Sussman and Alan Bates.

Presenter17:13

I wonder, you know, does the irony of that success and it was the making, the beginning of the making of you, does it does it does it haunt you at all that this great tragedy in your and Thelma's lives was really

Peter Nichols17:24

Well it was um yes, it's an irony. Uh m my my uh comment about it in my memoirs is um that on the first night in New York when Albert Finney was playing it and all the Connicenti and all the s furs and diamonds turned out to welcome it, the producer's wife gave him a dozen gold eggs from Tiffany's. And I said it's a it was strange to think of

Peter Nichols17:47

the Bristol Hospital and the goose who had laid them.

Presenter17:51

Next piece of music, number four.

Peter Nichols17:54

This is children's voices singing beautiful carol from Benjamin Britton's Ceremony of Carols. There is no rose of such there too. It represents the beautiful simplicity and innocence of children's voices and it's another irony really I think which is that children who are grubby, messy, anything but innocent are represented by adults like Benjamin Britton as being beautiful and angelic creatures.

Presenter18:22

There is no laws of such control as is the laws that benejez war.

Presenter18:34

Hallelujah

Presenter18:37

I am

Presenter18:42

In this rose contained walls Heaven and earth in little spray.

Presenter18:53

Let's be around.

Presenter19:00

I that rose we may well see any one golden presence free.

Speaker 319:04

Is any one good in a person?

Presenter19:14

Yeah.

Presenter19:17

There Is No Rose from Benjamin Britton's Ceremony of Carols, recorded in the chapel of St John's College, Cambridge, by its choir, directed by George Guest. So the golden years began, Peter, with your plays being produced at the RSC and at the National I think you got Best Play Awards for the National Health and Passion Play, Best Musical for Poppy and so on.

Presenter19:38

Tell me about, first of all, at the National. You must have worked i with or under or guided by Olivier. What did you think of him?

Peter Nichols19:45

Well, he didn't really have a direct uh play a direct part in any of my productions, but he didn't like the National Health and he didn't want it to be done because Olivia thought it was disgusting to be representing real illness on the stage of the National Health. You know, he had a grand idea of theatre, which I shared with him.

Peter Nichols20:04

He was he was two things, it seemed to me. He was both a terrific ruffian and a very posh, so that I mean Henry the Fifth side of him, the part that played Kings, was also

Presenter20:12

Henry V side.

Peter Nichols20:17

also contained Archie Rice, you know, and I loved him for that.

Presenter20:21

Hm. But there was also something else about his dislike of the National Health, wasn't there? Weren't there kind of shades of racism in his objections?

Peter Nichols20:29

Well, that was really directed at the actors. He s he said, um how we when we were talking about casting the um the parts that were were black nurses and doctors and so on. And um he he said um

Peter Nichols20:42

Much as I love our coloured brethren, I am no great admirer of their histrionic ability. Do you think Joan could black up?

Peter Nichols20:52

He actually wanted.

Peter Nichols20:53

Turn to blackout.

Peter Nichols20:55

Well, I mean, you know, the I it was rather like my father who in his generation used to do a monologue called Sergeant Solomon Isaac Stein. There was nothing really racist about this. This was the understanding of their generation. And my father was caught out when when they started throwing pennies and he was told that he was doing it at a Jewish dinner.

Speaker 120:55

You know the idea.

Presenter21:16

So anyway, you won, as I say, Best Play Award for the National Health and and then later on for Passion Play. Passion Play produced in I think 81, now having a revival.

Speaker 121:24

Mm-hmm.

Presenter21:26

It's a study in adultery that must have been painful to write or hurtful even.

Peter Nichols21:31

Well, it was uh sort of uh easy to write once I had the idea about betrayal. In betrayal.

Peter Nichols21:39

In the betrayal of someone you know intimately

Peter Nichols21:42

you get to the point where you're not quite sure which lies you've revealed and which you haven't and which is your real self and which is not and I think it's that that rings the bell with the audience.

Presenter21:53

But this this is a piece of music, I think, your next one, which is uh which actually is uh played with passion play, isn't it?

Peter Nichols21:59

Yes, this is uh the close of Act One.

Peter Nichols22:03

And it's from Mozart Requiem. And this is the a passage that is a fugal passage, quam ole mabrahe, which ends Act I, and the actors speak a correspondence and telephone calls against the fugue.

Presenter23:11

The fugue at the end of the hostias from Mozart's Requiem in D minor, K six two six, performed by the John Aldous Choir with the English Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Daniel Barrenboim.

Presenter23:22

So, Poppy, your musical for the RSC, a critique of the Empire set in the Opium Wars, one best musical.

Presenter23:28

And just at that point, Peter, you you retired from town to the country, from plays to novels. You you turned your back on the theatre. I have to say it does read, however many ways you try to look at it, like complete professional suicide.

Peter Nichols23:43

It was a period when I I'd got very unhappy about what the theatre could do. And I had yeah it was artistic as much as anything. Um God, that awful word. It was you get so intrigued by the mechanism of theatre that eventually I got to think that I was dealing with that only. And really, you know.

Presenter24:03

Hmm.

Peter Nichols24:05

You want to tell stories, that's what you want to do. So I I got away and tried to write a novel.

Presenter24:06

Do so I

Presenter24:08

But there was a very public falling out with Terry Hans, wasn't it? He called you a destructive genius, which I quoted earlier on. You know, it all got

Presenter24:17

Rather out of hand, isn't it? And you began to sound really very resentful.

Peter Nichols24:21

It was a row, it was a genuine artistic disagreement. He saw Poppy as a a grand musical, and I saw it as a small scale pastiche of the pantomimes I had loved as a child. Nothing to do with Terry. We we correspond and we talk to each other and we're perfectly amiable now. But at the time it was a bit sore.

Presenter24:40

And then it all seems to have got worse because you've you've written uh in your journal that that um you felt you were raw with the open sores of envy.

Presenter24:49

Huge jealousies suddenly beginning to come through, not least of course in your next play, which was uh called A Piece of My Mind which had this character in it called Miles Whittier.

Presenter24:59

Pretty thinly disguised Tom Stoppard. So where's all that jealousy come from?

Peter Nichols24:59

But she's thinly

Peter Nichols25:03

Well, I don't know about thinly disguised. I think he was an amalgam of various people and really a fantasy figure. The fact that a lot of my fantasies have since happened to Tom is a question of life imitating art.

Peter Nichols25:17

There was hardly anything I could I could imagine about him that didn't finally come true.

Peter Nichols25:23

He hasn't yet become king, but uh he's close.

Presenter25:27

Was it only him you were jealous of? No, it was the condition of envy. But do you still feel it? Does it go on? Is it a condition that you can't get rid of?

Peter Nichols25:28

No, no, no, no.

Peter Nichols25:35

I had to sort of solve it in myself, and had some treatment for it.

Peter Nichols25:40

Treatment for envy. I mean, it is an envy tablets. You know, well you have what you do really is you have antidepressant. I do feel it, yes, I do feel it very strongly, but I think it's a spur. I think it's not entirely negative. You say, He's doing that, I can do it too.

Peter Nichols25:57

Record number six.

Peter Nichols26:00

Well, this is a a recent arrival on my musical scene. It was when my wife and I were staying with Hal Prince and his wife in in Miami. And I heard on the radio one morning this rather marvellous rap record, and it's a lovely parody of life in New York for the posh people.

Speaker 126:21

So anyway, now hear the sound of the very best rapper from miles around. Yes, I'm the fellow who's where it's at. There's absolutely no denying that. Yes, I'm the apex, I'm the best. I'm considerably better than all the rest. The acne, the zenith, the tippist to the top. The Naples Ultra, the hippost of the hop. The summit, the pinnacle, the highest of the high. The apogee of rappers. That's I.

Presenter26:49

Part of classical rap performed by Professor Peter Schickler with Grandmaster Flabb and the Hoople Funk Harmonic conducted by Newton Whelan.

Presenter26:58

You famously wrote Peter Nichols the rhyme of the ancient dramatist to Richard Eyre when he was running the National. Let me quote a bit. What say you to revival then? Do you want to see me beg? So you've done old Bonds and Priestleys, what about Joe Egg? and so on. And it didn't work then in the early 90s, but it's working now and it's going down well. What's changed? What's different?

Peter Nichols27:20

I don't know, it's just sheer chance. And I think plays, novels, maybe even paintings, have their time.

Peter Nichols27:27

And this is a very welcome revival, though of course what I really would like is that they should do some of my new plays that I've written in the last fifteen years.

Presenter27:35

So how many of these um here's some I've written earlier have you got on the shelf there?

Peter Nichols27:40

Yeah.

Peter Nichols27:41

It's probably getting on for ten.

Presenter27:44

But do you have a theory? Where do you have a theory where they come from?

Peter Nichols27:47

I think in terms of where it comes from, they're sort of chosen for you. And a certain amount of light is going to fall on certain

Peter Nichols27:57

Subjects, certain stories. It reminds me a little bit of that brilliant film, Miracle in Milan, by Vittorio De Sica. Near the beginning, is a scene in a sort of shanty town in Milan, very cold, snow falling, dark, and all the poor people are living there. And every now and then comes a little shaft of sunshine, which falls like a spotlight on a certain point. And all these cold poor people run into this spotlight and stand there, singing and rubbing themselves and enjoying and basking in the sunlight. Then it all goes out.

Peter Nichols28:32

And they go, oh.

Peter Nichols28:34

And then the spotlight comes on somewhere else and they rush over there. And it seems to me, life's a lot like that.

Presenter28:41

But you've had your share of shafts of sunlight.

Peter Nichols28:43

Yes, I have. Yes, more than my share. I've been very lucky.

Presenter28:47

Record numbers

Peter Nichols28:47

Yeah.

Presenter28:48

Yeah.

Peter Nichols28:48

My phone rang one day and I answered it and a voice said, Hello, Peter Nichols, Hoagy Carmichael speaking. And I thought, my God, British Telecom have really got their wires crossed now. And it turned out it was Hogey Carmichael's son. And he had been put on to me by Michael Blakemore because he wanted a musical, a stage musical, made of his father's songs. So he commissioned me to write this

Peter Nichols29:15

Musical. And when I was over in New York recently, we visited his house in upstate New York.

Peter Nichols29:21

And I was sitting there talking to him, and he said, By the way, you're sitting in the original rocking chair.

Speaker 129:27

She

Speaker 129:28

Into my

Peter Nichols29:29

Right.

Peter Nichols29:34

Cheers.

Peter Nichols29:42

Mm

Presenter29:53

Hogey Carmichael and Rockin' Chair. So you get cast on a desert island, Peter. This one's a soliloquy.

Presenter29:59

Any dramatic potential in it, do you think?

Peter Nichols30:02

Um

Peter Nichols30:06

I uh I don't think I'll be very happy if that's what you're asking.

Peter Nichols30:10

Um

Peter Nichols30:11

I'll have the Shakespeare, won't I? That'll be nice,'cause I can shout it aloud. Without embarrassment.

Peter Nichols30:19

It would be nice to have.

Peter Nichols30:21

Some accompaniment, I suppose, to that.

Peter Nichols30:23

To remember too the traumatic, wonderful, ecstatic experience of first seeing the film of Henry V. We're now back to Lawrence Olivia again. It's quite hard to remember that this was really quite contemporary for people of my age. I was 18 when the war ended and the invasion of Normandy was happening.

Peter Nichols30:44

So then Agincourt and Henry V was the most marvellous propaganda film and

Peter Nichols30:50

I remember seeing it and just my hair standing on end, and it still does actually, whenever I hear Olivia's extraordinary rendering of those speeches, he was still doing it when I met him in a way. I mean, he would start on a story and suddenly plunge into one of these anecdotes, you know, this day is called England and St. John, you know, it's wonderful. And I'd I'd be doing that if I were on the island and I'd want William Walton's music for it.

Presenter32:14

Opening of Charge and Battle from William Walton's Henry V. Suite with the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by the composer himself. So if you could only take one of those eight records, Peter, which one would you take?

Peter Nichols32:24

It will be the the Mozart Raquen because of that.

Peter Nichols32:27

This is something that's said in person play.

Peter Nichols32:29

where the wife says a hundred people singing together is the nearest me we may ever come to heaven on earth.

Presenter32:35

What about your book?

Peter Nichols32:37

I think I want to take

Peter Nichols32:40

My Diary

Peter Nichols32:41

which I've been writing since I was about eighteen. And uh it sounds cocky, but it's not because of its literary quality, it's simply because I could relive much of my life. So I'll I'll be there starting from nineteen forty five and and reading it all through.

Presenter32:55

What about your luxury, then?

Peter Nichols32:57

Can you have a a tower and a telescope?

Presenter33:00

Sounds good. The

Peter Nichols33:01

Uh

Presenter33:01

Uh

Peter Nichols33:01

Is a bit practical to me.

Peter Nichols33:03

Well, the other one I was going to ask was if I can't have a tower and a telescope to look out over.

Peter Nichols33:07

for a rescuer, then I'll have a cyanide tablet,'cause I don't think I could I mean, when I finish the Diary and the Shakespeare and the Bible and listening to those records till I drop, I'd want to help myself out. I don't know. I can't think of anything sweet and lovely except a full-size snooker table with all the apparatus.

Presenter33:26

What rapture is is this?

Peter Nichols33:27

Well, I you said it sounds a bit practical.

Presenter33:27

Well I you said it

Presenter33:30

No, well the tower but the cyanide pill we can of course supply. I mean you you you think you might want to cease upon the midnight hour.

Peter Nichols33:34

Yeah.

Peter Nichols33:37

Mm, well, I think so. I I'm not very good at being on my own with no chance of seeing anybody else coming and I'm I you know, would want to

Peter Nichols33:47

Find human society pretty soon.

Presenter33:50

Peter Nicholls, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs.

Presenter34:02

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