Mark Tully

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 two thousand and three, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:23

My Castaway this week is a broadcaster. Born in Calcutta sixty seven years ago, he was brought up in strict colonial style before being packed off to public school in England and to Cambridge University.

Presenter0:34

He thought about becoming a priest, but abandoned the idea when he was told that he seemed more at home in the pub than in the pulpit. Then, having recited Little Miss Moffat in Hindi to a B B C appointments board, he found himself back in the land of his birth, eventually as head of the B B C's Bureau there.

Presenter0:51

His became the voice of India, one which understood its vast complications and reported with compassion and accuracy on the assassinations of both Indira and Rajiv Gandhi, the Bhopal disaster, and the storming of the Golden Temple of Ambritsa.

Presenter1:06

Eventually, after nearly thirty years in the job, he fell out with the BBC, or rather with its Director General John Burt, and resigned his stewardship of Indian affairs. But he continues to write books about the country he loves, and his voice can now be heard back on the BBC presenting the Sunday morning radio programme Something Understood. India, he says, has made me. In a funny way, I belong to it. He is Mark Tully. And indeed, nine years after you resigned from the BBC, Mark, you're still there. I mean, you're never going to leave it, are you?

Mark Tully1:37

Well, I never like to say never, Sue, because I have this sort of I'm a bit superstitious and uh I feel if you say never then the next thing which happens is for some reason or other you have to leave. But uh I I feel absolutely at home there and I have no plans to leave, I think, with the

Presenter1:53

How Indian is your life there in terms of your everyday affairs, in terms of what you eat or how you dress or how you live?

Mark Tully2:02

Well, it's very y really it's quite Indian. I I wear Indian clothes in the summer in in the evening simply because uh they're a lot more comfortable than this sort of shirt and tie which I'm wearing now in front of you. Of course I eat Indian food very regularly. I should think we have

Mark Tully2:17

More than uh fifty per cent of our meals are are Indian food, and when you travel, of course, you eat Indian food all the time.

Presenter2:25

And you drink their whisky, which most Westerners, I think, find pretty foul.

Mark Tully2:29

Well, yes, I but it's like everything else, isn't it? You get used to it and then you become very fond of it. I'm more of a beer drinker than a whiskey drinker.

Presenter2:33

Hmm.

Presenter2:36

But to that extent you've let me use the phrase gone native, as it were, which is something that I gather your mother, who was born of a very pucker colonial family, would have thoroughly disapproved.

Mark Tully2:47

Well, I don't know. My mother is still alive and she has changed a lot. And I think we you know, I always say that we have to see these things through the eyes of the times. But it is true that when I was in Calcutta as a child, the idea was that you were to be kept as European as possible, that it was to be made absolutely clear to you that you were not Indian and you really had no connection with India.

Presenter3:08

You shouldn't go jungly, I think was the phrase, wasn't it?

Mark Tully3:11

That is uh exactly the phrase. And I remember my grandfather used to say, I'll tell you a story about Uncle Charlie, and my grandmother always used to say, You will not, Bertie you know perfectly well that Charlie went jungly.

Presenter3:24

You obviously when you were there learned some Hindi because as I said when you eventually applied to the BBC you were able to spout Little Miss Muffet in Hindi. I think you've got to give us a blast of it.

Mark Tully3:34

Well, muffati muffity mai, bhgichmi baita, kuch parwanai, egbara makra, kapra pakra, bhagya, muffati mai. Phagya is a wonderful word, isn't it? Run away, you know. But I I had to say that I thought I'd blown it when I said that, because obviously the learned people of the appointments board

Speaker 23:44

I know

Speaker 43:44

Wait.

Mark Tully3:54

were under the impression that I should be a fluent Hindi speaker, having lived there for nine years, and I have to say that this is all I can speak.

Presenter3:58

I have to

Presenter4:01

But I'm sure it earned you a grand title, because all the titles of BBC Jobs staff, anyway, are very grand, aren't they? Oh, yes. What did you become?

Mark Tully4:05

Oh yes. What did you become? I became assistant representative and then acting representative because I was uh too junior to be called the representative, so I was the acting representative.

Presenter4:16

And the office was your home and your home was the office and this was

Mark Tully4:19

This this was in a later stage, yes. I had the office upstairs and the flat downstairs. Now the BBC's moved to grander premises.

Presenter4:27

Yes, but you were the B B C, you were Tully Saab, as we shall hear. Let's pause and have your first record.

Mark Tully4:34

Well, the first record which I've chosen is The Londonderry Air. I've chosen this because for years and years when I'd had too much to drink or anything like that, I always used to say my favourite song is The Londonderry Air. And there is in fact a chap who plays the piano in bars in Delhi. And whenever he sees me, he automatically starts playing the Londonderry Air. So perhaps in memory of his kindness we should have the Londonderry Air.

Presenter4:57

The signature tune of Tully's Harp, huh?

Mark Tully4:59

Uh yes, maybe.

Presenter5:33

James Galway and the Chieftains playing the London Derry Air.

Presenter5:36

Um so you became Mark Tully, an institution in India. Uh would it be right to say that your passion for India was greater than your passion for journalism?

Mark Tully5:46

Oh yes, absolutely so. You know, in in India I'm always being asked you must have passionately wanted to be a journalist and I said no I didn't. It was all happened to me by accident. And one of the things I feel most strongly about really is that India has had a very profound effect on the whole way I live my life and the whole way I think. And one of the things about it of course is that it has given me a much greater appreciation of the role of fate in one's life, that you don't actually make your life half as much as in this sort of achievement oriented society in the West people are taught to believe that a lot of your life is made for you.

Presenter6:24

So this was always what was intended for you?

Mark Tully6:27

Absolutely, that's what I think.

Presenter6:28

This is your karma.

Mark Tully6:29

Yes, absolutely. You've hit the nail on the head. Yes, I I feel that it was my karma, is my karma, and that's one of the reasons why I'm so happy to be going on living there, and one of the reasons also why I um feel so strongly in a way about India.

Presenter6:45

But what would have happened if the B B C had said to you, as it does and always has done to all of its foreign correspondents, Okay, you know, you've done a tour of duty there, time to move on and you'd have said no, would you?

Mark Tully6:56

I certainly never wanted to be the c the the sort of foreign correspondent who moves from country to country because I I never felt like an expatriate in India and I didn't want to feel like an expatriate anywhere else.

Presenter7:08

But having said that, you were away from it for twenty years, weren't you, from the age of nine or ten until you went back when you got this job, aged nearly thirty, I think. So when you got back there, was it like a homecoming?

Mark Tully7:21

Well, yeah, yes, I had this extraordinary experience, you see, of when I got off the aeroplane, it was a long flight, and I'd never done a long flight before, and I was quite tired and confused, and I thought, well, supposing I have made a wrong decision, and I went on the veranda of the hotel, and I smelt the smell of winter flowers in India, marigolds and things like that, and also, funnily enough, the smell of the gardeners cooking their food on a cow dung stove. And somehow the whole of my childhood rushed through my head like an electric train in some most extraordinary way. And from that moment onwards, I knew I didn't know what was going to happen, but I just knew that there was a really special place for me, India.

Presenter8:00

Record number two, tell me about that.

Mark Tully8:01

I I love uh various forms of Indian music, and including Indian classical music, and we're going to have something played by two of the great masters of Indian uh classical music, uh Dilayat and Bismillah Khan, um and it's going to be the Rag Yamani.

Presenter8:46

Potiv Rag Yamani, played by Vilyat and Bismillah Khan.

Presenter8:51

G give me a a picture of your childhood in India then, Mark, because I'm sure it was quite different from the way you live there now. Was it a vast house and lots of staff?

Mark Tully9:01

Uh big house, yes, lots of servants. Uh but of course uh you had to have lots of servants in those days'cause caste rules were still quite strict. Each servant would only do very limited jobs.

Presenter9:12

Lots of nannies.

Mark Tully9:13

Well, we had one European nanny and her real job was this business of keeping you away from India in a way. Because of course she didn't have any physical work to do because there were ayahs and the nursery boy and all that to do all the hard work. So she sort of kept an eye on you all day and made sure that you were playing with the right sort of children and that sort of thing. And it was really a very old-fashioned upbringing. You know, you were taken into your parents in the morning when they were in bed having what was chotahasri or small breakfast, which is tea in bed, basically, and bananas. And then very often you wouldn't see them again till they were taken down in the evening when you had had your bath and they were having a glass of sherry or something like that. Very much Nanny was the person who looked after you and Nanny's job was, as I said, stop you going native, as you put it. I'm not sure I like that phrase really. And she once I remember vividly, I was sitting in the front of the car and the driver whose name I remember he was an Indian Christian called Willie.

Mark Tully10:10

And he was a lovely guy, and Willie was telling me that how to count in Hindi, and I was going Ekdo teen char you see, and Nanny got heard this, you see, she got in the car, so she gave me a clout around the head, and said, That's the servants' language, not your language.

Presenter10:26

And then when you were quite a small boy, what would you have been when war broke out, four or five?

Mark Tully10:30

Yes, I was four when the war broke out and we should have been sent back to school at probably the age of five or six back to England. But there was no transport shipping stopped during the war. So a special school was set up in Darjeeling and the book's been written about it now and the author of the book called it Harrow on the Hooghly, which is the river of Calcutta. But what is it like? It's a wonderful school, much nicer than any school I went to afterwards actually, because we were allowed to roam around Darjeeling. And I remember particularly we used to go to there was an American rest and recreation camp there because Darjeeling's up in the hills and cool. And we used to go up there and used to be given chocolate by the American soldiers. It was wonderful. And then I came back to England and I was put in a prep school behind high walls where you went out once on Sunday in a crocodile.

Mark Tully11:17

This was Marlborough School. No, this was Triford. This is my prep school. Then I went on to Marlborough after that.

Presenter11:22

And and eventually on to to university. But military service came in between. So essentially, I mean, you were very much a colonial child of your time. You were very institutionalized.

Mark Tully11:24

Deem up

Mark Tully11:26

So it is

Mark Tully11:31

Totally. I always used to say that when I left Cambridge I was the sort of person who couldn't have a meal unless someone had rung a bell because, you know, it's so totally institutionalized.

Presenter11:40

And then you'd eat it very fast. So you could have seconds.

Mark Tully11:42

So you could have seconds.

Presenter11:44

But therefore, it seems very strange that in the midst of all of this you became quite radical. You know, you were quite sort of left-wing in inside all of these very establishment institutions. How did that come about?

Mark Tully11:55

Well, you're absolutely right. I mean, I used to have terrible arguments with my father, you see. I used to say to him, It's disgraceful. I go to this public school and can look at the s condition of the village school. Um and so in part it was probably a revolt against the sort of schools which I was sent.

Presenter12:09

But you had a similar attitude in your military service in the first Royal Dragoons, was that correct? Didn't you balk ab against the division between the officers and the men?

Mark Tully12:14

That's right, Jesus.

Mark Tully12:17

Well, yes, I got into terrible trouble in the army. The adjutant, who didn't like me at all because he thought I was very balshy, and he made us write an essay. And I read this essay saying the British Army would never be a happy and efficient organisation until the division between officers and other ranks was done away with. And the adjutant was most unamused and wrote on the bottom of it in red ink, the red flag flies forever.

Presenter12:42

Ha ha ha.

Presenter12:43

Tolly the Balsch. Um record number three, where are we? Here we are.

Mark Tully12:47

Yes, well, this record that I've chosen because I love hymns. And the one thing which meant something to me at at school actually was chapel. And this love of chapel, love of serv the Anglican liturgy has remained with me. So I've chosen a really beautiful hymn, I think, a sacred head surrounded from Bach's Matthew Passion.

Presenter14:06

O Sacred Head from Bach Saint Matthew Passion, sung by the City of Birmingham Symphony Chorus conducted by Simon Halsey. So, Mark Tully, you studiously did not work at school or at university. You must have come under some pressure at Cambridge from your tutors to pull your socks on.

Mark Tully14:22

I I did indeed. At the end of my first year in Prelims I got a two-two and Bob Runcie was quite certain, of course of the tricks I'd got up to, the lack of work and everything, that I would either fail or get a special, you know. And when he sent me the note saying you've got a two-two he put underneath it, this shows you must have some brains, why not try using them?

Presenter14:44

And did you ever meet you must have met him in later life, weren't you?

Mark Tully14:47

I met him often. He never ever lost touch with anyone. And he was enormously generous in his judgments. You know, he never held it against me that I failed to get ordained. He never held it against me that I was lazy and drank far too much when I was an undergraduate. He never was judgmental.

Presenter15:03

So it was in Cambridge, was it, that you began this sort of misspent youth? This is where your drinking began.

Mark Tully15:09

Uh no, I think that began in the army, really, you know. Certainly I drank a lot, I mean there's no doubt about it there.

Presenter15:14

And you characterized yourself as a womanizer then as well.

Mark Tully15:16

No, I wasn't actually. I think that someone's got that wrong. I mean, I was a public school boy. I was terrified of women, actually. I mean, I remember my first girlfriend. She was a lovely girl who nursed me, actually, after one of the more disgraceful incidents in my university career when I suspended myself from the college spikes trying to climb into college after gates were closed.

Presenter15:39

With a with a belly full.

Mark Tully15:41

Yes, it with a bellyful, yes. But uh, you know, it was uh I I remember that relationship as being really sort of uh um I mean, she was she was a lovely person, but I was bowled over, but terrified by it all, because it never happened to me.

Presenter15:41

Yes, with the billets.

Speaker 215:50

Uh

Presenter15:50

Yeah.

Speaker 215:50

Uh

Speaker 415:50

Yeah.

Speaker 215:50

Uh

Presenter15:52

Yeah.

Mark Tully15:53

Yeah.

Presenter15:54

And at the same time, you had this vocation. You did believe you wanted to become well, you did want to become a priest, and you went on to theological college. But it didn't last. You only lasted, what, two terms? That's right. What happened? What went wrong?

Mark Tully15:59

Speaking of the

Mark Tully16:01

But it

Mark Tully16:05

That's scientific.

Mark Tully16:07

It was always a doubtful enterprise. I had a general feeling that uh I might do something dreadful, you know, that um uh I I might indeed uh become a a really addicted heavy drinker. Or although I wasn't uh womanizer at Cambridge, I was very much interested in women and so I feared that maybe that might lead me astray.

Presenter16:28

So you thought you were too worldly in your natural feelings.

Mark Tully16:29

I suppose you're unreliable rather than worldly. Unreliable would be the word to use. And and I loved and I still love the church. And the last thing I wanted to do was to in any way disgrace the church.

Presenter16:42

But it must have been a big disappointment when it finally you had to face the fact that you had to give up.

Mark Tully16:48

Yes, it was a big black hole, really, because I didn't have the first idea. And I went to, was called into my study by my father, who was quite a commanding figure. So he said to me, well, what on earth are you going to do? And he was a businessman, you see. So I said to him, I couldn't really think of anything. I said, well, Dad, you know, you're obviously rather good at business, so maybe it runs in the blood and I'd better try and go into business. And he said, I'll tell you two things. Number one, you're going to business over my dead body. And number two, you're not getting another penny from me. And actually, that was the best thing in the world which happened to me. I'd have been disastrous in business. And it made me realize that if I wasn't going to go into business, I'd jolly well had to go out and earn some money.

Presenter17:27

Record number four.

Mark Tully17:28

Record number four comes from the era of the big band, a wonderful institution, and uh it's Glenn Miller with his orchestra and they're playing in the mood.

Presenter18:38

Ren Miller and his orchestra with In the Mood.

Presenter18:42

So, Mark, you went back to India, as we've said. You were about thirty at the time. You gradually made the switch into journalism and began to make your name. I gathered that you really put the making of yourself as an institution down to the the transistor radio, is that right?

Mark Tully18:57

Well, transistor radio made radio very, very cheap, so it spread throughout India into villages all over India and indeed all over South Asia. At the same time, all the villages could hear was the government controlled radio. So they wanted independent source of news and the one that they chose was the BBC.

Presenter19:19

Because they look to you for for truth and accuracy.

Mark Tully19:21

Absolutely for a balanced report.

Presenter19:23

Is it true that Rajiv Gandhi did not believe his mother had been assassinated until he heard it on the World Service?

Mark Tully19:28

He did turn to the BBC to listen to it, yes. And there is a photograph of it I have in actually the first book which I ever wrote.

Presenter19:36

But on the other hand, Mark, one can see to a certain extent in such a society where there are so many different religions and highly charged views, you can see that perhaps there is an argument to censor some news, because after all, riots can follow information, can't they? And that's happened in India time and again.

Mark Tully19:53

Yes, you can, but I I would put it the other way round, because India is a highly oral culture still. And therefore, if you don't get reliable information actually out, what will happen will be rumours, because you can't hide the fact that there's been a riot or that there's tension or something like that.

Presenter20:10

No, but I mean now that there's satellite television and I mean the satellite television has taken over, has it not, from the transistor radio in India, y I mean in nineteen ninety two when there were those terrible riots, the information spread from city to city. I think I mean in the end twelve hundred people or more were killed, weren't they?

Mark Tully20:24

Yes, absolutely. But again, you see, you could not possibly have hidden the fact that Hindu fanatics had pulled down a mosque because everyone knew the story was being told, that all these people had gathered there, they were going to have their religious ceremony. You couldn't hide this fact. So even if it had come out a week later, still there would have been riots, and they might have been much worse if there had been rumours spread.

Presenter20:46

You've been attacked, I know I mean, much as we've we've said you you much loved out there, but you've been attacked and vilified, you've had stones thrown at your house, you've been taken prisoner on occasion. When have you been most frightened?

Mark Tully20:58

Well, I suppose the time I was really most frightened was during that time when the mosque was pulled down, because I found myself surrounded by people wielding tridents, which is the the weapon of the God Shiva. They were literally saying, Come are we going to kill this guy?

Presenter21:11

I mean, you really thought your number was up.

Mark Tully21:13

I thought it might have been up. You know, uh I I think under circumstances like that you don't really think very much, you know. Um but on reflection I realized I was in a very dangerous position.

Presenter21:24

Record number five.

Mark Tully21:25

Well record number five is something which is again very dear to me. Where I live in in India is called Nizamuddin and it's opposite a Sufi shrine and Nizamuddin is a great Sufi saint. So I've chosen um some Kawali played by Nusrat Fati Ali Khan and it's a song written in memory of another great Sufi saint, Sharba'as Khaland.

Presenter22:18

Nusrat Fatah Ali Khan playing part of the Kavali Shabazz calendar, and it reminds you, Mark, you say, of Thursday nights at home.

Mark Tully22:25

Yes, because um w what happens every Thursday night, I mean I don't go every Thursday night, but in the shrine which is the other side of the road from where we live, these uh Kavali singers sing and it's a wonderful occasion. It's out in the open and uh as you can hear from that music they get totally carried away.

Presenter22:41

And so do you, by the way, who's fidgeting away.

Mark Tully22:42

Very difficult not to fidget, isn't it?

Presenter22:47

So let's talk about the BBC, because it was in the early nineties, wasn't it? You were in your beloved India, working for your beloved BBC, because you very much believe in the public service ethos. And then at a certain point, you decided to come over here, stand up at a conference in Birmingham and make a speech against it was an attack really on the then Director General John Burt, whom you characterized as being rather a big brother figure, running a kind of society or a corporation based on fear. Why did you decide that you should be this voice of disaffection?

Mark Tully23:21

Well, it goes back again to what we were saying talking about earlier, fate. And it seemed to me that because I had been asked to give the Radio Academy lecture, therefore it was my fate, basically, to stand up and do this.

Presenter23:32

Three rose to the plate.

Mark Tully23:33

Well, yes, I mean it sounds very gallant and it wasn't really very gallant. I mean my biggest fear was of course uh that uh no one would pay any attention or everyone would think I was Balmy. I think would you have been? Well I think John Bird thought I was Balmy certainly and I know that I know that the chairman Duke Hussey thought I was Barmy because he told me so.

Presenter23:44

But I think

Presenter23:53

But in the end you you you were joined by others, and notably David Attenborough, I think, and Barry Took. But you were characterized as being old soldiers polishing your muskets. That must have stung.

Mark Tully24:04

No, it didn't actually sting at all, because I was absolutely certain that we had a case to make. And our case was not that there should never be any change. It was very simple, and I actually put it in these words, that there should be evolution rather than revolution. And as you look round the world, you see that revolutions very rarely have a happy outcome.

Presenter24:28

But what do you say now? I mean, here is the B B C, what, nine years on, alive, well, thriving, doing better than ever, some might argue, you know, with its future assured and some would say that that is due not least to the revolution that John Burt brought about.

Mark Tully24:45

Well, I would still insist that one thing which does seem to have gone from the BBC is that old ethos of companionship, comradeship and that sort of thing. When I work with producers now, they do say that that spirit of comradeship and companionship and that sort of thing, that ethos is not the same as it used to be. Maybe it couldn't be.

Presenter25:04

And maybe

Mark Tully25:06

Um

Presenter25:06

Di did you resign a year later because you said you were gagged? Were you told the shot?

Mark Tully25:12

Yes, I was told shut up, you see, and I felt that they couldn't do this because either people would think I had lost my bottle if I could use that expression, didn't dare to speak out any more, or they would think that I was um had changed my mind and I hadn't done that either.

Mark Tully25:28

Echo number six.

Mark Tully25:30

Well no, this again is is nostalgic really, and it's a nostalgic title. It seems like yesterday played by Humphrey Lyttelton. Because when I was at university, Humphrey Lyttelton was all our heroes, and of course he is a wonderful broadcaster.

Presenter26:45

Humphrey Lyttleton and his band, and it seems like yesterday. And let's talk about India, Mark, about which you now write and talk. And it's been said, I suppose, that there too you're kind of opposed to change. You've written and argued, for example, in defence of the caste system. I mean, how how can you defend such a system?

Mark Tully27:06

Well you see again, I'm not opposed to change. Uh what I have said is that we have to look for the good and the bad in the caste system. The good side of it is it offers security, it offers companionship, a community to belong to and that sort of thing. The two bad side of the city. Of untouchables? No, but wait a minute. Uh wait a minute. Uh there were a lot of people who were actually outside the caste system basically, and they were treated as untouchable, and that is wholly indefensible. The community is one of the good sides of the caste system. And you see

Mark Tully27:39

One of the reasons why I wanted to try and find a balanced view on caste is because so many people dismiss the whole of Indian religion, the whole of India, because of the caste system.

Presenter27:49

But you're saying it's much more complex, obviously, than people can see at first glance. But also you've talked about how consumerism should not come to India, how Western economic systems are not desirable there.

Mark Tully27:51

Yes, we can.

Presenter28:03

In a sense what people your detractors would say is that you have a kind of frozen image of the place. You want to keep it as it was and not allow it to go forward.

Mark Tully28:12

I believe very much that India must progress, and I would be an absolute idiot if I didn't think that the Indian economy should grow. But I don't believe necessarily that our way of doing things is the right way for India. If you take consumerism, consumerism is after all based on greed, and who can say that greed is a healthy human emotion? That's just one example. We are the people who have to change, because we are the advocates of consumerism. We are also the people who have the economic clout and the economic muscle.

Presenter28:44

Record number seven.

Mark Tully28:46

Record number seven is a very, very Indian record again. When I'm in India, people always sort of test your Indianness by asking you do you like Bombay movies? And I love Bombay movies, and this is from one of the great hits of a recent one called Lagaan.

Speaker 429:05

Gana Gana Ganana, Ganana, Gana, Ganana, Gana, Gana, Gana, Gana, Gili, Gili, I Padira, Ganikana, Kora, Kari Chai Padira, Tama Gana Padira.

Speaker 429:16

Badavana dharakai badharvan

Presenter29:29

Ganan Ganan by A. R. Rahman from the film Lagan. So you live between two worlds, Mark, England and India, and you've been very publicly frank about the fact that you live between two women as well, your wife here, Margaret, and your partner, Gilly, there. Is that a situation which you're at peace with?

Mark Tully29:50

I'm not entirely at peace with it, obviously, for obvious reasons of my Christianity. But it's something which has happened. And there are two wonderful women of whom I'm extraordinarily fond.

Presenter30:04

There's one

Mark Tully30:05

The s

Presenter30:05

Doom left.

Mark Tully30:06

Two. But they're reasonably at peace with it too. I wouldn't like to say that they're totally at peace with it because it's a strange situation. But it's not a unique situation. There have been other people. I remember I was very friendly with John Betcherman, and he was in quite a similar sort of situation.

Presenter30:21

But is it an avoidance of divorce? Is that where it comes about? Or is it a sort of

Mark Tully30:26

Well, it's in avoidance of divorce in part. After all, I don't think that a divorce is necessarily a healthy or a good thing. It's also in part because I wanted to preserve as much as I could of my family life. It's also in a way going back to fate. It's in some ways something which has just happened. I do my best to live within it, and both Gillie and Margaret do their best to live within it, and it's the situation we find ourselves in.

Presenter30:59

It i it is again, it all feeds into this this view one really puts together of you, which is that you are this very strange mixture of a of a great traditionalist and equally a nonconformist. It's it's it's it's something you've struggled with all your life.

Mark Tully31:12

It is a

Mark Tully31:15

Well, it is something within me, I think, very much that I love tradition. You can see from the music which I've chosen. And I do also at the same time, of course, see the need for change. And I see the huge need for change now. That's why I'm so vehemently opposed to the way which we do our economics now. That's why I opposed certain things which happened in the BBC.

Mark Tully31:39

I think this is something which is within all of us actually if we examine ourselves. But perhaps it's more obvious in me than in some people. Perhaps I'm more confused than most people.

Presenter31:48

Well, no, perhaps you've actually been your own man more than most people, because although you've been part of a large corporation, you've actually been out there on a limb, as it were. You are an individual.

Mark Tully31:59

Yes, I'm very, very uh lucky in that way. I have been able to be an individual and I'm sure if someone had tried to make me a manager or or someone who had to deal with other people, I'd been very, very bad at it.

Presenter32:12

Uh

Mark Tully32:12

Uh Record number. Yeah.

Presenter32:14

That's

Mark Tully32:14

Yeah. Record number eight goes back again, you might say, to my traditionalism in some ways, but it's a combination of both because it's modern religious music, wonderfully beautiful music, written by John Tavener, and it's called Song for Athene.

Presenter33:24

Part of Song for Athene by John Tavener, with the chorus and orchestra of the National Academy of St. Cecilia, conducted by Mung Wan Chung. Now, Mark, if you could only take one of the eight records with you, which one would you take?

Mark Tully33:37

I think probably I would take the last one actually. It does sum up so many things for me and after all Tavena was very much influenced is very much influenced by Eastern church music, so he isn't entirely a Western musician. So in a way he's Eastern West. He's a modern composer, but in a way in the classical vein. So in some ways he sums all the muddles up within me.

Presenter33:57

Hmm.

Presenter33:58

What about your book, You Get the Bible in Shakespeare, as you know?

Mark Tully34:01

Well, I thought a lot about this and in the end I came to the conclusion that you'd have a lot of time. And I love the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, but I don't understand a lot of what he says. So I thought if I took the collection of the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins and I could spend lots and lots of time trying to work out exactly what he meant or whether in fact he meant anything at all sometimes.

Speaker 234:12

So what if I

Presenter34:24

And your luxury.

Mark Tully34:25

Well, you know, I'd love to have taken my pipe with me, but I'd had to give that up, uh, so I can't take my pipe with me. But uh the other thing I'm very fond of doing is having a pint of beer in the evening. And I discovered that in this country now there are all these mini breweries uh which are springing up everywhere. So maybe I could take a mini brewery with me. I don't know where I'd get the ingredients, find you.

Presenter34:46

Mark Tully, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your Desert Island discs.

Speaker 234:56

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