Christopher Frayling

Speaker 40:00

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 40:08

The programme was originally broadcast in two thousand and three, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:30

My Castaway this week is an art historian. He's as much at home with the Spaghetti Western as he is with the old masters. He sees art everywhere, and has spent his life encouraging his students to have the same vision.

Presenter0:42

His academic career has been centred around the Royal College of Art, of which he's now rector. From that base, he's written books, made television documentaries, served on innumerable committees, and generally gone about the business of trying to make more people understand the beauty and importance of the simplest things around them. He hates intellectual snobbery, but loves intellectual engagement. You can do a PhD on Mickey Mouse, he says. Nearly all the books I've written are about taking seriously that which many people would consider beyond the pale. He is the RCA's Professor of Cultural History, Sir Christopher Fraling. Give me a a list then, Christopher, of these beyond the pale subjects that you've written about.

Christopher Frayling1:23

Well, we start off with vampires. Uh we move on to uh European Westerns. Well, they're now known as Euro-Westerns, but in my day it was spaghetti westerns.

Presenter1:31

If you you coined that phrase.

Christopher Frayling1:31

If I use it.

Christopher Frayling1:32

I did. Well, it's attributed actually there's a bit of a paternity suit going on about who was responsible. Certainly the Italians think I did, so I have a very rough time every time I go to Italy. Whereas, of course, in the sixties everything was spaghetti that's cheap and cheerful and Italian, spaghetti junction, uh spaghetti house and all these things. Today it'd be pizza. I think if we were doing it today we'd call it a pizza the action or something like that. But anyway, spaghetti westerns, clint eastwood.

Presenter1:40

Yeah.

Speaker 41:41

Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 11:50

It's not today.

Christopher Frayling1:57

Popular Egyptian design in relation to Tutankhamun, all that sort of thing. I've always had this crusade, really.

Christopher Frayling2:03

to broaden the notion of culture and to relate it to the reality of what what happens in people's lives. When I was at university I studied Charles Dickens or the Middle Ages and it didn't seem to actually relate to what was going on in the high street. And of course there wasn't much contemporary art in the university I was at. So I've been trying to focus people on the broad front of culture.

Presenter2:18

Mm.

Presenter2:22

Almost as a point of honour, really, it would seem.

Christopher Frayling2:24

It's true, there's a culture with a CHA, you know, which is what connoisseurs do, and there's culture, which is the sort of art you lean against. And I like this breadth, and taking cinema seriously, taking despised cinematic genres seriously, not too seriously, but quite seriously. And basically.

Presenter2:37

Seriously.

Presenter2:39

So it doesn't have to be Eisenstein, it doesn't have to be Bergman, it can be a very good thing.

Christopher Frayling2:41

No, and and if you know there was a terrible holocaust of some sort and I had to choose between saving the sole copy of Wagner's Ring and the sole copy of Singing in the Rain, I wouldn't hesitate. It would be Singing in the Rain. It's a wonderful, wonderful movie, yeah. And I think there's a cultural snobbery. Everyone erects hierarchies, particularly in this country, that we're interested in literary rather than visual things and the the great tradition of literature and history. So uh we don't we don't look at uh film and technological culture, the things that happened in the twentieth century, we don't take them as seriously as we might.

Presenter2:52

But yeah

Speaker 42:52

It's a wonderful.

Speaker 42:54

Uh

Speaker 13:01

Yeah.

Presenter3:11

But we do accept it more now. I mean, in a sense, your lifetime has been that battle, and it is more won now, certainly, than when you were at university.

Christopher Frayling3:18

To some extent, although now it's superimposed on that is the dumbing down debate, as if certain forms of art are themselves dumb. I mean, my view is there's good movies, there's bad movies, just like there's good poetry and bad poetry, and it's not to do with dumbing down.

Presenter3:23

You know

Presenter3:31

Okay, but there has to be a dividing line somewhere, doesn't there? There has to be a point at which you say that is art, but that isn't art. Otherwise the whole term is debated.

Christopher Frayling3:39

The term is debated. Oh, yes, no, there are categories and they're important categories. But my point is that culture is a very, very broad church, and nothing's to be gained by erecting holidays.

Presenter3:49

Okay, so you can do a a PhD about Mickey Mouse. What can't you do a PhD about?

Christopher Frayling3:54

I think you can do a PhD, but I don't think it's a matter of approach, seriousness, not everything is art. No, not every PhD is about art. No, but I'm talking about in art. There's nothing intrinsically trivial about any subject matter.

Presenter3:57

So everything is art.

Presenter4:02

No, but I'm talking about in articles enough.

Presenter4:06

So you could do a PhD about the art of washing up.

Christopher Frayling4:09

Yeah, you get a very interesting PhD about the social history, domestic, the domestic sphere, gender. It's a matter of how you approach it.

Presenter4:15

Let's stop and have your first record. What is it?

Christopher Frayling4:17

My first record is Reasons to be Cheerful by Ian Dury. Now I've chosen it. Ian was a student at the Royal College of Art in the mid-sixties and before then at Walthamstow where he was a fellow student with my wife, Helen. And the words of this song remind me of wandering round the painting studios at the college where all the students have their sort of pin boards of favourite postcards, Xeroxes, posters, things they like. And if you listen to the words of this, this is Ian talking about things he likes that makes him cheerful.

Speaker 14:46

Reasons to be Cheerful, Part Three

Speaker 14:50

Summer Buddy Holly, the working folly, Good Gully Miss Molly and Boats Hammersmith Pully, The Bolshaw and Bally Jumpback in the Alley and Nanny Goats Agent Minus Camels, Dominica Camels All other members plus eat wall boats Seeing Piccadilly, Fanny Smith and Willie Bein' rather silly and porriage oats I bet you Grin and Berry Shell to come and share it You're welcome, we can spare it Yellow socks Too short to be haughty, too nothing to be naughty Going on faulty, no electric shots The juice of the carrots, the smile

Christopher Frayling5:30

In fact, I sit in my office watching the work of graduates whiz by, you know, all these jackups and forbids and all this.

Presenter5:31

That's right.

Presenter5:37

And the Benti Continental Act.

Christopher Frayling5:37

Yes, I mean people think because it's called the Royal College of Art with the capital A that it's entirely to do with fine art and that seems to be the and I've spent a lot of my time as rector, you know, trying to put over the fact that actually seventy percent of the students do design in one form or another, whether it's craft or whether it's uh industrial design or design for manufacturing or one-off things, it's all in the realm of design.

Presenter5:39

Thin links.

Presenter5:58

But it isn't an art college. I mean, it's postgrad anyways.

Christopher Frayling6:01

It is entirely postgraduate. And it isn't. It's basically we do art in a design environment and design in an art environment. And you put those two things together with a lot of postgraduate, bright postgraduates in design and art, and see what happens. It's a sort of greenhouse. You put this very concentrated community of people together. You stir the pot a little bit, put the artists next to the designers. So you're giving them an opportunity to be very, very creative within that. But at the same time, you're saying to them, you're all talented. Some of you will learn how to use your talents and some of you won't. And that's where the professional orientation comes in.

Presenter6:08

Thank you.

Speaker 16:08

But

Presenter6:34

But isn't the danger if you do that and you start also teaching them how to bookkeep and things, because you do a bit of that, teach them to be, as you say, professional, is that you might just kill that kind of free spirit that that the the one who might design the one-off beautiful prototype of something all of a sudden is sort of concentrated on the

Christopher Frayling6:52

I don't see it like that because where design is concerned. I mean design is part of everyday life. Every light switch, every light bulb, everything you see was designed by someone as a conscious human decision. And it's the fact of making it that turns it into design, really.

Presenter6:53

Is it not a conservative?

Speaker 17:04

Real

Christopher Frayling7:05

So I don't see the distinction between, as it were, the real world for designers and the greenhouse because they're all it's a it's a continuum. Unlike many university subjects, the application of it is part of the activity itself.

Presenter7:18

So what are they designing at the moment? Whet our appetite? What are we going to get?

Christopher Frayling7:21

Well, that's a lot of fun. So what are we going to get? Well, the big, big issue for designers, I think, at the college is humanizing technology. They feel that a lot of products on the market are pushed by the technology rather than pulled by people. So mobile phones that do far too many things and are incredibly complicated to work, or radios that you don't, you know, you sit at car radio and you can't work out how to switch it on. And where fashion design is concerned, intelligent fabrics, actually sewing information into clothes, because you can turn information into soft fibre now. Well, you could have clothes that actually react to the environment that people are in, or you could have clothes. You remember those old science fiction films where people had on their cuffs, sort of adding machines, and can be thought that looks really, really hokey. Actually, you can do that now. You can sew into clothes all sorts of parts of living because they're soft.

Speaker 47:50

So, yeah.

Presenter8:06

So you can sew into your scarf a mobile phone.

Christopher Frayling8:09

Yeah, and in fact there was one of the students a few years ago did a lovely idea of sewing a mobile phone into a glove. And what was nice about it was that each of the numbers was on the joints of the finger and the speaker to speak into was in the palm of the hand. So you actually put your hand over your mouth when you're making your phone call. So it's like Jane Austen meets a digital technology, which I think is a wonderful idea, because it's good citizenship as well as being a rather elegant design. I don't know if it'll go into production. But that's an issue, a big, big issue for students. Don't let the technology push us around. Let's bring the users into it and let's bring delight back into everyday products because it seems to have gone.

Presenter8:44

Echo number two.

Christopher Frayling8:45

Record number two is my grandfather, Frederick Fraling. He was a bandmaster, a professional bandmaster of the regiment, the Royal Scots Greys, and this was recorded in nineteen twelve, selection from an operetta by Franz Leyard called Gypsy Love. This brings back my childhood extraordinarily.

Presenter10:01

That was my Castaway's grandfather F. W. Fraling conducting the band of the Royal Scots Greys playing Gypsy Love by Frantz Lehar, recorded in 1912. You weren't around in 1912. And then there was great Uncle Charlie, who played the trombone.

Christopher Frayling10:11

No, no, no, no.

Christopher Frayling10:16

He played the trombone. He played the trombone in the Scottish Orchestra, but also in the Pitt Orchestra of the Glasgow Empire for Harry Lauder. You know, I love a lassie and there's a long, long road winding and all that. In fact, family folklore said that great uncle Charlie contributed to Harry Lauder's songs. I'm not sure.

Presenter10:31

But your father loved music.

Christopher Frayling10:32

He did it. He loved music hall, he loved military music, Edinburgh Tattoo, Royal Tournament, the Guards Chapel, and that side of things. And the pipes, you know, he'd burst into tears when he heard the skirl of pipes and amazing grace and all that. On one side of the family, on the other side of the family was also music. It was a German émigré family called Imhoff, where my great-grandfather Daniel Imhoff came over in 1848 to the German community of Bloomsbury and set up what became a record shop called Imhoff. So many people with long memories will remember this shop in the 50s, a very stylish record shop. It was in New Oxford Street, just on the corner by the Dominion Theatre in London. It had wonderful Bauhaus graphics on its carrier bags and chrome and it was very modernist as an interior. I remember this very well. And it had lots of imports you couldn't get anywhere else.

Presenter11:03

Uh

Speaker 411:03

Where is it?

Presenter11:11

Presumably

Speaker 111:12

Uh

Presenter11:18

So it was records it sold all the time.

Christopher Frayling11:19

By that stage, and originally it started off as musical boxes and automata and orchestrons, you know, these mechanical musical instruments, early synthesisers in a way, and then and then these esoteric records.

Presenter11:30

So you'd go there as a boy, would you?

Christopher Frayling11:31

Yes, I was allowed at sort of Christmas time to make my selection of records, which was absolutely wonderful.

Presenter11:35

No one thought.

Christopher Frayling11:35

And uh um so but that was the I I think the sort of artistic serious culture side of my personality comes through the Imhofs.

Presenter11:43

Your mother's son.

Christopher Frayling11:44

Yeah, whereas the sort of showman communication, um, slightly music-horny side, put that way, uh, comes from my father's side.

Presenter11:51

But what happened to the shop?'Cause you might have been, you know, a sort of rich businessman by now.

Christopher Frayling11:53

Which business

Christopher Frayling11:55

I know. Well, it didn't keep up with HMV down the street and the chains and it was the old story. In fact, Imhofs marketed the very first video machine in the mid sixties, video recorders. Can you imagine? Hugely expensive. But they they were very good at avant-garde marketing and getting there first. They weren't awfully good at exploiting that situation and and actually the old, old story.

Presenter12:08

Uh

Speaker 112:08

Yeah.

Presenter12:16

But you might also, of course, have had a another a different kind of business,'cause your father was in the fur trade, wasn't he? He had an auction house in the city.

Christopher Frayling12:22

Yes, my my father ended up as a chairman of the Hudson's Bay Company in London, and it was something I kept slightly quiet from the students in the nineteen seventies because animal rights and anti-fur was I mean it was the seventies was a time at the Royal College when um the fashion show was actually flower bombed because some of the students were wearing fur.

Presenter12:39

Yes.

Christopher Frayling12:40

And so

Presenter12:41

But your father never suffered from any of this but he lived in the middle of the city.

Christopher Frayling12:43

He did, yes. Oh, he did, latterly. Well, not in his career, really, because people didn't think like that in the 40s, 50s and 60s. It was the mark of everyone's ambition was to have a mink coat. This was the mark of affluence. But then in the 70s, as he came up to retirement, he became the industry's spokesperson on a hiding to nothing. So he appeared on T V and radio programmes defending fur against animal rights activists. And all you need is one slide of a seal and you've lost. So he really was. But it got quite bad. He actually had police protection for a time because he had threatening letters and phone calls. So he was in the eye of the storm towards the end.

Presenter13:18

I could number three.

Christopher Frayling13:19

Record number three is Moon River, but it has to be the version sung actually by Audrey Hepburn. Now, she hasn't got the best voice in the world, but kind of just think of the scene in the film Breakfast at Tiffin is 1961. A young writer is in an apartment in New York on East 71st Street, and he looks out of his window, and just below him, on the fire escape, is sitting this vision of Audrey Hepburn, not in given she for once, but just wearing jeans and a pullover, strumming on a guitar, singing Moon River. And it stops his writer's block, it gets him going, and he writes this wonderful book. I'm With That.

Speaker 413:51

The same.

Speaker 414:00

Waiting round the bell

Speaker 414:05

Huckleberry friend.

Speaker 414:12

River

Speaker 414:15

And me.

Presenter14:22

Moon River, sung by Audrey Hepburn. Not the greatest voice, as you say, Christopher, but um she saw you through puberty.

Christopher Frayling14:28

She did. She helped me through, but I managed to write to her shortly before she died and confessed this fact. I think she was deeply unimpressed, but agreed to do an interview on television, and sadly she died before it could happen. But I developed something of an obsession with Audrey Hepner and Jeremiah.

Presenter14:40

You also, I think, did one of the very early interviews with Woody Allen, who was notoriously difficult to interview and uncooperative. How did you get on top of that?

Christopher Frayling14:50

It's very, very, very difficult. The BBC had tried to get an interview with Woody Annan for ages, and eventually I wrote on Royal College-headed notepaper with the Royal Coat of Arms. I think he thought he was getting the OBE anyway. He agreed to do the interview, and it was very, very sticky. And the thing that actually brought us together was I started, I don't know why, I started talking about Minnie Mouse and the shoes. You know, when Minnie Mouse has these huge shoes and tiny little feet inside them, and I've always been intrigued by that. It looks wonderful. And he said, do you know, I'm intrigued by that as well. There aren't many of us around. And it unlocked the interview. Let us do a PA.

Presenter15:22

Let's do a PhD on that.

Christopher Frayling15:24

Oh, exactly. And we were fine from then on. It's funny, I got his confidence by sort of sharing that thought. It's very weird how that happens sometimes.

Presenter15:31

But

Presenter15:32

Let's just go back to your child because I do want to hear about your mother, who was obviously quite a lady. She won the RAC rally.

Christopher Frayling15:38

She did in 1952. Yes, she was a professional. Well, in those days, rally driving was a very different thing to what it is today. It was a semi-amateur sport, but souped-up cars, in her case, an Allard, which was a large car with a V8 engine, a Cadillac engine. I grew up in this large car. We used to go on family holidays, racing gear changes on the way to the boat at Dieppe, you know. And she won the RAC rally. She took part in all the major rallies. I do remember being proud at school that everyone else's mum seemed to be what they then called a housewife. And my mum sort of wore a Biggles hat and drove Allards across the finishing line. And that did make me proud.

Presenter16:14

But you you'd have been what when she won that 1952, you'd have been five, six, something like that.

Christopher Frayling16:17

Fifty-two, I was six.

Christopher Frayling16:19

Yeah, just about to go off to boarding school.

Presenter16:20

Uh well, quite. She sent you early because frankly she had more interesting things to do with that.

Christopher Frayling16:24

Well partly that my father travelled a lot. While my mum at that stage continued motoring. And yeah, I think they felt that a little bit like the diplomatic thing, you know, shunt the children off to boarding school.

Presenter16:40

Boarding schools.

Christopher Frayling16:42

I did, I know, this is a dreadful moment where I was wandering around and there was the matron and I said, Mummy, God is so Freudian.

Presenter16:49

So do you think this parental deprivation did you lasting damage, Christopher?

Christopher Frayling16:53

Possibly something it certainly made me rather embattled about life, I think, which is which has helped me. It sort of stokes me up. Taking on crusades, trying to go being against the grain sometimes and fighting for causes that are difficult. Yeah, I think it did stoke me up on that. It made me sort of

Presenter16:54

You can tell me all the passes.

Presenter16:59

It's folks.

Christopher Frayling17:10

Me against the world is an attitude which I still have to some extent.

Presenter17:15

Record number four.

Christopher Frayling17:16

Record number four.

Christopher Frayling17:18

is the the suite from the Thruppenny Opera by Kurtweil, but it has to be the version of nineteen twenty eight conducted by Otto Klempere, who was there at the very first performance. And this for me, it's twenties Germany, it's jazz meets opera, it's incredibly evocative.

Presenter18:32

The Mack the Knife section of Kordvarstropni Opera, played by the State Opera Orchestra of Berlin, conducted by Otto Klemperer, recorded in nineteen twenty eight.

Presenter18:40

So, Christopher Fraling, your visual imagination was fed, as you said, by the music shop, your mother's family, and by the cinema, and then by the time you got to your public school, to Repton, you were acting, weren't you? You you played Juliet.

Christopher Frayling18:53

I did. My great triumph was playing Juliet. Only unfortunately I fell down the fire escape about three weeks before the performance and broke my leg. So I wandered round uh you know, if you can imagine doing the balcony scene with your leg in plaster, it was very, very strange. Um I performed with James Fenton actually, who subsequently became the great poet. Was he your

Presenter19:09

Was he your Romeo?

Christopher Frayling19:10

No, no, no, no, different production, but I think we were both in drag. It was very strange.

Presenter19:14

But that seems from what I've read about you to have informed again this this business of your seeing performance sort of from the inside, appreciating the performer, moving away from the sort of academic analysis.

Christopher Frayling19:28

Yes, I had I was very lucky to have a marvellous English master man called Michael Charlesworth who emphasized not sort of dead texts but live performances. And it transformed my attitude to learning.

Presenter19:39

So an exhibition to Cambridge, early switch from law to history, lots of drama, lots of writing for varsity, student newspaper, but all the time, apparently you were destined for a job in advertising if your father had anything to do with it.

Christopher Frayling19:50

That's right. In those days in the School magazine they had an article where they asked the parents what they thought the children were going to do and I was advertising. But you shuddered at the thought. I did. And no one from my family background had been to higher education before. I was the very, very first. I went before my brother, in fact.

Presenter19:58

But you shuddered at the thought.

Christopher Frayling20:08

And my father was very worried it would make me, as he put it, unemployable.

Presenter20:12

I thought he thought you'd gone arty on him, is that what you

Christopher Frayling20:12

So he's

Christopher Frayling20:14

That's exactly right, that I might go arty on him. And I remember actually when I published my first book, which was in the early 70s, he looked at me and said, I suppose you think you're Charles Dickens, you know. And he was very suspicious of that. Actually, he came round later in life and began I think he began to be quite proud of what I was doing, although he'd never tell me. He wasn't that sort of person. But he told lots of friends. He then phoned me and said, Do you know what your father's saying about you? And I said, Wish he'd tell me direct.

Presenter20:38

But what he was was somebody who didn't like flannel, didn't like I think what he called bullshit.

Christopher Frayling20:42

No, that's right. He had a a bullshit detector on his forehead that basically, when people used long words meaninglessly or jargon meaninglessly, or were trying to baffle you with science, he would bristle and say, Come on, what do you really mean? This is a smoke screen.

Presenter20:56

Are you your father's son when you walk around talking sometimes to some of your students? And as we know, it is possible with a work of art to come out with all sorts of pretentious guff. Can you spot it a mile off?

Christopher Frayling21:08

Oh gosh, yes. Yes, I can. And I love cutting through it. Yes, indeed. And I think part of the education of being at art school is learning how to put your ideas over in a clear way, particularly with the designers. There's much too much obscurantism in that world. And I love cutting through it.

Presenter21:10

And do you tell it to stop it?

Presenter21:22

In that world

Presenter21:25

Your father wouldn't have approved of that that word, would he?

Christopher Frayling21:27

No, no, no, it does slip out every now and again. And of course, you know, one person's jargon is another person's technical language. I understand that. But very often technical language isn't technical language. It's actually smokescreen. It's it's covering the f woolly thinking.

Presenter21:29

I recorded it.

Presenter21:40

Simplicity is the most difficult thing of all.

Christopher Frayling21:42

It is, and it's partly'cause, you know, there were only about three books in the house when when I grew up, and one of them was Rough's Guide to the Turf, you know, and when you're in that sort of situation, uh, you know, you you you deal with things directly.

Presenter21:52

Click number five.

Christopher Frayling21:53

Record number five. This relates to when I did research just after leaving, being an undergraduate at Cambridge, I stayed in Cambridge for a few years to be a research student studying the Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Now, he was an interesting man. He was very direct. He wrote in this from the gut sort of way, hated pretension. And he's the only political philosopher in history, as far as I know, who actually wrote an opera called Le Devin de Village, the village soothsayer. And the very first song called J's Père du Tu Montbonneur, Lost is All My Peace of Mind, still brings all that back to me.

Speaker 422:59

Qu'faire des vita, que faired tour baller.

Speaker 423:10

Oh, birthday Laisa, all the Lisa.

Presenter23:25

Che per du tou monbonneur, lost is all my peace of mind from the opera Le Devin du Village, the village soothsayer, you say that is, with by Jean Jacques Rousseau, sung by Anna Maria Miranda, with the Orchestre de Chambre conducted by Roger Cotte.

Presenter23:39

You managed, Christopher Fredding, to duck advertising and you became an academic, a history man in Exeter and in Bath. And then eventually some years later you took on a post at the Royal College of Art, made to measure for you, Professor of Cultural History. It was, it still is in many ways, unusual to cross that divide from academe, as it were, into art education. What made you so sure it was the right thing for you? What gave you the buzz?

Christopher Frayling24:05

It was 1979 and at that stage it was very, very rare for someone to go from mainstream university into into art and design. And an awful lot of people advised me not to. They said, you know, you're going into a jungle. They're mad. They're strange people. And there's also snobbery, again. I remember uh one one of my first meetings of the uh Vice-Chancellor's Committee, as it was then called, um someone came up to me and said, uh where do you work? I said, The Royal College of Art and he said, Oh, isn't that where they mend fuses?

Christopher Frayling24:34

This was someone from Cambridge. I thought, oh, it's one of those things where you can think of a million things you should have said just afterwards. But there's this snobbery within higher education about.

Presenter24:35

British.

Presenter24:40

Absolutely.

Christopher Frayling24:43

There's the ivory tower where you study things and there's the place where you make and do things. And the way you make and do things is the tradesman's entrance. And I've spent a long, long time trying to sort of redress that.

Presenter24:45

Mm-hmm.

Presenter24:52

If art education is is squeezed at the one end, as you said, by a certain snobbery from the ivory tower, it's squeezed at the other, is it not, by industry, who are

Presenter25:02

I think often quite worried about employing students of art because they think they will be self-indulgent or lacking family.

Christopher Frayling25:09

Lacking focus. There's a terrible phrase in the educational jargon at the moment: oven-ready students.

Presenter25:16

Oh dear.

Christopher Frayling25:17

It's so dreadful. Uh the idea being that a student graduates from art school one day, following morning, turns up at advertising agency, graphics agency, uh car company and is absolutely ready. Of course not in any culture, no one's ever going to arrive on the doorstep on the first day and be oven ready.

Presenter25:33

No, but they're going to think that someone who studied uh history or or mathematics might be more focused, more disciplined, I think is really

Christopher Frayling25:40

Yeah, but but I mean you've got to have people who push the story on and they push it on in their own way. So the more creative they can become, I mean damn it, they're never going to have an opportunity to freeform in this way again. So this is the two years when they can really, really fire on all cylinders and then learn to adapt it and use it.

Presenter25:57

What about those who don't go into industry? What about those who actually do end up attempting to make a living by their art alone? I would have thought these days that there's more possibility of that happening. I mean, there is a great lifestyle demand, isn't there, for affordable.

Christopher Frayling26:10

Oh, huge. That's changed completely. I mean, when I first arrived at the Royal College, the big thing was for artists to aggressively not be collectible. You know, they produced things that were all about being an artist and being angry about collectors and smash capitalism and all that. And absolutely determined not to be bought by anybody. Now there's an active market, there are all sorts of patrons like Satchi, like Tate, whatever it is, Tate Modern.

Presenter26:33

But them apart, I mean I would have thought it would be possible to set up the majority of the market.

Christopher Frayling26:36

No, it is not.

Presenter26:38

Affordable was really

Christopher Frayling26:40

No, no, no, it's true. And we did a survey of our fine art graduates a couple of years ago, and 90% of them on leaving get work as artists in the subject that they've studied and manage to sustain a living these days, which is a remarkable statistic. And that's great, because that confidence comes over into the students. They feel wanted. They feel there's a world that they can go into. It's a lottery with fine art. You can never be sure who's going to take you up. But it's an exciting lottery and a very vibrant one at the moment.

Presenter27:06

Next piece of music.

Christopher Frayling27:08

My next piece of music is the is the title music from a T V series I did in 1992 called The Face of Tutankhamun, and it still sends shivers up and down my spine. It was a great opening to the series and it brings back all the fun of making that programme, indeed all the other programmes that I've done.

Presenter27:53

The title music from The Face of Teuton Carmen by Howard Davidson, title music of one of your many television programmes, Christopher. Antiquities, advertising, religion in the Middle Ages, horror films, and so on. Most of them made in the 1990s. Some such programmes are made now, but not so many, and certainly not put out in mainstream television. What is put out are these lifestyle programmes, which of course these makeovers are all about design. You must love them.

Christopher Frayling28:17

Uh

Christopher Frayling28:18

Well, I should, but I don't. I think, yes, they are about design. Do doing up your room, doing up your garden, doing up your kitchen.

Presenter28:25

Decca.

Christopher Frayling28:26

But yeah, it's all makeovers, superficial makeovers. Let's have it pink this weekend. You know, let's have a Zen meditation area next week and then we'll change it into something else. The trouble is it has a r I don't want to sound too solemn about it, but it has a rather superficial notion of design as style as makeover. When I think it's actually a bit more important than that, you know, it's also about how things work, it's about manufacturing, it's about production, it's about everyday objects which function. You know, do you want a light switch designed by Lawrence Llewellyn Bowen? I doubt it, you know, etc. So I should like lifestyle. And actually some of the programmes touch it, but most of it is basically about encouraging people to buy things.

Presenter29:02

Well, is it? It's it's also because people are interested in it, the same as cooking. It is popular culture, isn't it? It's what people like to do, and to go to their do-it-yourself store and then to indulge in a little bit of artistic creation and design themselves at the window.

Christopher Frayling29:14

I just think it's too much of it. You know, it's clogging up the mid-evening. Well, that and reality television, so-called, are clogging up the the mid-evening slots. When I did The Face of Tarte, it went out mid-evening BBC Two. When I did Nightmare, The Birth of Horror, it went on BBC One at a reasonable hour, you know, before the witching hour. And the medieval series Strange Landscape was six o'clock on a Saturday.

Presenter29:35

But would you now pull in the kinds of audiences that these makeover people bring in?

Christopher Frayling29:38

I like to think so. I think it's a question of variety. What I don't like is ghettoising the arts onto something onto a channel that's that's labeled arts. So let's shove it onto four when only three people watch it. That I don't like.

Presenter29:51

But how would you put across important design on mainstream television, which by definition has to bring in now these days those kinds of big audiences?

Christopher Frayling30:01

Well, I think one way of doing it would be

Christopher Frayling30:03

Solving everyday problems. You'd say, what object really, really irritates you? Everyone has an object that irritates the hell out of them, you know, in their everyday life. The door doesn't open properly. Tiny things. That's a good way into design, I think, because it makes it everyday. But it's also a serious question that, you know, some of these things need redesigning, and the redesigns have had an important impact on our society.

Christopher Frayling30:27

Record number seven. Record number seven is uh a piece of music by the Italian composer Ennio Morricone. It's the final sequence from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, the Spaghetti Western made in nineteen sixty seven.

Speaker 130:33

But

Christopher Frayling30:39

And if you can imagine, you're in the middle of the dusty Spanish desert. There are three men standing there, staring at each other. In fact, I call this sequence an opera in which the arias aren't sung, they're stared. And the three of them are staring at each other. It's a three-way duel, a trillo, not a duello. And this is the music on triumphant mariachi trumpet that accompanies that confrontation.

Presenter31:30

Il Triello from the original soundtrack of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, composed and conducted by Ennio Morricone with the orchestra Unioni Musicisti di Roma. Um Christopher, we're about to send you off to this desert island. You, I know, were godfather, as it were, to the faith zone in the dome. So do we infer from that that you're a religious man?

Christopher Frayling31:50

I'm not I'm a s I'm a seeker. The spiritual side of life is very important, and many people in an art environment feel the same thing, that you know there's more to life than just the material.

Presenter31:58

The spiritual frailing would probably, by the sound of it, be okay on a desert island. The intellectual frailing would go bonkers, wouldn't he?

Christopher Frayling32:02

And then

Christopher Frayling32:05

I'd enjoy the solitude for a year or two, I think, uh to really reflect on what I've been up to in relative tranquillity. Yes, I actually think I'd enjoy that for a year or two.

Presenter32:14

But what about if in the end it became obvious you weren't ever going to escape? How philosophical do you think you could accept yourself?

Christopher Frayling32:22

Well, I think that would be the moment where one started asking the really big questions, questions that perhaps in the Helter Skelter of life you don't have time to ask, and I'd rather appreciate that. But I'd I'd build a boat.

Presenter32:28

To ask.

Christopher Frayling32:32

I mean, I'd I'd rather fancy myself as a boat builder. I don't accept this question, I think. I don't actually. I mean, no, I think fishing and and I'm quite a good fisherman and I'd be able to make a boat. I don't think I'd be able to make a very good house, but uh it would sort of stand up, I think.

Speaker 132:34

You don't accept this question.

Presenter32:36

I don't actually

Christopher Frayling32:45

No, yes, okay. A bit of time for reflection and to meditate and and so on, but get the hell out and back into culture as quickly as I can, really. Last record. My last record is a piece of Gabriel Faure, Cantique de Jean Racine. Now I heard this at the memorial service of a friend of mine.

Christopher Frayling33:03

A couple of years ago.

Christopher Frayling33:05

And it completely blew my head off. I don't know. You know, music is so often to do with the frame of mind you're in when you first hear it. And it just washed all over me and it means a lot to me, this piece of music.

Presenter34:12

Part of Contique de Gen Racine by Gabrielle Foray, and that was played and sung by the City of Birmingham Chorus and Orchestra conducted by Louis Ferremo. Now if you could only take one of those eight records, Christopher, which one would you take?

Christopher Frayling34:25

I'd go for The Good, the Bad and the Ugly by Ennio Morricone. I think in moments of doubt on the island when I was beginning to despair, this would fi that Marianchi trumpet would fire me up and I'd be able to get up in the morning and face life again. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

Presenter34:27

Mm-hmm.

Presenter34:34

Thank you.

Presenter34:37

Yeah.

Presenter34:38

Act it out on the sand. And your book, we give you, as you know, the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare.

Christopher Frayling34:43

I take Don Quixote by Cervantes. The relationship between Sancho Panza and Don Quixote.

Christopher Frayling34:50

Is for me moving, amusing, and says a lot about me actually. Here's this popular culture man, Sancho Panza, who's rather coarse, he belches, he rides around on his donkey, he uses bad language sometimes, and here's the Don, this chivalric sort of character. And the relationship between the two is just wonderful, and I'd love to have the opportunity to re-read all that.

Presenter35:11

And your luxury.

Christopher Frayling35:13

I wonder if I'm going to be allowed this. I would like to take the Victoria and Albert Museum. Now it would stimulate me hugely. I could sort out the signage system. Now the thing about the V and A is that it's awfully difficult to find your way round the building. I could sit on the desert island working out uh the signage. I'd love to have the V N A if that was allowed, but I promise not to use it as shelter.

Speaker 135:22

You know, is it?

Presenter35:23

It's all for

Speaker 135:23

Yeah.

Presenter35:32

It's a deal. Sir Christopher Fraling, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island is.

Christopher Frayling35:35

Thank you, I've loved it.

Speaker 435:44

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