Geraldine James

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

Presenter0:30

My Castaway this week is an actress. She became a household name twenty years ago when in the television series Duel in the Crown she played the part of the restrained boarding school girl who discovers seeds of rebellion within her. The part suited her perfectly. She was born in the home counties into a family where middle class propriety concealed a deal of stress and unhappiness. She defied her father in becoming an actress and went on to win an award for one of her first television performances as a profoundly deaf prostitute in Dummy. Since then, she's starred in the ITV series Band of Gold, played Porsche opposite Dustin Hoffman in Peter Hall's production of The Merchant of Venice, and has been seen most recently in the film Calendar Girls and on television in He Knew He Was Right. The characters she plays, she says, are separate from me, so I'll never be a star. A star is someone who makes all their characters into themselves. She is Geraldine James. What do you mean by that, Geraldine? Give me an example of a of star who makes all the characters into him or herself.

Presenter1:33

Um I think Hollywood does that with people. I think it wants you're asked to. People see you do something and they say, You did that in that programme, in that film, whatever it is, come back and do that for us,'cause we know you can do it.

Presenter1:45

And I think what I've tried to do is to go, Well, I've done that, so I don't want to do it again. People don't recognize me, or they think they know me. They think I work in the library, or I'm you know, I'm at the parent at the school or whatever. But doesn't that make you a very, very good character actress? Isn't that exactly what you are?

Geraldine James1:57

But

Presenter2:02

I suppose I'm more I yes, I think I'm a character actress. Because you know, you can play something like Lady Maud in Blot on the Landscape, and you're really quite young then. I think you based it on your head mistress, in your And at the other end of the spectrum you can play the prostitute in in Band of Gold, you know.

Geraldine James2:05

Because

Presenter2:18

Yes, I think it's about imagination. I think I've always had quite a strong imagination. And about not particularly

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feeling comfortable as myself, so needing to reinvent myself in different guises. Is that the secret? Not liking yourself? About not liking. I've got much, much better uh as I've got older, but when I was young

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Between jobs, I'd sort of be floundering about not knowing what to do with myself, because myself was exactly what I wasn't used to being, and I needed to go off and.

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Create another person and pretend and put on somebody else's clothes, somebody else's words, somebody else's look, and then I was, then I felt at home.

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Now your most recent film I mentioned is Calendar Girls, hugely successful, as everybody will know. It's kind of female answer to the Full Monty, wasn't it? The WI women who posed discreetly nude, I think, for a calendar to raise money for charity. You did not get your kit off, and you were jealous of those who did, I'm told.

Geraldine James3:03

He was met.

Geraldine James3:12

Then you would just

Presenter3:14

Well, it was such fun. I mean, they all had such a great time. And it was the first time in my life I actually said to a d director, Can't I take my clothes off too? And I tried to put in a line saying, Are you still looking for Miss November? But they wouldn't let me. They kept saying, You're the baddie, shut up. You're the baddie. You were the sort of rather prissy head of the branch of the WR. Yes, I was fictional. I was completely fictional.

Geraldine James3:28

You're the baddie, you

Presenter3:35

But there must have been a voice in there somewhere going disapprove, disapprove, so I was the personification of that person. And meanwhile, Helen Mir and Julie Walters, Celia Imrie, and all the rest of them had wonderful times hiding their bosoms behind ice buns with sort of little red cherries on, or whatever it was. It's interesting that they should all agree to do it and that you wanted to do it, i.e., take your clothes off in that moment. Is this kind of safety in numbers, really? Yes, exactly. You know, we're all doing it, so let's all join in and do it. And apparently, the day they did it, it was absolutely wonderful. They all had a great time. And you weren't there. And I wasn't there. I said, I'll come and just be there anyway.

Geraldine James3:47

And I

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Record number one. Tell me about that.

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Record number one is a piece of music I only discovered quite recently, and it's a albinone concerto for the trumpet.

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It's one of those pieces of music that you hear it and it just goes straight into your heart and just gives it a huge twist and a pull, which I love happening to me. I'm always

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going for emotional music and this is about as emotional as you can get I think.

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Part of the slow movement of Al Binone's concerto opers nine number two with Frank Berger on trumpet and Hans Dieter Weber playing the organ.

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It was, of course, your role in Jewel and the Crown which really placed you in the public consciousness, Geraldine, the marvellous television dramatisation of Paul Scott's Raj Quartet dealing with the decline and fall of the British in India. You played Sarah Leighton, the Army Colonel's daughter who discovered these seeds of rebellion in herself. Apparently it was a part you coveted because you identified yourself with it. Why? Um I'd been in India doing working on Gandhi with Richard Attenborough and somebody said you must read Paul Scott's Raj Quartet. So I was in India reading these four fantastic books and just found this character. And funnily enough my sister came to visit when I was there and I just realised all these echoes that were going on. But what were the echoes? The two sisters, the older sister and Sarah Layton is the older of the two. Susan is the most apparently successful. She's the one who everybody wants to go out with. She's the pretty one. She's the one who her parents love most. Sarah is rather lumpy and there's a line in it where she sees her face looking back at her and the bones in her face that won't move and won't reveal the person she feels she is inside and that's been something I've felt a lot during my life. Their mother is an alcoholic and our mother was an alcoholic and that has a very profound effect on a child. And when I was auditioning for the part.

Presenter6:54

Christopher Moran and Jim O'Brien kept saying, Well, why you? Why should you be right for this part? And eventually I had to own up and say, I've been there. I know what it's like to be in the loo, in the cubicle next to your mother, and hearing the rattle of brown paper bag and the gin bottle coming out, and just that sort of despairing feeling. That was the sort of one of the links, but it was also the idea of feeling that the world was wrong, feeling that the society she was in.

Presenter7:21

Was making a mistake and not having the confidence to say, I don't agree with this, and having to discover that in herself.

Geraldine James7:28

So

Presenter7:28

It was a V?

Presenter7:29

She's a very sad character and mm very frustrated. You you I c I can remember the feeling of it always wanting her to take action, and she never did, as it were, until later.

Geraldine James7:39

And and

Presenter7:41

Playing her in the uh early eighties, I remember wanting to call across the years to Sarah Leighton and go, You were right, it's okay. And you lived with her for eighteen months. Did it depress you? Did you come out of it? You must have found it very difficult to sort of slough her off in the end. I used to think that it took me as long to get away from a part as it had taken to play the part, and eighteen months was rather a long time.

Geraldine James8:05

Was there a lot?

Presenter8:06

And of course, once the programme was shown, I was offered fabulous quantities of work, but all playing the same character, and that's what I don't want to do. So that was quite difficult to actually get

Presenter8:20

Get moving in a different part. So you turned them down, but finally you accepted Lady Maud in Blot, Blot on the Landscape. Blot on the landscape. Is that the one that followed, Maurice? Yes. Absolutely the one that followed. It took six months to find it, but I found it and they everybody thought I'd gone completely bonkers playing this mad woman, but it was such fun. They had this wonderful costume designer called Ian Adley who made these sort of gorgeously thick pleated tweed skirts and clumpy shoes.

Geraldine James8:27

Yeah.

Presenter8:43

And they tried to pad my legs, but didn't work,'cause the sponge kept slipping down inside my ties.

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And I had a wig to make my forehead even shallower than it is. I had this sort of silly little piece on my head.

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Record number two.

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Record number two goes right back to Maidenhead in Berkshire and my beloved papa, Doctor Gerald Thomas.

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There were three of us and three children we used to sit around and sing this song, join in with Peter Sellers and Sophie Loren.

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Singing Goodness Gracious Me, all about marvellous doctors.

Speaker 39:18

Oh Doctor, I'm in trouble.

Speaker 29:23

Well, goodness gracious me!

Speaker 39:25

For every time a certain man is standing next to me A flash comes to my face And my pulse begins to race It goes boom boody boom booty boom booty boom booty boom booty boom booty boom boom boom Boom booty boom

Geraldine James9:43

Well, goodness gracious me

Speaker 29:45

Yeah.

Presenter9:45

Peter Sellers and Sophia Loren and goodness gracious me and um memories of your father singing round the house when you were small. Your father was a cardiologist and your mother was or had been a a nurse. This is the nineteen fifties in the home counties. And there was a kind of obsession with class, I mean not unusual there and then not uncommon now, it has to be said. But but what form did it take in your family?

Geraldine James10:05

But

Presenter10:08

We had a wonderful house for children in near Maidenhead, this huge rambling Victorian Gothic house with a vast garden and sort of jungly bits and stables and summer houses and all of that.

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But

Presenter10:24

We had to be it was always sort of moving forward.

Presenter10:27

I just remember being having to be better than everybody else. And what would have been then your father's aspirations for you as a girl or for your brother as a boy? Were they different?

Presenter10:38

Oh, very much so. Richard was the one who was going to go. He was going to go to Eton. He didn't in the end. He was going to go to Cambridge,'cause my dad did go to Cambridge. Um, you know, I was a girl, and I should behave like a girl and look like a girl, and of course I didn't. I ran I climbed trees and went around in roller skates and did somersaults and was rather embarrassing and showing off all the time, I think. And in the end i you um you went you were sent away to boarding school, um, where for some reason I gather you had trouble with the uniform lists. What happened?

Presenter11:06

I failed my eleven class, so I couldn't go to Maidenhead Grammar School. And I remember coming down one morning at breakfast and hearing the the dark tones saying, Well, she'll have to go to Downhouse then. And my poor mum was out for the count ninety percent of the time. She didn't know what she was doing. And this rather posh boarding school eventually sent a clotheslist, and it had things on it that we didn't know what on earth it meant. And we had to go to a shop called Daniel Neal, which no longer exists, and buy something called a gibber, which was apparently worn by mediaeval knights under their armour.

Presenter11:37

What was it? It was a sort of sack that you wore over a a funny little blouse. We also had to have something called um it it said three B B's.

Presenter11:48

A BB is a bust bodice. So you had to wear bust bodices. Sort of liberty bodice. I wasn't I wasn't actually a candidate for this thing until I was about fourteen, so it didn't matter. I just went with a vest.

Presenter12:00

Knicker linings. There were linings, they were called, six pairs of linings, which went inside these huge green outer knickers. It was all completely. Save them washing the knickers too often. Yes, probably. We weren't allowed to wash our hair more than once a fortnight, which was absolutely awesome.

Geraldine James12:06

It was all completely.

Geraldine James12:09

We're on couch a web

Geraldine James12:12

You better

Presenter12:14

couldn't cope with all of this. Well, she she got it wrong. She thought that was it. She thought, right, we've been to Daniel Niel, we've bought all this extraordinary bizarre stuff. So she put it in a trunk and sent me to that. And then when I got to the school, aged eleven and more frightened than I've ever been in my life.

Presenter12:28

And Miss Samuels, my housemistress, unpacked my trunk and went, Oh, dear, dear, where's the muffty? And of course we'd only got uniform, and at this school you only wore uniform in the morning and then you wore your own clothes, and I didn't have any of my own clothes. No, Mufti could be described. So Jerry, were you Jerry then? Jerry Thomas, yes. And I was

Geraldine James12:40

Snowmaf

Geraldine James12:42

President.

Presenter12:45

mightily ribbed for being called Thomas,'cause they were all called things with triple barrel names and

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owned Warwickshire. They were all frightfully grand at this school. So I had to invent myself as a frightfully g grand person. So I gave myself a double barreled name. Which is what? Vaughan Thomas. Jerry, if I haven't told anybody that.

Geraldine James13:01

Briefly I haven't

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I used to write to my mum as the Honourable.

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Pauling So I thought I had to play this extraordinary game.

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But at the same time, in order to overcome it all, this oh you obviously had some inferiority complex. You became the class clown, which is pretty classic, hmm.

Presenter13:19

It is fairly classic, isn't it? I did a sort of comedy routine in my English class with a pencil tin that I had. I'd dread to think this was probably awful, but anyway, an English teacher came in and spotted this and thought, Aha, I see, and cast me as the artful Dodger.

Presenter13:34

In the form play. And I had this hat that was one of those expanding top hats. You sort of tapped it and it went wheep and shot out, and then you pushed it back in again. Something terribly important and moving was happening in the play, and I was at the back fiddling about with my hat, and I suddenly heard this noise, and I realized everyone was laughing at me, and I thought it was fabulous, and sort of discovered audience reaction, I suppose, and performance.

Presenter14:00

Number three. Number three is Nina Simone. And I mean, I've always loved Nina Simone, but Nina Simone playing the piano is extraordinary.

Presenter14:08

And I learnt the piano from the age of five. I wanted to play jazz piano because really I wanted to be Nina Simone.

Speaker 214:20

Say love me, leave me, let me be lonely You won't believe me, but I love you only I'd rather be lonely than happy with somebody else

Speaker 214:31

You might find the night time the right time for kissing. Night time is my time for just reminiscing. Regretting instead of forgetting with somebody else.

Speaker 214:44

There'll be no one unless that someone is you

Speaker 214:49

I intend to be independently blue Say I want your love, don't want to borrow Have it today to give back tomorrow Your love is my love, there's no love for nobody else

Presenter16:12

Nina Simone accompanying herself in Love Me or Leave Me. And then one day at boarding school, Geraldine James, when you were fourteen, uh you took a a dramatic telephone call from your sister.

Presenter16:24

Yes, and we weren't allowed telepho telephone calls unless it was um something fairly crucial.

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And it was my sister, and it was a Sunday evening, and she said, I just thought I should tell you that

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Dad is divorcing Mummy and is going to marry a woman called Phyllis.

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And that was it. I had no idea.

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And I kept it entirely to myself, because I felt

Presenter16:47

so ashamed of being uh you know, of having divorcing parents. Did you understand that, or did you think this must be to do with mother's drinking? Yes, I think so. I mean, we knew they hadn't got on, and it's no fun sitting on the stairs listening to horrible arguments going on all the time, and feeling

Presenter17:06

Because we weren't told what was going on at all, you make it up for yourself, so you feel guilty. I think that's it. Did you try to talk to your father about it?

Geraldine James17:13

Yeah.

Presenter17:15

I don't think so. I remember my brother once saying, Mummy's drunk, isn't she? and getting a smack round the head and told Never, ni I never want to hear that word in this house again. It was qu it was embarrassing.

Presenter17:25

And when the divorce finally happened it really did turn your life on its head, didn't it? Because at some point apparently you were made wards of court. Yes, we were. And my head mistress, who was an amazing, wonderful woman, called me into her room at school and said, I've just read in the local paper you're wards of court and I didn't know and all I knew was that

Presenter17:46

Phyllis, the stepmother, had said to us, had got us together and said, I've married your father, not you. You can no longer consider this to be your home. And of course Mummy was trying to sort herself out and in various um uh drying out places. So one felt very adrift. So you didn't have a home? No, not really.

Geraldine James18:02

So you didn't have a home.

Geraldine James18:04

But it will

Presenter18:07

Not one that he was prepared to share with us. I remember my sister, this really upset me, and probably her as well. She was out for a weekend with friends from school, and she drove past our house, and she ran in, and we had a swimming pool then. As she walked in the drive, she could see Daddy waving up by the swimming pool, so she waved back, and he was waving. He was going, No, no, and he ran down the lawn, going, No, no, you're not supposed to be here. And she sort of went, Oh.

Presenter18:34

And had to get back into the car with her friends and go because it wasn't a designated home weekend. So, where did you live?

Presenter18:42

Well, I stayed at school and we were only allowed home, um

Presenter18:45

three weekends a term anyway, so it was a huge relief. But in the holidays? I don't know. I think it was fine. I mean, I think we we could go. I mean, they'd they'd have an arrangement that poor El Phyllis had to put up with us for half of the summer holiday or whatever. You know, I mean,

Geraldine James18:57

But

Presenter19:01

Just a little psychologically disturbing. It was tough. It was tough.

Presenter19:06

Record number four. This was actually my brother and I were driving in his little Fiat six hundred through Gloucestershire or somewhere to go to a party, and this music came on the radio and we literally stopped the car to listen to it because we'd never heard anything like it. And it's Nick Drake.

Presenter19:21

And it's his from his first album, which is Five Leaves Left, and it's a song called Man in a Shed.

Presenter19:26

But she lived in a house so very

Geraldine James19:33

For him it seemed like some very distant light.

Presenter19:41

So when he called her.

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Let's share to men

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She said I'm sorry you just

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Have to find the friend.

Presenter19:56

Nick Drake and Man in a Shed. So are you suggesting, Geraldine, that the insecurity born of this background you're describing is part of what made you want to be an actress? You were saying earlier that you liked becoming other people because you didn't quite so well. I think so. I think.

Geraldine James20:10

Quite so.

Presenter20:14

I n needed to find a way of presenting myself to the world, and I found it by

Presenter20:20

Being other people. But when you told your father that's what you wanted to do. No, it didn't go down well at all. What happened?

Presenter20:26

I've paid for this very expensive education. You're not going to throw it all away by going off and being an actress.

Presenter20:32

And I said, Well, I am, and I'm very glad I did. I really felt it very strongly. I knew that it was the only thing I could do.

Presenter20:41

And that I had any desire to do. And indeed, you did go on and do it and, you know, have been a great success, as we know.

Presenter20:49

The background to all of this, as you say, is this very bumpy relationship with your father, apart from anything else.

Presenter20:54

And this non-communication, not talking about your mother being an alcoholic, not being able to explain to him why you wanted to be an actress and his understanding. Di were you ever eventually able to have those kinds of conversations with him? Yes, I'm very glad to say. Eventually he married for a third time and very happily to a wonderful woman and

Presenter21:14

He lived in Cornwall. He had a house in Cornwall, and I went down with him one weekend, and we both just sat there.

Presenter21:19

And talked for the first time in our lives about the truth of his having the way he left Mummy and what had happened. And he spoke about what it's like to be married to an alcoholic. And we had a great, great sort of moment of friendship and honesty and openness. And we were shouting at each other, and it wasn't, you know, it wasn't pleasant, but it absolutely made such a difference. And we were very, very good friends. And did he ever admit you'd done the right thing in insisting on being an actress? Yes, he.

Presenter21:51

It was actually dummy. It was the first sort of big thing I did on tele. I was nominated for a BAFTA Award, and he.

Presenter21:58

sent me some money to buy a frock to wear to the awards. And he wrote me a letter and he said, I was wrong and I'm very glad you went against me. And he was fantastic from then on, which was great. But did he say, Hey, you're really, really good? I watched you and I was elated.

Presenter22:15

Yes, and of course he was the voice I always he was the call I always wanted after something was shown on telly. He knew I was all right in Dummy because I was playing this deaf girl because he was on the ward the day after and one of the sisters apparently was looking rather gloomy and he said, What's the matter with you? And she said, I saw this film on telly last night and I just find it rather sad and he said what? And she said it was this thing about a deaf girl and he said he said oh that was my daughter acting the part.

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And she said, Oh, doctor Thomas, I had no idea your daughter was deaf.

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And he thought, Whoa, she can act.

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What are we, record number five?

Presenter22:51

I was very lucky to go to a drama school called the Drama Centre and be taught by some amazingly wonderful people and it was a great, great training.

Presenter23:00

And I also met the man who became my husband and love of my life, and his great passion is Bob Dylan.

Presenter23:08

This song

Presenter23:10

It's very much about the late sixties and about rebellion and about wanting the world to change.

Geraldine James23:15

Senators, Congressmen, please heed the call.

Geraldine James23:20

Don't stand in the doorway, don't block up the hall Or he that gets hurt will be he who has stalled The battle outside raging Will soon shake your windows and rattle your walls For the times they are changing

Presenter23:41

Yeah.

Presenter23:44

Bob Dylan and the times they are a changing. Let's talk, Geraldine, about that first film that got your father on side with the acting dummies. It was 1977. You'd have been in your mid-twenties. It was a kind of drama documentary, wasn't it, about a profoundly deaf girl who became a prostitute. Possibly an early victim of the Yorkshire Ripper. Yes. She was beaten up by somebody and left for dead in this motel room.

Geraldine James24:04

Yes.

Geraldine James24:05

Now she raised

Presenter24:11

I sort of learnt to communicate with her.

Presenter24:13

And she I was talking about it and I was saying, Tell me about this man and she d she said he had mead he sort of did this thing about he'd got a beard and then I said Did you did you know his name? and she said she said Peter she sort of did the thing about and I oh, Peter.

Presenter24:28

And this was before your man was caught, so that was quite frightening. And she was an amazing, she just had the most one has, because she's still very much with us.

Geraldine James24:33

Frightening.

Presenter24:39

A wonderful spirit for life. So why would the director have um chosen you, you know, a sort of fine boned, fine skinned Southerner, to play uh the part of a um a deaf prostitute from Bradford?

Presenter24:53

My first ever telly was a part in the Sweeney playing a croupier. And the morning after that was shown, I got a phone call saying they're making a drama documentary and they saw you on telly last night. Will you come and meet the director? And I thought, oh, good, they're making a drama documentary about croupiers. So I sort of got very dressed up and went off to meet this man who opened the door and said, oh, good, you're not too sophisticated. And I thought, damn, because I thought that's exactly what I was trying to be. And he started telling me this story about this woman. And it was everything that I believed acting should be to do with transformation. And I mean, it was just so exciting. It was. And you did your research, obviously, by talking to her, as you said. But you also, I think, went shopping with earplugs in to discover what it was like.

Speaker 325:27

Um

Presenter25:35

I had to find out what it was like to be deaf. And so I used to wander round and just I didn't have earplugs in. I just had to.

Presenter25:45

remind myself that I was deaf and pretended to be deaf. And I went into a shop and it was really shocking because I could hear them giggling because I was trying to speak as she did to to buy something. And it just really brought it home to me that um how badly we treat people.

Presenter26:02

You of course went on to play a prostitute again many years later in the mid-nineties in Band of Gold for IT V. Did you research again for that? Did you? Yes, we did. That was amazing. I met some fantastic people on that. And I've made a very good friend of a woman who I met up there, who I've sort of based Rose, my character, on. Rose Garratt. Yes.

Geraldine James26:21

Yeah.

Presenter26:22

sort of tart with a heart, but much more. I mean, great compassion. She's a very popular character, isn't she? People are very happy. Wasn't that extraordinary?'Cause she was she was the sort of, you know, very gritty and, you know, raw and rather scary.

Geraldine James26:27

Wasn't that extraordinary because she was

Presenter26:33

And people took to her, which was great.

Presenter26:36

Um, Old Spice, they used to call me, but um record number six. Record number six is it's the um it's the cello, and it's Pablo Casals, and he's playing a Spanish folk song, really, called Nana.

Presenter26:50

And it's just absolutely beautiful.

Presenter27:51

Nana by Manuel DeFalla played by Pablo Casals and Eugene Istomin.

Presenter27:56

Tell me about your poor mother then, Geraldine. What what happened to her in the end? She discovered um God and AA and she was saved, I mean completely saved by them. And she was fine until she got alcohol-related Alzheimer's. But she had a very sort of good end of her life until she got very ill. But again, were you ever reconciled at some point during the course of this when she was dry? Were you ever able to talk about everything that you were doing? Yes, and she was always she was very loving and very, very sweet to all of us, and we all were always very close. And she and I had a funny connection. I was on stage once when I was very young.

Geraldine James28:19

But again

Presenter28:40

in Rep while she was still drinking, and I I was in Exeter, and I suddenly knew I had to get back to London, and I found somebody in the company to give me a lift, and and arrived back at her house in Putney.

Presenter28:52

and just knew something terrible had happened and and I sort of eventually found her completely out in her bed but completely sort of unconscious. And she'd fallen over and cut her hand and there was sort of blood everywhere and it was it was horrible. But anyway I sort of cleaned her up and went to sleep and in the morning she was standing in the little spare room at the back and she just said she said you came and I said I said yes I just suddenly knew I had to be here.

Presenter29:17

And she said afterwards that that was one of the moments that that sort of made her realize she was at Rock Bottom. And they say you have to get to Rock Bottom before you can get back out again. She was a wonderful, wonderful woman. And strange to say, although your father went on to marry for for a third time in their lives, his and his your mother's were completely separate, weren't they? They died within a few weeks of each other. I think I don't think that was a coincidence at all. They'd been I mean m Mamia was always holding the candle for for him and when she never found anyone else? No, um she wasn't interested. And and how's that whole experience of your um childhood and and early adult life which you describe so graphically how's that affected your attitude to your own marriage and your own child? You have a daughter of eighteen. You must have been determined to be a very different kind of parent.

Presenter30:07

Well, yes, we tried, don't we? But both Joe and I had had close siblings. I always felt my sister was n get nipping at my heels and I was in her way and all that sort of thing. And it was similar with my with Joe and his brother. So when Ellie came along, we both wanted to wait for a while before we had any more children. And then, of course, when we went right now then, we reality was that it was too late and we couldn't, which was very sad. But and actually I had an email from Ellie recently, because she's away.

Presenter30:38

Just sort of saying that she's glad that we can say we love each other. And I think, you know, now it's everybody does, but in, you know, in the early fifties you really, really didn't. Number seven.

Presenter30:50

is for dear Ellie, who's um such a sort of amazing sweet person, and we have great cuddles, the three of us, and we often have cuddles, in the middle of the kitchen floor listening to this um song by Charlie.

Speaker 231:04

Think I'd leave your side, baby

Geraldine James31:11

You know me better than that

Speaker 231:17

Uh

Geraldine James31:17

God leave you down when you're down, huh?

Speaker 231:19

Your knees

Speaker 231:25

I wouldn't do that.

Presenter31:26

Yeah.

Presenter31:28

Oh we found

Presenter31:33

Chade and by your side. You once said, Geraldine, and as you gather, I've been reading some very ancient cuttings.

Presenter31:40

That you didn't know what it was like to feel you'd done something well, because at the end of a roll you always um, despite the fact you look strong, burst into tears in the bushes. Is that still the case?

Presenter31:53

The other day I've just started a new job up in Manchester, and after the first day I thought I th I they asked me to go back early and I thought well th they're gonna sack me, they're gonna replace me. Professional insecurity is just the way you are. I know it's ridiculous. But personally personally I'm much more confident and that's that is

Geraldine James32:02

Yeah.

Geraldine James32:04

The way you are.

Presenter32:11

ninety percent due to down to Joe because he's just incredibly supportive and encouraging and strong and good and clear and lovely. But he ain't going to be on your desert island.

Geraldine James32:22

This uh this

Presenter32:23

a kind of practical self-sufficiency in you somewhere? Um I if there's if there's water and shade, I think I'll be fine. I'm not very good at m I'm not great at my own company.

Presenter32:34

I don't relish the thought of spending a lot of time on my own.

Presenter32:37

I don't know what I'll be able to do. I'll build things. We used to make dams. We used to love being on sort of streams and damming them up. I'd be quite good at doing all that sort of thing. I'll probably build a shelter.

Presenter32:47

Lost record. Mm, well this'll help.

Presenter32:50

This is the wonderful Bach.

Presenter32:53

And it's the um, it's the Sir Matthew Passion, and this is the final chorus. Why do you want this?

Presenter32:59

Because I want to learn all the different parts because I used to sing in a choir and I loved singing in a choir. I loved playing in an orchestra and I love being part of a company. So this is about the whole. I think this is joyous. I think this is wonderful in spite of its rather gloomy title.

Presenter34:14

The English Baroque Soloists and the Monteverde Choir, conducted by John Eliot Gardiner, singing the very last part of Bachsen, Matthew Passchen, Wis Zetzen undsmittreinen Nieder, In tears of grief, dear Lord, we leave thee.

Presenter34:28

Geraldine, we have to leave the two. If you could only take one of those records, which one would you take? It would be the St. Matthew Passion. Hmm. And what about your book?

Presenter34:37

My book would be The Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes, which is about the beginnings of Australia. And it's a fantastic illustration of George and England and the prison ships and all of that. But I think crucially on The Desert Island it does talk about creating a new place. And I think I might need it a bit of help. And it's a huge book and will take me a long time to read. And you get a luxury. Yes, thank you very much. It's been difficult choosing eight pieces of music. So I'm going to say this quickly before you say I can't, but I'd like an iPod with all the tracks I haven't been allowed.

Presenter35:10

I'm not sure you're a large organ getting into terrible trouble, but there you are. An iPod. Geraldine James, thank you very much indeed for letting us see your desert island discs. Thank you.

Presenter35:25

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