Desmond Morris

Speaker 30:00

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.

Presenter0:29

Mike Castaway this week is an anthropologist. Far from being a dry observer of the human condition, he's enjoyed participation as much as academic study. He was a teenage boyfriend of Diana Dawes. He taught a chimpanzee to paint and filmed the female orgasm for a B B C television series.

Presenter0:47

A lonely childhood in Wiltshire, surrounded by a menagerie of pets, led first to a job as a zoologist and then as a presenter of television programmes. His series Zoo Time explored the relationship between men and animals, but his book The Naked Ape, published in 1967, took the lid off the whole thing, demonstrating to an excited readership that man is a risen ape, not a fallen angel. Since then he's continued to astonish and explain, in a series of books and television programmes, the world in which we live and our place in it. I'm not happy to die, he says, until I've seen the entire planet. He is Desmond Morris. Not wishing to be cruel, Desmond, but I mean you at seventy six you're slightly pushing it for time. I mean, how much more of it have you got to see?

Desmond Morris1:34

Well, I've been to ninety countries so far. I I'd like to get to a hundred before I die, just for fun. But that will still leave a hundred that I haven't seen, which is sad, because I would like to see the entire planet.

Presenter1:45

And you have been cramming it in all your life, really, haven't you? And that's been your approach to life: if I'm going to do it, let's do it now.

Desmond Morris1:51

Yes, because I always uh thought I would die young. Um the males in my ancestry have always died young, and I thought I would be one of them. And so I didn't think I'd got all that much time left, and so I've always been trying to pack it in.

Presenter2:06

And what you've done and what you've obviously enjoyed most of your professional life is you've people watched. And I have to say it does seem that the epitome of it now is Big Brother. I mean, is it any good to you? Do you watch it scientifically?

Desmond Morris2:18

Well, about five, six years ago, a Dutchman got in touch with me. He said, Look, I'm going to put a lot of people in a house, and I'm going to have cameras all around, and we're going to watch their behaviour. Would you like to come in on it with me? I said, Well, it sounds okay. Is it a serious scientific experiment? He said, Well, we're going to also have a game show because they're going to have to vote one another out. And I said, No, I don't like the sound of it. He's now worth 600 million, I'm told. Because he was the man who invented Big Brother.

Presenter2:43

But is it a serious scientific study?

Desmond Morris2:45

Well, it it it has serious elements in it. For somebody like myself

Desmond Morris2:50

Who is interested in the nuances of behaviour, of watching behaviour, it's a feast because I can see real people, ordinary people, behaving. Admittedly, they're being watched, but they soon forget that, particularly. Do they? Do you think that's when they become emotional they do, certainly. And you can see some very interesting patterns of behaviour there, and I have been asked to write about that.

Presenter3:00

Do they have to be a little bit more?

Presenter3:08

But it is also, isn't it, an example of the second of your best selling theses, which is it's a human zoo. They are caged animals, which is why, as you wrote back in the human zoo, you know, they do hit out, literally again in this last series, at each other, don't they?

Desmond Morris3:16

Yeah.

Desmond Morris3:21

Yes, if you restrict people to that degree, it increases the tension between them. And of course they select people who are have opposite views to increase that possibility. The one thing they did wrong this year was to stop the show for uh an hour or two when there was trouble, because that trouble would have resolved itself.

Presenter3:37

That's when it gets really interesting, too.

Desmond Morris3:39

Yeah, but you see, they thought it was scary because there was going to be a fight or something. But in fact, there was very little viola. It appeared violent, but there was very little violence. And they didn't give the people involved a chance to resolve that violence. Because it's an amazing phenomenon how the human species, wildly overpopulated, evolving in tiny tribes, now living in huge cities, and yet the vast majority of people are incredibly peaceful and cooperative. That's our nature, by nature.

Presenter4:08

It's all a long way from your original bit of reality television for live in 1956, which was Zoo time, and I want to hear about that in a moment. But let's pause and have your first record.

Desmond Morris4:17

Well, my wife gave me a nice birthday surprise. She said, I'm going to take you to see something really special and I was taken off to see this incredible cir well, it isn't really a circus. Cirque de Soleil is a surrealist event. It's a magical magical event. And the music is very strange.

Desmond Morris4:36

I'd like to hear something from their music.

Speaker 44:39

Part of life shining alive.

Speaker 44:45

My hero means profession, Alec.

Speaker 44:50

Beautiful roll rings be

Speaker 44:53

I'm a giant star, so excree.

Speaker 44:59

There is a love in the Regent Adec.

Speaker 45:05

A joyous, magical field.

Presenter5:09

Alegria, the music of the Circ du Soleil. So, Bernarda Television, 1956, Zoo Time, Desmond Morris, Curator of Mammals at London Zoo, sitting at his desk, I think, in London Zoo, which was turned into a bit of a studio with a snake round his neck or a bush baby in his hand. I mean, that was the top and the bottom of it, really, wasn't it? It was live.

Desmond Morris5:26

Baby

Desmond Morris5:30

That takes me back. Yes, it was it was uh B V before video. Um and it was very exciting because of course animals are unpredictable. Uh I was on the uh live for half an hour each week and you didn't know what was going to happen. And that was what I think gave it its appeal. People used to watch Shoe Time to see what would bite me next week.

Presenter5:49

Well, absolutely. We thought the snake around you. I mean, you had a cobra there once or twice. Well, there was.

Desmond Morris5:50

We talked

Desmond Morris5:52

Well, the worst moment of all was because being at London Zoo, we couldn't treat the cobra. It had to be a proper intact cobra. Because, of course, in North Africa, the snake charmers, they all take out the fangs and things, but we wouldn't hurt a snake to do that. So this cobra could kill. I said to the reptile overseas, I said, look.

Desmond Morris6:13

Is there some way we can protect the crew from this? I mean, we're taking risks, but why should they have to. So don't worry. I will tape its tail into the bottom of the snake charmer's basket, which he did.

Desmond Morris6:24

What we hadn't checked was it was just about to shed its skin and it left its shed skin neatly taped in the bottom of the basket. So that was that was one of the hairier moments. We had lots of moments like that.

Presenter6:34

It was also on Zoo time, wasn't it, that you had Congo the chimpanzee who could paint, which created a furore in the art world, really. I mean, if an animal can paint, you know, what is man, what is art?

Desmond Morris6:45

Well, I was seriously interested in the origin of art, and people had always said that the beautiful Kay painted in Lasco that this was the birth of art. I'd always said that's rubbish. That's the adolescence of art. It's not the birth of art. So I thought, how can I get right back to the very beginning as the first artistic impulse? And I discovered that Congo, my chimpanzee, would do drawings or paint pictures. And I did a serious analysis of this because it was clear that he did have.

Desmond Morris7:13

Thematic variation. He would restrict his pictures to a particular space. He would know when he'd finished and wouldn't go on any more.

Presenter7:19

So he didn't go over the edges and he didn't he didn't bite the brass.

Desmond Morris7:21

And if you took it away before he'd finished, he would scream, and if you tried to get it go on after he'd finished, he wouldn't. So even the chimpanzee brain was interested in making a visual pattern and controlling it and varying it.

Presenter7:33

Mm-hmm.

Presenter7:35

But the art world got very upset.

Desmond Morris7:36

Well, when there was an exhibition of his work at the ICA, they said to me, We'd like to sell the paper. I said, No, no, no, these aren't for sale. This is a scientific experiment. And of course people who hated modern art were able to use it as a joke and the newspapers treated it as a joke. But the the artists, the serious artists, didn't treat it as a joke.

Presenter7:57

Picasso liked it. Picasso got one, didn't he?

Desmond Morris7:59

Picasso was given one, and he when a reporter made a rude remark about it, Picasso bit him, which I thought was a nice response. This chap said, you know, this is ridiculous. So Picasso went out there and he came back and went and jumped on the man and bit him, which was his way of saying, The chimpanzee and I are both artists. I thought it was a wonderful response. Dali had another response. It's over to Dali when he looked at one and said, The hand of the chimpanzee is quasi-human, the hand of Jackson Pollock is totally animal, which I thought was another nice comment.

Presenter8:35

Record number two.

Desmond Morris8:37

Record number two. Right, well now we're going right back to my school days because as a rebellious young schoolboy I loved jazz. And in particular I loved a trumpet player called Muggsy Spania. And he fascinated me because he used a muted trumpet. It almost made his trumpet talk. And one of the pieces that I know he does this in is called Relaxing at the Truro.

Presenter10:00

Relaxin' at the Toro by Muggsy Spanier, and that was recorded in nineteen thirty nine. So let's observe Desmond Morris the boy, uh, nineteen thirties Wiltshire. Uh not a desperately social animal by all accounts. Um a bit of a loner, in fact. Why?

Desmond Morris10:15

Well I think it was World War Two was raging all around me. And when I as a boy looked at adults, I thought when you grow up you kill people. That's what grown ups do, because there was that was what was happening at the time.

Presenter10:31

Yeah, yeah.

Desmond Morris10:32

Well, my father was dying from war wounds he'd received in the First World War. He'd been gassed and he'd lost one and a half lungs, so he was in very poor shape as a result of the First World War. And my entire childhood was watching a tough man go into decline. So I got pretty angry, I think, as a boy about what the establishment had done to him. And now I was seeing it all over again. Is that why you turned...

Presenter10:55

Is that why you turn to animals, do you think?

Desmond Morris10:57

I think I felt that really human beings were pretty awful at that point. I got to like them later on, but at that stage I thought they were pretty awful. I I found my mother kept some of my school essays and in one of them it said, Human beings are monkeys with diseased brains. And so obviously I didn't think too highly of the human species and I turned to other species and I my grandmother had a lake.

Desmond Morris11:20

with some little islands on it, and nobody else was allowed to go there. It was my private domain. And I built a raft out of old oil cans and planks and floated around on this lake. I was watching and studying things and escaping, if you like, from the horrors of World War Two.

Presenter11:38

And you took a lot of those things home as well, didn't you, from the lake, because you'd found a microscope.

Desmond Morris11:44

Well in the attic I found my great-grandfather's microscope. He was a Victorian naturalist and I also found a book of his called The Comparative Anatomy of Stomachs and Guts Begun by Neremaya Gruh, a 17th century book which fascinated me because it's full of strange illustrations of biological specimens. And there was the microscope of course and I started studying things under the microscope and I was becoming obsessed with studying animal behaviour.

Presenter12:10

And you mentioned this this book on anatomy. There does seem to be a kind of macabre element to your childhood. I mean, didn't you a bit later on get yourself smuggled into a mortuary so you could in inspect mutilated corpses?

Desmond Morris12:22

Well, I yes, I was absolutely fascinated by what I saw because the inside of the human body was so beautiful.

Presenter12:29

What was beautiful?

Desmond Morris12:30

The organs, the internal organs, were so beautiful, and it was so extraordinary to see what goes on inside the human body, because these were soldiers who'd been badly damaged at the front and were being brought back for embalming. And that was a curious moment in my life, certainly.

Presenter12:48

I got number three.

Desmond Morris12:49

Well, during this time, one of my acts of rebellion was to learn to play the drums. I wanted to be a drummer. I wanted to be Gene Krupper, who was the most famous drummer at the time. For me, one of the um

Desmond Morris13:01

Great occasions which didn't occur till much later, in fact not until nineteen fifty two at Carnegie Hall in New York, was when Cruper for the first time met and did a drum battle with his great rival, his arch rival Buddy Rich, back and forth. So this is the drum battle.

Presenter13:49

Part of the drum battle between Gene Cruper and Buddy Rich live at the Carnegie Hall in New York in 1952. Before we leave, Desmond Morris, the rather unusual preoccupations of your childhood, there was another strange incident. I'm sure we could talk about them all today, actually. When you went on a picnic with your parents on the banks of the River Thames, tell me about that.

Desmond Morris14:08

Yes, this is in the very early days of the war. There were training pilots and there were two aircraft, I think they were called Oxford. They had twin engines. And the whole thing was like a sort of Hitchcock film. You know, this plane suddenly started to come towards us. And we're sitting there, we've got strawberries and cream, and it's a most wonderful, relaxing day. My mother, my father, myself, I'm just a little boy. And I look up and I see these two aircraft touch wingtips. This throws them out of control and they both crash. It comes straight down and crash one on either side of us in this field.

Desmond Morris14:44

The there are bits of bodies sticking up out of them and so on. And um it was such a it was the the horror of the moment was the contrast of course. Uh if you were in the middle of a war zone you'd expect to see things like that, but not when you're having a picnic next to the Thames. And it made me um it it left me with a fear of flying which uh I didn't overcome. I didn't I didn't fly until I was thirty-eight I think it was.

Speaker 414:55

Yeah, but not fine.

Presenter14:57

Yeah.

Speaker 414:57

Yeah.

Presenter15:08

If you're gonna see the whole planet, you've gotta get in an airplane somewhere.

Desmond Morris15:10

Well, you see, this is the point. At thirty-eight, I still hadn't done a lot of travelling for this reason. I I'd driven all over the uh the continent because I could take my car across, but I hadn't flown. And when I got in the airplane, I was bathed I knew I was going to die, you know, I just knew it it's a ridiculous thing, a trauma, how it lasts all your life. And when I got off the other end in Switzerland,

Presenter15:15

Mm-hmm.

Desmond Morris15:34

I didn't die. That's fantastic. And I became, after that, I became fanatical. I loved flying and I would fly in light aircraft all over Africa. And I, you know, and I've seen that.

Presenter15:43

So you went to the other extreme?

Desmond Morris15:44

I went to the other extreme, became a fanatical traveller.

Presenter15:47

And again, that's a bit of a theme in your life, isn't it? Because I think you also at one point nearly drowned and terrified of water. And now you're a very, very keen swimmer. You go from one end to the other.

Desmond Morris15:54

And now you

Desmond Morris15:56

Yeah.

Desmond Morris15:58

I do seem to have had a rather traumatic li uh childhood. Yes, I nearly drowned in the again in the Thames. Another picnic when I was even younger. I was very young, I was about five or something like that, and I nearly drowned. I was only just saved.

Presenter16:12

It is a theme, because again, we've described this sort of rather shy, reclusive boy who ends up performing on the television, and you end up spending your career people watching.

Desmond Morris16:16

Boy

Desmond Morris16:23

Yes, well it took me quite a while to get around to liking the human species, but when I did start to study it you see I began studying insects and fish and then birds and then I moved on to mammals and chimpanzees. I was kind of working my way.

Presenter16:36

That's why you decided we were animals, right?

Desmond Morris16:38

Of the family tree. And so the next logical step was to go past the hairy apes to the naked ape. And I decided that it would be interesting to look at people the same way I looked at animals. But the point was that with the other animals, I couldn't talk to them. I could only watch them. You see, you can't talk. And so, therefore, I thought if I use the same technique with humans.

Desmond Morris17:00

and study body language and and visu watch people instead of interviewing them, I will have a new approach to humans which may tell us something new.

Presenter17:10

Record number four.

Desmond Morris17:13

Well, I uh have one very fond memory dating from nineteen sixty four when my wife and I went to see the last performance in London by Marlena Dietrich. And

Desmond Morris17:25

Her extraordinary voice, I think, is at its best in Go Away from My Window.

Speaker 417:32

Oh a button.

Speaker 417:34

For my door.

Speaker 417:36

Go away, wait, wait for my bedside

Desmond Morris17:37

Meanwhile

Desmond Morris17:38

My bad son

Speaker 417:40

Then bother me no more.

Speaker 417:45

And bother me.

Speaker 417:49

Don't forget.

Speaker 417:54

And Bobber.

Presenter18:00

Marlina Dietrich with Go Away from My Window from her final performance in London in nineteen sixty four, and she had thirty curtain calls, you say, Desmond. Amazing. Um I mentioned in the introduction that you had a teenage fling with Diana Dawes. Um this must surely have been a case of, you know, the the little introvert being dazzled by the great extrovert, surely.

Desmond Morris18:18

Yes, I she overpowered me, she overwhelmed me. She was the great extrovert, she was amazing. And of course, when I knew her, she was a a young teenager. She claimed to be seventeen or eighteen, but she was really only about fourteen, I think. But

Desmond Morris18:33

I mentioned earlier I had a there was this family lake and there was a little island in the middle of it and I pitched my tent on that lake. I'd graduated from a a raft to a canoe by now and I would paddle her out in my canoe to my little island where I'd have my grammophone and my grammophone records. And it was on that little island that she taught me to jitterbug and um she was already expert at it and I was

Presenter18:55

Why would she have wanted anything to do with you then? I mean, you don't sound to have been a kind of devastating figure for such a girl.

Desmond Morris19:01

No, I don't know why. Do you know nobody's ever asked me that question before, and I haven't got any answer to it. I've no idea.

Presenter19:10

Well, she'd just fancied taking you under her wing, maybe.

Desmond Morris19:12

She liked we both liked animals, and she had pet birds, I remember, and was maybe it was a link there, I don't know.

Presenter19:21

So you did your national service and then you went to Birmingham University and got a first in zoology and then up to Oxford to Maudlin College to do your PhD. What did you do that on?

Desmond Morris19:31

That was on the sex life of the stickleback, which was a a little fish that has a very complicated and fascinating sex life. And it was a very happy time in my life because I was once again doing what I loved best, which was watching animals.

Presenter19:45

So that was Maurice the Scientist. But again, there's a contradiction, isn't there? Because also, running in parallel was Maurice the Artist. You really wanted to be an artist as well, didn't you? Or instead of?

Desmond Morris19:56

Well, yeah, it when I was at school I no, I've always had these two sides to to me. And and when I was at school I'd already started to paint rather unusual pictures which nobody liked. And I started exhibiting them. I had my first one man show in 1948. And then in 1950 I had a show with Miro in London.

Presenter20:17

So we're not just talking a bit of amateur painting here.

Desmond Morris20:17

So we're not just talking

Desmond Morris20:20

I was dead serious. I was dead serious. I was the youngest of the surrealist group. I'm probably almost the last survivor now. And I always painted, still paint. And then in the 70s, some of my earlier work started coming up at Sotheby's, and I thought, hang on, this is a bit odd. I've lived long enough to see my paintings actually sell, which is lovely.

Desmond Morris20:44

Oh, I d oh good Lord, I don't know. So I s not a lot. I'm I'm I'm the cheapest I'm not only the youngest of Swiss, I'm also the cheapest. But it's thousands. Yes, I think probably fifteen thousand is about the the maximum. But as I say, it's it's really for me and I'm I'm delighted that now some other people uh are enjoying them and collecting them, but that was never my function.

Presenter20:50

But it's thousands.

Presenter21:03

Breakpoint number five.

Desmond Morris21:05

Part of my artistic activity when I was very young, back in 1950, was to make two surrealist films. And a film called Time Flower began with me pursuing a girl across the Wiltshire Downs. But I wanted a very dramatic piece of music to go with this. And what I chose was Prokofiev's Scythian Sweep.

Presenter22:27

The opening of Coffee F Scythian Suite, played by the Orchestre de la Suisse Romand, conducted by Ernest Anseme. You published Desmond Morris' The Naked Ape in 1967. Good timing, you know, chimed with the more relaxed mood of society. You could discuss sex in a matter-of-fact sort of way, and no euphemisms and so on.

Speaker 422:44

Mm-hmm.

Presenter22:47

I wonder why, looking back,

Presenter22:50

People were so shocked, because you weren't necessarily saying anything that Darwin hadn't said a hundred years earlier, and yet they were shocked. We were shocked, I remember.

Desmond Morris22:57

Yes, I it it surprised me because I hadn't expected to be

Desmond Morris23:03

Sort of rearguard action for Darwin. You know, I'd expected that by now people had accepted that. Looking back on it now, I think it's just that what was shocking was because people recognized themselves in the naked ape, and the church wasn't very happy with that. And of course, I was reporting on sexual behaviour just as objectively as I would have done if I was studying a fish or bird. And so the Puritanical people weren't happy with that. So I was attacked by the Puritanical and by the devout.

Presenter23:36

But it it it is this this accusation of of being enjoying being sensational. And I mean, you know, spool on a few decades to sort of nineteen ninety-four when you insert the camera in the female vagina and and and film for television the female orgasm.

Desmond Morris23:49

Junk

Presenter23:52

When does it cease to be science and when does it become voyeurism?

Desmond Morris23:56

I think it's a case of whether a particular pattern of behaviour is important to our species. And nobody can say that sexual behaviour is unimportant because without it we wouldn't be here. And it is a vitally important part of our behaviour. But I'm just as interested in the way in which people cross their legs or fold their arms as I am in the way in which people mate. But I'm not going to leave mating out. I can't leave it out. Just because it's a sexual behavior.

Presenter24:21

I found

Presenter24:22

Just because it's a situation. But then take your latest book, for example, which is about the female body. I mean, again, there is a whole chapter there on pubic hair and pubic topiary, the way in which it's cut. I mean, do we need to know the difference between the Playboy strip and the moustache? Is this really scientific research?

Desmond Morris24:47

I'm surprised you've remembered those names. But there you go. Did you do the scientific research?

Presenter24:50

Did you do the scientific research?

Desmond Morris24:52

No, the reason why uh that chapter is in there is because again I in The Naked Woman, this new book, I start with the hair and I end with the feet, and I look at each bit of the female body. And I'm not going to ignore parts of the female body simply because it's the great

Presenter25:04

Monit.

Presenter25:09

But it's the great detail of this, you know, all these sort of fancy names.

Desmond Morris25:11

If I go into greater detail on the hands and the arms and the eyes and the lips and the toe and the feet.

Presenter25:17

But did you do the research yourself?

Desmond Morris25:18

I have, with a with a BBC crew, visited a number of very strange places in Las Vegas where I did a certain amount of field work, I must admit. And it was quite fun. I'm not going to pretend otherwise. But certainly I have made these observations and I have done my proper field work.

Presenter25:37

Recommended.

Desmond Morris25:38

Um talking of going off to strange places, one of the things I've loved uh now that I do enjoy travel a lot is is going to s to different countries. And one of the things that I enjoy when I get there is the local music. And there's one group I discovered who have taken West African music and westernized it without vulgarizing it, and they're called Zapmama.

Speaker 426:02

Bye.

Speaker 426:10

Blue Litz Tony

Speaker 426:17

You gotta concentrate, you just gotta be concentrate.

Desmond Morris26:19

Just go.

Speaker 426:22

Singing six stars, singing since every devil didn't die. But then we never

Speaker 426:28

How did you

Presenter26:31

Zapmama with Sab Silma. You've enjoyed huge success as a communicator over the years, Desmond, and you're still working as hard as ever. But it hasn't meant that you haven't spared time to enjoy the fruits of your success. And I know that following the publication of The Naked Ape, and it started selling, I mean, it sold millions, it's still in print, isn't it? You kind of.

Presenter26:51

Emigrated with the money.

Presenter26:53

Well, I don't know.

Desmond Morris26:53

No.

Desmond Morris26:55

Yes. What happened was this, that I had been overworking uh and I I really was at risk of damaging my health. So once I've discovered that uh Naked Ape, to my astonishment had become this huge bestseller, I thought let's go off and recharge our batteries. And my wife and I went off to live in Malta and we bought a boat and and I I learned a whole lot more about life because I was living in another culture and it was

Presenter27:25

This is what a huge house.

Desmond Morris27:26

Yes, we wanted to we wanted to enjoy life a bit.

Presenter27:28

I've got twenty-seven runs.

Desmond Morris27:30

Yeah.

Presenter27:30

Take it.

Presenter27:31

We're talking staff and not and more than one boat and

Desmond Morris27:34

It was millionaires.

Desmond Morris27:39

Well, yes, I decided that uh the important thing with money is it's nice to earn a lot, but you need also to use it. You don't shove it away in a corner and save it because it's dead money. Money should be

Presenter27:50

Rolls-Royces. How many Rolls-Royces?

Desmond Morris27:52

Yes.

Desmond Morris27:53

Well, we had one in each place where we lived, but the point is that what I was doing really was using the money to experience life. I didn't know anything about the sea, nothing about the sea, so by buying a thirty-foot boat, I had to learn about the sea, and that was a whole new experience for me. By living in Malta, I learned about different body languages in different cultures, and that set me off on this big study which led to my book Man Watching.

Presenter28:17

But then the the money ran out and you came back. You sold the rollers, bought a bike.

Presenter28:22

Have you got a a roller again now?

Desmond Morris28:25

Yes, I'm afraid I have. Comics, gangsters and me love Rolls-Royces. Record never said. Well, when we came back to Oxford, our son grew up there and he was at the school just round the corner and he'd come home with his school chums and amongst the school chums was this little boy called Eddie. And Eddie was different from the others in that he he really loved playing air guitar. And he was only a little boy, about eight or nine at the time. And I thought that's an odd thing, you know, at that age. Well, Eddie went on to become Ed O'Brien, one of the guitarists of one of the most successful pop groups in existence, namely Radiohead. So I'd love to hear Ed playing his guitar, please.

Presenter29:42

Radiohead with Paranoid Android. Um you've written books on age and aging as well. You've written so many how many books have you written? I mean

Desmond Morris29:49

Mm fifty I forget fifty two fifty three something like that

Presenter29:53

Anyway, age and aging. How much more creative life, as I said at the beginning, you're seventy six. How much longer do you have to create in the way that you do?

Desmond Morris30:02

Well, I I should never have written that book about aging. I know too much. I know that I've only got about four years of

Desmond Morris30:11

Possible creativity left because when you get into your eighties, it's very difficult to be creative.

Presenter30:17

So do you lose the energy or the imagination to do that?

Desmond Morris30:21

I don't know what it well, no, you lose the brain cells. It's as simple as that. You you lose the brain cells and you lose the uh ability to be original. You you you have to keep keep your brain working all the time if you want it to go on working. If if you just relax and watch the sunset, you're done for. And I'll never do that.

Speaker 330:40

Fast record.

Desmond Morris30:41

My last record is Imagine, my favorite John Lennon piece. But because everybody plays John Lennon singing Imagine, let's have Imagine sung by Alex Parks.

Speaker 430:53

Imagine with no countries.

Speaker 430:59

It isn't hard to do.

Speaker 431:06

Your sentence kills or die for.

Speaker 431:12

No religion to.

Presenter31:19

Imagine all the people

Presenter31:23

Imagine, sung by Alex Parks of Fame Academy, two thousand and three. So if you could only take one of those eight records, Desmond, which one would you take?

Desmond Morris31:31

I think I would take Alex Parkes, uh, because Imagine says so much about the way I feel about life, and I think I'd take that one.

Presenter31:40

And what about your book, as well as the Bible and Shakespeare?

Desmond Morris31:42

Oh, well, that's easy because um I have a book I mean I'm being serious now. If I was on a desert island, I would want a book that I could go on reading and reading and reading. So I would take A Thousand Nights and a Night, the Richard Burton version.

Presenter31:56

And your luxury.

Desmond Morris31:57

Uh

Presenter31:57

Yeah.

Desmond Morris31:58

snorkel, if I can, please, because I want to spend all my time on my desert island watching the coral reefs and watching the fish. A wonderful way of making the desert island uh a pleasurable experience.

Presenter32:11

And again, it's going back to your childhood, isn't it? Exactly what you did on your grandmother's lake.

Desmond Morris32:16

Yeah, but I actually went further because I tried at one point in 1972 I actually tried to buy a desert island in the Indian Ocean. It was called Round Island.

Desmond Morris32:26

And the idea was that I was going to take my wife and my son, and we were going to live there for a few years. But then I got this letter from the estate agent saying that it was a 37-year lease. And it was a romantic gesture, and of course, having a leasehold on Paradise just didn't work. And so I abandoned the idea. But you just as well, because I saw it last year. I was out there in the Indian Ocean last year, and I saw this island in the distance. And I said, Oh, that's round island. I nearly bought that once. And he said, Did you? The local said, Did you? I said, Yes, yes, I was going to live there. He said, Well, I'm glad you didn't, because that used to be a leper colony.

Desmond Morris32:58

So that was a lucky escape. You've got to be careful. If you're going to go get shipwrecked on a desert island, make sure you it's a it's a nice, pleasant one.

Presenter33:09

Desmond Morris, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs.

Desmond Morris33:12

It's been a pleasure.

Speaker 333:21

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