Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Desert Island Discs
Presented by Sue Lawley
Theatre director and co-writer/performer of Beyond the Fringe, also editor and presenter of the BBC arts programme Monitor.
Eight records
I heard this accent, this voice, this narrative, with this rather beautiful musical accompaniment. I thought that this woman is a is a poetic genius.
Which brings back the war and the image on the news of head-scarfed girls on production lines and the sense of distant dread that I as a child had about the war...
The first three notes of this brings back again a world which has vanished, a civilized, despairing world that thought will civilized life ever restore itself after the desecration and atrocity of what went on between 1939 and 1945.
For me, it brings back again that last part of the war with American forces. Yes, my darling daughter, is the sound of the heroic excitement of America...
There was that period just before. The Nazis took over when it was possible for three Jews and three Germans to work together in Comic Harmony...
Theme from Alice in Wonderland
I did a film of Alice in Wonderland, which I took away all the animal heads and all the sort of cartoon aspects of it, and restored it to what I think Dodgson or Carroll had in mind...
This music of the Beach Boys singing Surfing USA just brings back my first intoxicated excitement with the United States of America.
Goldberg Variations, BWV 988: AriaFavourite
I would like to have a piece of music which I would play in cycle, which itself is a cycle... I'd like to die to the sound of this music.
The keepsakes
The book
Libbie Henrietta Hyman
because I had a great passion as a young student in zoology, with marine biology, and I became passionately interested in invertebrate marine life.
The luxury
I would while away the days on the desert island, revelling in the extraordinary invertebrate fauna of this tropical sea.
In conversation
Presenter asks
Does your regret [about leaving medicine] run very deep?
I think it's mainly to do with the fact that um I grew up in a world in Cambridge which valued particular forms of intellectual achievement and devalued others, so that when I told the friends of mine that I had at Cambridge that I was leaving medicine, the look of icy disapproval that swept across their face corresponded to the same sense of icy disapproval which swept across the inside of my mind when I found that I had done so.
Presenter asks
Was your father's icy disapproval voiced?
It was rather tentatively. I remember when I was about forty, when l by which time I'd left and gone and done other things, I remember going to his apartment and he was sitting behind his consulting room desk and said, uh Ha ha ha have you uh Have have you decided what you want to be? And I knew that he really hadn't got much time for what it was that I'd I'd drifted into rather than decided to do.
The recording
Timestamps play the recording from that turn
Speaker 2
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 five, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.
Presenter
My Castaway this week is a theatre director. That's a rather inadequate description of a man who's done a lot of things in his life, but who nevertheless claims he's failed to achieve as much as he could.
Presenter
Having read natural sciences at Cambridge, he qualified as a doctor, but it was on the stage rather than in the operating theatre that he began to make his name. He co-wrote and performed in Beyond the Fringe with Alan Bennett, Peter Cook, and Dudley Moore, started to direct plays, and became editor and presenter of the BBC television arts programme Monitor. Since then, he's made several series for radio and television on science and the arts the body in question is probably the best known and directed dozens of plays and operas for the stage. In recent years the invitations have come more from abroad than from home, and with his accompanying sense of rejection, a feeling of regret that he gave up the intellectual challenge of medicine for the more frivolous world of the arts. There's a very large part of my sensibility, he says, which is filled with a sort of inconsolable remorse about having betrayed a very good mind. He is Jonathan Miller.
Presenter
People, frankly, Jonathan, would laugh to hear you say that, you who've been such a sort of force in British intellectual and artistic life, you know. But it runs very deep, this regret, doesn't it?
Dr Jonathan Miller
I think it's mainly to do with the fact that um I grew up in a world in Cambridge which valued particular forms of intellectual achievement and devalued others, so that when I told the friends of mine that I had at Cambridge that I was
Dr Jonathan Miller
leaving medicine, the look of icy disapproval that swept across their face corresponded to the same sense of icy disapproval which swept across the inside of my mind when I found that I had done so.
Presenter
What about your father's icy disapproval? Was that voiced?
Dr Jonathan Miller
It was rather tentatively. I remember when I was about forty, when l by which time I'd left and gone and done other things, I remember going to his apartment and he was sitting behind his consulting room desk and said, uh
Dr Jonathan Miller
Ha ha ha have you uh
Dr Jonathan Miller
Have have you decided what you want to be?
Dr Jonathan Miller
And I knew that he really hadn't got much time for what it was that I'd I'd drifted into rather than decided to do.
Presenter
Hm. So there's a sense you feel you've sort of squandered your inheritance, is that?
Dr Jonathan Miller
Yes, I have a sense that that I I could have done something more serious and and also more more more fundamental and lasting. If you arrive at a truth in science, it's forever. So if there is an achievement in science
Dr Jonathan Miller
Um it's unquestionable.
Presenter
So your regret is what that you
Presenter
were weak and were seduced by the arts and the kind of instant power.
Dr Jonathan Miller
I think that it was an almost imperceptible seduction. It came at a rather strange time in my medical career when the prospects in English medicine for a junior doctor were very poor. It was extremely badly paid. You spent long, dreadful hours sleeping in tiny, tiny dormitory accommodations in hospital with the prospects of promotion which were very narrow. And people didn't get consultant posts until they were about 40. And so it was the thought of somehow doing something which would tide me over. And I thought, well, I'll do it for a few months or a year or so.
Presenter
And so it was the thought of somehow
Presenter
I thought well
Presenter
So now it's what is the kind of sense of shame and guilt that you didn't slog through all of that.
Dr Jonathan Miller
Yes, yes. There are things about the sciences which it's difficult to do. You have to wrap a a a wet towel round your head to think out some of the things. It's really hard.
Dr Jonathan Miller
Whereas in some awful way and it sounds like a sort of idle, arrogant boast most of the things that I've done in the arts I can do with my right hand tied behind my back.
Presenter
Tell me about your first record.
Dr Jonathan Miller
Bobby Gentry and the ode to Billy Joe. And I can't remember exactly when I heard it. I think it must be about thirty years ago or twenty five years ago. But I heard this accent, this voice, this narrative, with this rather beautiful musical accompaniment. I thought that this woman is a is a poetic genius. The southern world that she conjures up and the idiomatic interruptions about
Dr Jonathan Miller
passing food while telling a story about a tragic death somewhere up there on Choctaw Ridge.
Speaker 4
Brother said he recollected when he and Tom and Billy Joe.
Speaker 4
And put a frog down my back at the Carroll County Picture Show
Speaker 4
And wasn't I talking to him after church last Sunday night?
Speaker 4
I'll have another piece of apple pie
Speaker 4
You know it don't seem right.
Presenter
Bobby Gentry and the Ode to Billy Joe. There are, of course, all sorts of links between the arts and the sciences, Jonathan Miller. You've characterised them on the one hand as being a fascination with trivia. Can you explain that?
Dr Jonathan Miller
Well
Dr Jonathan Miller
Um it it doesn't apply to all the sciences and it doesn't apply to all the arts, but it applies to the aspects of science that I'm interested in, which is the explanation of how the nervous system enacts and implements behaviour.
Dr Jonathan Miller
And it also applies to the the arts which attract and interest me. I'm never interested in the heroic, the grand and the epic in the arts. I'm always interested in the trivial and the negligible, rather like that Bobby Gentry story of someone dropping a frog down someone's back after church.
Presenter
Mm-hmm.
Presenter
But it is interesting, this whole business of of trivia. Well, you've writt written a book about Freud, haven't you? He was obsessed with trivia, as in a Freudian slip of the tongue.
Dr Jonathan Miller
Well, that's the only thing that finally adds up in the biological sciences and the behavioral sciences. It's putting the small details together which actually constitute the truth.
Presenter
So it's it's your the eye of the doctor and and wanted to have the minutiae of the brain that you then apply to
Dr Jonathan Miller
It's not really the doctor. I believe deeply that uh there aren't any really important things, there are just huge heaps of negligible things and um
Presenter
But it's understanding those and knowing how a character would be.
Dr Jonathan Miller
It's understanding how they work and what people do and noticing the things that people do with their hands while they're talking, um how people will sometimes rub the corner of their eyebrow while asking a question, while staring vacantly into space. If if you get that right, the audience knows that they're in the presence of
Dr Jonathan Miller
A little fragment of life as lived. Auden talks about it in his Miser de Beaux Arts, that at the edge of a martyrdom the torturous horse is rubbing its haunch against a tree, and a boy is skating on a pond, and as Icarus falls out of the sky, a ploughman doesn't even notice him.
Presenter
And and but that kind of certainty that that you have as a as a director, knowing you believe exactly how this character would behave, has brought you into conflict, hasn't it? I mean the most recent example one's heard of is with Angela Giorgio doing Traviata.
Dr Jonathan Miller
Well, actually, the funny thing is, I didn't really have conflict. She actually went along with everything that I asked her to do. I was rather surprised. Actually.
Presenter
But she wanted to to to die standing up, wasn't that
Dr Jonathan Miller
Yeah.
Presenter
Fuck.
Dr Jonathan Miller
Uh I've done several productions of Traviata and have always insisted, who that whoever plays it, that uh listen, dear, um dying is a full-time business and uh most of it's done lying down.
Dr Jonathan Miller
You're weak, you're probably incontinent, and you haven't got time to do a lap of honour half way through in order to show how sort of interesting your chiffon nightie is.
Presenter
But you can sing beautifully, so
Dr Jonathan Miller
But she will sing beautifully, and be content with representing the details of dying. That's it's as touching as you need. You don't need to suddenly get out of bed and run round. She agreed, and I actually she was reduced to tears during a course of a description when I sat on the side of the bed and explained to her.
Dr Jonathan Miller
And she explained to me that her sister had died and that she knew.
Presenter
Check it out.
Dr Jonathan Miller
from what I said, that I was right.
Presenter
Record number two.
Dr Jonathan Miller
Well now record number two is a piece of Madeleine dipped in tea, acoustically speaking. Um and I think for me this music while you work
Dr Jonathan Miller
Which brings back the war and the image on the news of head-scarfed girls on production lines and the sense of distant dread that I as a child had about the war, not knowing really quite how endangered we were, but terrified by air raid sirens, relieved by all clears, ration books. This is what this brings back.
Speaker 2
Knowing
Presenter
And this often had um a voiceover which you can do wonderfully down.
Dr Jonathan Miller
Oh yes, but it would be um they would say, Music while you work comes today from a factory somewhere in the north of England. But we're not going to tell you because Jerry will bomb the hell out of us.
Presenter
Calling All Workers, the theme from the radio programme Music While You Work, composed by Eric Coates, who of course wrote our theme tune, The Sleepy Lagoon. Um one assumes, Jonathan, you know, that you would have been a very precocious child, but on the contrary, you've said that you were very backward at school and only interested in Biggles, Guns and Conquers.
Dr Jonathan Miller
That's right. Um and also fearful and embarrassed and awkward and uh
Dr Jonathan Miller
We were moved around a great deal during the war.
Dr Jonathan Miller
My father was a military psychiatrist and he went from one military hospital to another and then off to War Office Selection Board uh establishments.
Presenter
And your mother was a writer. She wrote novels and biographies of language.
Dr Jonathan Miller
Yeah, she was writing all the time.
Presenter
So she was shot away with her typewriter.
Dr Jonathan Miller
That's right. I mean, she she would put away her typewriter when we came back from school. But I I was just ill at ease and anxious and fearful at school, going to new schools all the time. Also, you must remember that boys' schools, prep schools in those days, were establishments filled with nasty, sadistic Christian um masters who beat boys and got sexual kicks out of doing it.
Presenter
And
Dr Jonathan Miller
Yeah.
Presenter
I want to talk to you about that, but just let me ask you a little bit more about what kind of little boy you were, because there's this story.
Dr Jonathan Miller
But
Presenter
Um that Stevie Smith wrote.
Dr Jonathan Miller
Oh yes, being a show off.
Presenter
Yeah.
Presenter
Well, I I think she just said you were a noisy little boy who demanded a lot of attention and and and made lots of animal noises.
Dr Jonathan Miller
That's right, that's what I did. I I think I was a nausy little boy. I think for Stevie, anyone who wasn't a quiet little boy, anyone who distracted attention from her, was an unforgivable interruption of decent life.
Presenter
She
Presenter
She was a friend of your mother's, wasn't she? And did did they fall out after she read this?
Dr Jonathan Miller
Yeah, so
Dr Jonathan Miller
I think my mother was rather offended by the story, yes, and felt that she had taken advantage.
Presenter
Um your mother, therefore, was was a high achiever. Your father was eminent in his field, and and you were, you said, surrounded by a world which has vanished. Can you just give me a thumbnail sketch of that world?
Dr Jonathan Miller
Well, I think anyone who
Dr Jonathan Miller
was born into a literate family, it was taken for granted that your interests might extend wider than your professional commitments. It's only in the l post war period that people would have said of someone like me, Oh, he's a Renaissance man, or
Dr Jonathan Miller
a jack of all trades,
Presenter
You hate that phrase, didn't you?
Dr Jonathan Miller
But both of them are vulgar. And they come from people for whom knowing more than one thing is, in fact, boastfulness.
Presenter
It's interesting that you perceive it as a pejorative term, though, because I don't think people do generally in a matter of time.
Dr Jonathan Miller
Well, it's it's it's whichever way it is, Jack of all trades or Renaissance man. Well, you know, it's bullshit, all of that. My father, for example, could paint and draw
Dr Jonathan Miller
He could sculpt. I've got a marvellous bust of one of his shell shocked patients that he did. But he was also acquainted with philosophy. But he would have been agonised with embarrassment if any one had said to him,
Dr Jonathan Miller
Emmanuel, Renaissance man, eh? Going all the way from anthropology to philosophy to medicine, and then I see you're dabbling in painting too. Um you know, it's it's vulgar and illiterate to think like that, and that's what's vanished, is the taking for granted. A world of civilized curiosity.
Presenter
Record number three.
Dr Jonathan Miller
This is associated with a film which I think bears seeing many, many, many times. I first saw it just after the war, I think in 1947. I stole away from my house, lying to my mother that I was going rowing in the park and actually having stolen two and six from her purse, went down to the West End and saw Carol Reed's Third Man. The first three notes of this brings back again a world which has vanished, a civilized, despairing world that thought will civilized life ever restore itself after the desecration and atrocity of what went on between 1939 and 1945.
Presenter
That's the theme from the third man, the Harry Lyme theme, composed and performed by Anton Karas. So you went up to Cambridge in the early fifties, Jonathan, to read natural sciences. Uh strange to say you were never actually a member of Footlights, were you? You you sort of just got caught up and dabbled a bit.
Dr Jonathan Miller
No.
Dr Jonathan Miller
Because I got I got pulled into it by accident um because what happened was that the footlights that I did shot me to some sort of uh rather spurious fame.
Dr Jonathan Miller
And then I dropped it. Um after I left Cambridge I went down to London to University College and did my clinical work. And then the person from Porlock arrived.
Speaker 2
Yeah.
Dr Jonathan Miller
Mr. Bassett, John Bassett, who had been working in the Edinburgh Festival office.
Dr Jonathan Miller
had been asked by his boss to uh look for some reviews that might be better than the th the things that were going on on the fringe. And uh I had seen Peter Cook perform while I was working in Cambridge, and uh we were put together.
Presenter
And so you were lured in. This was the beginning of the seduction.
Dr Jonathan Miller
And yes,
Dr Jonathan Miller
Well, that that was the beginning of the seduction. I didn't see it then as a seduction. It was j simply a time out.
Presenter
Come here.
Presenter
But it's interesting, isn't it, that you mention the person from Porlock who
Dr Jonathan Miller
At least by hindsight, I see him as a person from Paula.
Presenter
who interrupted Coleridge writing Kub Kubla Khan.
Dr Jonathan Miller
Yeah.
Presenter
and actually stopped something great.
Dr Jonathan Miller
Yeah.
Presenter
From going on.
Dr Jonathan Miller
Well, as Stevie Smith once said, she said, I don't believe the person from Pawlock at all. I think Coleridge was stuck anyway.
Presenter
Yeah.
Dr Jonathan Miller
Well, it may well be that I was stuck anyway, that I was in a state of
Dr Jonathan Miller
not despair exactly, but some sort of anxiety about what the next five or six years in the role of a junior doctor was going to be like, whether I'd be able to hack it.
Presenter
Mm-hmm.
Presenter
So you drifted inexorably, really, away from it, didn't you?
Presenter
Beyond the fringe, Edinburgh, London, and then New York, and that was it, really. Your your fate was sealed.
Dr Jonathan Miller
I think New York was what began to really seal it. Um I encountered in New York um none of the condescension and, you know, Renaissance man um
Presenter
Jibes
Dr Jonathan Miller
This stuff that went on in England.
Presenter
Yeah.
Presenter
I see all that, but you've also talked about the fact that that whole period was really the beginning of what you've termed the rotting of your moral fibre.
Dr Jonathan Miller
Well, it was the rotting of my moral fibre in the sense that it was the rotting of my endeavour. I had not stuck it out in bleak hospitals in the Midlands, waiting for a consultant post in Winchester.
Presenter
Yeah.
Presenter
Record number four.
Dr Jonathan Miller
Well, record number four is Dinah Shaw singing Yes, My Darling Daughter. For me, it brings back again that last part of the war with American forces.
Dr Jonathan Miller
Yes, my darling daughter, is the sound of the heroic excitement of America, whose war, other than in Europe, was fought in colour, unlike ours, which was fought in dreary Gaumont British black and white.
Speaker 4
Mother, will it be exciting? Yes, my darling daughter. Mother, do I look inviting? Yes, my darling daughter. If he holds me tight, Mama darling, and my knees just turn to water. Mother, must I keep on dancing? Yes. And oh, my daughter!
Speaker 4
Uh
Presenter
Dinah Shaw and Yes My Darling Daughter. Peter Cook of course went on among other things to um help found Private Eye um which in turn became your bête noir. They hounded you mercilessly for years.
Dr Jonathan Miller
Well, I think they probably thought it was mercilessly, although I think they would have said
Dr Jonathan Miller
To my objections, can't he take a joke?
Presenter
But why do you think they had it in for you? Because they did.
Dr Jonathan Miller
Oh, a mm minor public school.
Dr Jonathan Miller
Christian Prefect Beating
Dr Jonathan Miller
And that's all it is.
Presenter
So it's it there's a streak of anti-Semitism there.
Dr Jonathan Miller
I don't think the anti Semitism is very important. Then of course e all of them would strenuously deny. They would insist that some of their best friends are people of the what they would call the Hebrew persuasion. No, it's it's something I started mentioning earlier on. The English educational system.
Dr Jonathan Miller
suspects the too clever by half.
Dr Jonathan Miller
Hate swats.
Dr Jonathan Miller
likes sports and loves beating.
Speaker 4
Hmm.
Dr Jonathan Miller
It gave licence to an alternative form of sexual intercourse.
Dr Jonathan Miller
which was legitimized as punishment, as discipline. I can remember watching masters and prefects beating with one hand in their pockets.
Speaker 4
Hmm.
Speaker 4
Hmm.
Dr Jonathan Miller
and private eye is simply the prefect's room in Greek Street.
Presenter
But you you have said before now, and I don't want to stress the anti Semitism if you don't, but you have talked about, you know, the phrase that they would consider you to be, quote, a clever dick Jew boy.
Dr Jonathan Miller
There was a wonderful book written about Whitehall and the Jews, in which these tremendously confident people in Whitehall would say, Well, of course the thing you must understand about Jews is that they're oversensitive.
Dr Jonathan Miller
Even now you see people the Holocaust deniers in England, the country house deniers who say of course it's tremendously exaggerated, the Holocaust and of course in a sense, um our our friends of the Hebrew persuasion really brought it on themselves.
Presenter
But it's those kinds of epithets as well, and one does still hear them. It's there, it runs.
Dr Jonathan Miller
Oh yes, it it it runs now in nothing s a scarcely audible bat squeak.
Presenter
But your mother had written about it, hadn't she?
Dr Jonathan Miller
Yes, she one of her her second novel was about uh being uh a reluctant Jew. She wasn't interested in Jewish life any more than I am, but she knew what it was like to be thought to be Jewish. You see, for for for those of us who really have no interest in ethnicity of any sort,
Dr Jonathan Miller
Being Jewish is really very little more than being the potential target.
Presenter
Record number five.
Dr Jonathan Miller
This in a way is related to what we've just been talking about. They're called the Comedian Harmonists. And it was a German group that got together in the thirties. Three of them are Jewish, and three of them are what Goebbels would have said, Aryan singers.
Dr Jonathan Miller
There was that period just before.
Dr Jonathan Miller
The Nazis took over when it was possible for three Jews and three Germans to work together in
Dr Jonathan Miller
Comic Harmony
Dr Jonathan Miller
Until these filthy little figures like Goebbels and Hitler and Himmler sort of
Dr Jonathan Miller
Dreadful little chicken farmers.
Dr Jonathan Miller
got together and decided that we had to eliminate uh Jews and Marxists.
Speaker 4
So the child, cross the wall,
Presenter
Comedian harmonists Wachen ent und Zonnenshein, or Happy Days Are Here Again. Jonathan Miller, you've written books on so many topics, Freud and Darwin, art and the theatre, you've made television documentaries about the body. But undoubtedly the bulk of your professional life has been spent in the arts. But in the main, as I said at the beginning, not for years, decades even, here in Britain. Why do you think you seem to have fallen out of favour in this way?
Dr Jonathan Miller
I don't know. I'm probably because I'm old. I'm not.
Presenter
I don't
Dr Jonathan Miller
cutting edge now, to use again another vulgar term. Um I'm not part of that thing which critics call a producer of must see productions.
Dr Jonathan Miller
I just go on doing the same stuff that I have always done, pursuing the same sort of interests, which I will never vary I'm not going to change very much, because I'm interested in the same things that I always was interested in.
Presenter
But you do b bite the hand that might potentially feed you quite frequently, don't you? Let me quote you because it's so witty.
Dr Jonathan Miller
Well, I do.
Presenter
Allow me to quote you, sir. You say that the audience at Covent Garden it looks as if Harrod's food hall has yielded up its debt.
Speaker 4
Mm.
Presenter
And the BBC is populated by people with two degrees in media studies, which is like having a degree in stationery. I mean, it's wonderful, quotable stuff, but it's not conducive to making you an offer.
Dr Jonathan Miller
I mean, I'm always told by friends and so forth that I, you know, dig my own grave in some sense. But I won't keep quiet. I increasingly see the world as filled with uh vulgar fools, and uh I tell vulgar fools that they're vulgar fools.
Presenter
But you don't think that that that
Dr Jonathan Miller
How do you
Presenter
giving voice to that kind of vial says m more about no, no, it's much about it being tactless, does it?'Cause it's it's quite fun and it makes us smile. But but but doesn't it say more about you than the people it's directed at?
Dr Jonathan Miller
Yes, it's a file assessment.
Dr Jonathan Miller
Sorry.
Dr Jonathan Miller
I'm thinking.
Dr Jonathan Miller
It says something about me, but it also, if in fact you keep your eyes and ears open, it says a great deal about the people I'm directing it to, that that the people I've called vulgar fools are objectively vulgar fools. I may be, in fact, a discontented misanthrope, but the accused are guilty, and so is the accuser in his own way. And in fact, I'm perfectly happy to suffer the consequences of being thought to be a malcontent.
Presenter
And if you can do it with wit, I mean it all adds to the sum total of the
Dr Jonathan Miller
It's better to do wickedness if it's merely frothing at the mouth. There's no point doing that. You might as well hurt as many people as you possibly can if you're going to, as it were, identify vices and follies, get it right and stick it in.
Presenter
Record number six.
Dr Jonathan Miller
This is again a reminiscence. It's a reminiscence of my own work. One of the things I'm most pleased about I made many years ago when I did a film of Alice in Wonderland, which again sort of brought down the the prefect's beatings from from private eye upwards. And uh it was a film of which I'm very proud. I did a film of Alice in Wonderland, which I took away all the animal heads and all the sort of uh
Speaker 2
Mm-hmm.
Dr Jonathan Miller
cartoon aspects of it, and restored it to what I think Dodgson or Carroll had in mind, which was the creation of a sunlit Victorian world of Oxford academia.
Speaker 2
Who the f
Dr Jonathan Miller
I asked Ravishankar to write the music for it, and this here is the music which he wrote for the title sequence at the end.
Presenter
Ravi Shankar's theme from the film Alice in Wonderland, which was directed by my castaway Jonathan Miller.
Presenter
In the meantime, we're going back to trivia now, Jonathan, because that is what you're concentrating on artistically, isn't it? You do collages and
Dr Jonathan Miller
Yeah.
Presenter
And sculptures made up of bits of old rubbish. Detritus
Dr Jonathan Miller
Yeah
Dr Jonathan Miller
Well, you see, I again I wouldn't think of it as art really.
Dr Jonathan Miller
I like pieces of faded coloured typography, and uh I began putting them together again in geometrical assemblies.
Dr Jonathan Miller
I'm deeply influenced, I think, in some ways by something which is completely out of date now. I mean, I mean everything about me, I suppose, is out of date.
Dr Jonathan Miller
I'm a an early twentieth century modernist in the sense that those are the people that excite me and I think I'm s still under the influence of it when I start making my own compositions. And I do things out of wood and I do things out of paper. I do much less and met metal now, I guess.
Presenter
But it's such a completely different artistic endeavor from the kind of stuff you're doing for it. He's working, as I say, alone effectively, as opposed to in this great team moving people around stations and
Dr Jonathan Miller
Yeah, effectively.
Dr Jonathan Miller
People around stationary.
Presenter
I just is that where you've now arrived? Does that give you greater pleasure?
Dr Jonathan Miller
No, I mean it's a curious sort of consolation for not being asked to do the work that I'm still capable of doing, which is the the theatrical work, but since I don't get employed and don't get asked to do it, I'm
Speaker 2
Doing
Speaker 2
Yeah.
Dr Jonathan Miller
happy to have an enormous amount of unfinished work to do in areas that I'm acquiring skills at as I go along.
Dr Jonathan Miller
I'd like to do casting in concrete on a fairly big scale, but that becomes rather expensive, and they also where do I keep it? Um my wife has had it up to here with the number of pieces of rusting metal that I've assembled in her otherwise nice garden. Um she's been very tolerant.
Presenter
New piece of music.
Dr Jonathan Miller
Well, the seventh piece is again a reminiscent, and it's reminiscent of my visit to America. We'd switch on the radio, and there were certain tunes as we bowled along the night roads. My wife and I a newborn son, or he was then about six months old. There he was in a carrycott in the back of the car. This music of the Beach Boys singing Surfing USA just brings back my first intoxicated excitement with the United States of America. It was long before anyone had even heard of George W.
Speaker 4
If everybody had an ocean across the USA
Speaker 4
Then everybody be surrounded.
Speaker 4
Like California, yeah.
Speaker 4
You see them wear their bag
Speaker 4
We're at G. Santos too.
Speaker 4
A bushy bushy bonhere serving USA
Presenter
For Beach Boys and Surfing USA. So Jonathan, a a solitary existence on a desert island with bits of flotsam and jetsam to play around is right up your streak.
Dr Jonathan Miller
Currently quite nice. And also
Dr Jonathan Miller
I'm old enough to know that I haven't got much time to be rescued anyway, that I would probably be dying on this beach.
Presenter
I'm talking about age, you're only just seventy.
Dr Jonathan Miller
I know, but uh but by that time, you know, you're really
Dr Jonathan Miller
uh playing with dice about how long you've got.
Presenter
And no belief other than in yourself to support you, and there's no religious belief. You've just done it. You're not afraid of disbelief. You don't need it, you don't want it, you think it's hocus pocus.
Dr Jonathan Miller
No, absolutely no religious belief of any sort at all.
Dr Jonathan Miller
No, I just I it's not even hocus pocus for me. I mean um religious thoughts even irreligious thoughts don't enter my head at all, any more than I have to, as it were, think about not believing in witches.
Speaker 2
Last record.
Dr Jonathan Miller
Well, the last record is related to
Dr Jonathan Miller
B.
Dr Jonathan Miller
My expectation that I'll be on this island forever, and that when I've played these nostalgic reminiscent pieces which will bring back my past, I would sit on my hunkers staring out to the horizon, like Robinson Crusoe in that wonderful film of Robinson Crusoe, meditating in a circle, in a cycle,
Dr Jonathan Miller
And therefore I would like to have a piece of music which I would play in cycle, which itself is a cycle, and that is uh the Goldberg variations of Bach.
Dr Jonathan Miller
There are different tempe, as there would be different tempe, to my thoughts, sitting on that beach with no expectation of rescue, and perfectly happy to see myself die there.
Dr Jonathan Miller
knowing perfectly well that nothing of me would live on, that I'd be dead, and that's the end of it. But I'd like to die to the sound of this music.
Presenter
The aria from Bach's Goldberg variations played by Glen Gould, and that was recorded in nineteen fifty five. If you could only take one of those eight records, Jonathan, which one would you take?
Dr Jonathan Miller
Well, I think I would have to say it would be the Goldberg variations.
Presenter
Variation
Dr Jonathan Miller
one can only enjoy um half an hour of quick bursts of uh nostalgia. Sucking on Madeleine's is no way to spend your day. This meditative sequence would be the way I'd spend my evenings, I think. Yes.
Presenter
And uh your book?
Dr Jonathan Miller
Well, because I had a great passion as a young student in zoology, with marine biology, and I became passionately interested in invertebrate marine life. And so I think I would take away with me the five volumes, if I'm allowed to pack that.
Dr Jonathan Miller
of uh Libby Henrietta Hyman's book The Invertebrates.
Presenter
How many volumes are there? Only two here.
Dr Jonathan Miller
There are five. I ha I couldn't bring them all in. They're very, very heavy. But that the wonderful McGraw-Hill.
Dr Jonathan Miller
Okrambound
Dr Jonathan Miller
They'd they'd survive on the on the desert island.
Presenter
Splendid. And your luxury.
Dr Jonathan Miller
The luxury item to go with that would be mm the canvas roll of my old dissecting set, and would take it rolled up, brown khaki canvas.
Dr Jonathan Miller
ribbons to to hold it closed, I would while away the days on the desert island, revelling in the extraordinary uh invertebrate fauna of this tropical sea.
Presenter
Jonathan Miller, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your Desert Island discs.
Dr Jonathan Miller
Thank you.
Speaker 2
You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.
Presenter asks
Is there a sense that you feel you've squandered your inheritance?
Yes, I have a sense that that I I could have done something more serious and and also more more more fundamental and lasting. If you arrive at a truth in science, it's forever. So if there is an achievement in science Um it's unquestionable.
Presenter asks
Why do you think you seem to have fallen out of favour [in Britain]?
I don't know. I'm probably because I'm old. I'm not... cutting edge now, to use again another vulgar term. Um I'm not part of that thing which critics call a producer of must see productions. I just go on doing the same stuff that I have always done, pursuing the same sort of interests, which I will never vary...
Presenter asks
Doesn't giving voice to that kind of vial [criticism] say more about you than the people it's directed at?
It says something about me, but it also, if in fact you keep your eyes and ears open, it says a great deal about the people I'm directing it to, that that the people I've called vulgar fools are objectively vulgar fools. I may be, in fact, a discontented misanthrope, but the accused are guilty, and so is the accuser in his own way.
“There's a very large part of my sensibility... which is filled with a sort of inconsolable remorse about having betrayed a very good mind.”
“Most of the things that I've done in the arts I can do with my right hand tied behind my back.”
“I believe deeply that uh there aren't any really important things, there are just huge heaps of negligible things...”
“For those of us who really have no interest in ethnicity of any sort, being Jewish is really very little more than being the potential target.”
“I increasingly see the world as filled with uh vulgar fools, and uh I tell vulgar fools that they're vulgar fools.”