Dame Joan Bakewell

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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 nine.

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My castaway this week is the broadcaster Dame Joan Bakewell.

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For more than forty years her hallmark has been intelligent, thought provoking programmes. Always fascinated with where the boundaries of taste and decency lie, she's not averse to giving them a bit of a shove herself. She faced the threat of legal action for broadcasting a poem that was deemed blasphemous.

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and smuggled her copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover into Britain in her underwear.

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As well as exploring social change for her work, she's lived through it, too. At the vanguard of women forging careers in television, she combined work with motherhood, has twice been divorced, and her relationship with Harold Pinter formed the subject of his play

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When she started working in television, it was a medium which, she says, stripped bare the illusion of all things being well. In doing so, it created our more open, more truthful, but more conflicted, society. A more open and truthful society, then, Joan Bakewell. A better society than when you were a young woman growing up? Much better, much better.

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People hark back nostalgically to the sixties, but I go back to the forties and fifties, and I do remember society being very closed down, very conventional, a lot of hypocrisy, a good deal of secrecy.

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And I grew up quite fearful of the world and wondering what it was really going to be like, because inside me I had churning all sorts of ideas and ambitions and fantasies which didn't seem to fit any observed conventions. Do you regard yourself as somebody who's interested as a broadcaster and writer in portraying and and helping other people to understand the world, but also as an individual, are you interested in trying to shape things, in trying to influence debate?

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Yes, I've always regarded the world as to be improved. I have this slightly, I suppose you would call it liberal do-gooding attitude. It's used as a pejorative phrase, but I'm quite pleased to be considered a wishy-washy liberal. When at various times in my life there have been crises abroad or in domestic policy, I've been willing to put my voice behind some cause or whatever. And I do think that it's a good thing to do. You feel you can be part of change. It's quite a risky thing to do, isn't it, though? Because also as a broadcaster you rely on being popular, you rely on having a spread of appeal and once you start...

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Pinning your colours to various masks, then people can judge you as somebody who is not just a bystander.

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It's not so much popularity, which really has to take care of itself, whether people like you or not. That doesn't ever concern me very much. What you will recognise in broadcasting, of course, traditional public service broadcasting, is that you're meant to be impartial. So I didn't do a great deal of flag waving when I was beginning in the 60s, although I had the good fortune to work for a very radical programme called Late Night Line Up, which did flout conventions. So it's a matter of judgment at any point. I don't think there are absolute rules. You can or can't do this. That's what makes life so interesting. Each day carries a new set of decisions. Tell me then about your first disc today. Well, Jimi Hendrix, I mentioned the programme Late Night Line Up in the 60s, which was a sort of groundbreaking programme live every night of the year. And a whole raft of young musicians were coming up through the 60s who seized the chance to come on the Very Late Night Programme and

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and Play and Jimi Hendrix came along.

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A very intense person, rather beautiful, I remember rather kind of crazy as well and obsessive, but totally dominating any room he was in, and his music is the same it's obsessive and absolutely brilliant.

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The thing about the sixties many, many things have been found wrong about the sixties, but one of the things you can't fault is the quality of the music.

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The Jimi Hendrix Experience and Voodoo Child. So, Joan Bakewell, your job now, your sort of newest incarnation, I suppose, is being the voice of older people, which in itself is an intriguing title. Yes, I chose it because voice seemed appropriate to someone who'd had a lifetime as a broadcaster. And it puts me in the right position between

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The older people who write with all their problems and issues that concern them, and government who are prepared to listen. They all want to tell you all their problems. That's an interesting place to occupy, isn't it? Because for so much of your professional life, you've been concerned with dissecting life and how people manage to make sense of life. Do you find yourself increasingly dealing with people's concerns over death and how they fight? Of course, I get a great many letters about how we are to die.

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Of course I do get a great

Speaker 15:39

Yeah.

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How am I to die? Where do I get pills? I mean, people write and say, What am I going to do? I don't want to be the victim of

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A medical system that can keep me alive for ever when I'm in fact I'm ready to go. Well, it's very d difficult to advise people about these things, so what I do is try to continue a debate with everybody and raise it in newspaper articles and programmes and insist that we are going to have to discuss this matter. You yourself are seventy-six now. I mean, you look to be in rude health to me, but but have you contemplated for yourself the the dignitarse journey? Would you make your way to Switzerland if you had to, if you saw the end coming? I've made a living will.

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And I've talked to my family, and I've talked to my doctor, so I've done as much as possible to avoid the fi phrase my father used when he was very, very ill. He said, Joan, don't let them mess me around. I knew exactly what he meant. So I've I hope that I've indicated to all those who love me that that's um what I want to prevail. Would you be a DNR? Would you be a do-not-resuscitate person? Yes, I carry a do-not-resuscitate card.

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Um yes, I

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I do. And I think um

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I think it's best to look these things squarely in the face and consider what might happen. Otherwise you leave your family with all sorts of dilemmas. What would she want? She's lost the power of speech. What are we to do? And the lack of voices around of older people is almost unbelievable. Voices like yours, of people in their mid-seventies into their eighties, seem so rarely heard. Oh, very rarely heard. Ninety-five per cent of the people in broadcasting and the media are under fifty.

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So I regard fifty as relatively young. Obviously it is for me. No, you don't hear those voices very often. It's to do with the changing demographics, of course, and the fact that we haven't yet adjusted to the notion that we will go on being in our prime, in our forties, fifties and sixties. I mean huge numbers of people now live into their eighties and are very active, and far more people live into their nineties than they did, and are available as intelligent, energetic, trained, professional, working people to do their jobs, which they're suddenly oh, you're sixty-five. It's the end of the line. And they write to me with complete astonishment that this is how life has been configured for them.

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Let's have some music, then. What's next?

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Religious music.

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I love religious music, and I'm very involved in the broadcasting I do with religion. So people always say, Are you religious?

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Um I skirt that one by saying I'm a non-believing member of the Church of England, because in fact I was baptized and confirmed, and I'm very fond of the Church of England.

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The Christian religion has thrown up most beautiful buildings, beautiful paintings, and beautiful music. So I do love to hear church music, and I've chosen Thomas Talis's Spemin Allium, which is one of the most sublime pieces of English music ever.

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Thomas Talis's Spem in Elium, sung by the Talis Scholars, directed by Peter Phillips. Let's rewind then, Joan Bakewell, to Stockport, nineteen thirty three. The Where and When.

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that you arrived into this world. What what was your home life like?

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My father was a word you don't hear nowadays. He was an orphan. And then he had the good fortune to get one of the places at a school for poor boys. He went on to become an apprentice engineer. He worked in a foundry when he was about 15 and rose from there in the same company for about 40 odd years and ended up as the manager director of one of the branches of that engineering firm. So he became.

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Someone who rose from the artisan class, as it were, to the middle managerial, and that was regarded as a great triumph and result of effort, which was always borne in upon me, was worth making. Really, always. So there was this idea of expectation from a very early age. Yes, I was the burden of my parents' hopes. They'd both been

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quite clever children, but the social situation was such that m my mother left school at thirteen.

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She'd got a scholarship to the girls' high school, but she couldn't afford the uniform.

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So they had huge aspirations and they got quite a lot of brains between them. So I had I inherited just enough to mobilise that ambition for them and became a sort of standard 1940s scholarship girl. And your mother had this, well, early thwarted ability. She was not able to fulfil her potential. Did that in some way manifest itself in the type of character she was, the type of mother she was? When I was in my teens, my mother sank into what we would now call clinical depression, but we didn't know what it was in those days. We just thought she was being difficult, really, and also impossible to live with. She was given to bouts of total silence and was very, clearly very unhappy. I

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Minded very much. I was very resentful of that as a teenager, but as I got older and

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began to think about what had caused it, I did realise, and it endorsed my kind of feminist instincts, that she had responded to her intelligence and ambition being completely sat on, and that had turned her in on herself and caused her depression. Did her depression mean that she was

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unable to be enthusiastic about your own achievements?

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She was proud of me in a rather quiet way, I think.

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Both my parents were proud and a bit bewildered when I got a place at Cambridge. No one in the family had ever been to university before. They didn't really know what universities were like. They watched me kind of drift away from the background that they knew and enter this other world of, you know, scholarship and bright young things and glittering prizes, all of which bewildered them. Tell me about your next piece of music then.

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Opera. What was I going to do about choosing opera for this programme? I thought, well, I would just go for the piece that gives me perpetual joy, and that is Strauss's Rose and Cavalier. It is hugely romantic, brilliantly orchestrated. It's a touching story of a woman of a certain age conceding her lover to a younger woman.

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It was rather alarming to find that the Marshaline, who is this supposedly aging beauty, is all of thirty five in the plot. How depressing. So um that doesn't give us much comfort, does it? But none the less, most beautiful and here she is conceding to the younger woman.

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Oh, still here.

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The trio at the end of Strauss's De Rosen Cavalier. Uh you once said, or maybe you wrote it, I wanted to be a boy or a nun.

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Yes, I was thinking about that.

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Well, I was

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I was in revolt against what I saw as a woman's lot. It was clearly that men ran the world and they had a much better time. I mean, they just they got out more, they ruled things, they had all the top jobs. Who wouldn't want to be a boy in those circumstances?

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The nun thing was slightly more weird.

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I think it was to do with being isolating myself from the conventional setup around me. I don't think it survived very long once the hormones hit, but for a time I did see myself as really having more in common with talking to Jesus than talking to my contemporaries. And when you went to Cambridge then, the idea of either being a boy or a nun, I would imagine, was uh was long gone. You you had a fabulous time.

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Yes, I have to say, I think that's the big breakthrough in my life was the shift from my rather conventional background to what was probably quite a conventional world of Cambridge, but it was so different from what I knew.

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Many, many, many friends, people of my own age talking about ideas, having ideas and plans and producing plays and writing magazines and poetry and so on. I just thought it was I was delirious with happiness, it was glorious. Of course, being a student in those days was a much more heavily chaperoned affair than it is now. I mean, you had to presumably be back in your rooms at a certain time, you weren't allowed to stay out, all of those kind of things. How did you deal with that? Well, there were two girls' colleges at the time, Newnham and Girdon.

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Glory

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You were eager.

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to have any attachments and you're falling in love and out of love all the time. You d did have to be back in college by ten o'clock at night. Young men had to be signed in at the Porter's Lodge, and then had to sign out of your room.

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It didn't occur to them that if you didn't sign them in they wouldn't know the men were there, and of course we found ways round the rules. I mean, my generation was

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quite used to staying over in the men's colleges, and not being discovered, leaving a rolled up

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blanket under the eider down so that if anyone looked in your room it was clear that there was somebody asleep there. If you were discovered you were in real trouble, a friend of mine got pregnant and was sent down instantly.

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Her boyfriend stayed on to do his degree. She never took hers. So we were conscious that the world was loaded against us. But we reckoned that we were seeing change. It would come slowly, and it would be great to be part of it. Were you part of quite a glamorous set, then?

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Well, I was part of the theatre set, and there was a great deal of partying, of course, quite a lot of drinking. We didn't do drugs very much, but we did drink quite a lot.

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Sherry, we drank sherry. Interesting you say we didn't do drugs very much. I mean were there drugs around? Benzedrine, we used to take benzedrine because it would keep us awake so we could do essays all night.

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For that

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But that was about it really. Well as as far as I was concerned, I was pretty innocent really. Innocent and timid.

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It's amazing. I had such a good time. Tell me about your next piece of music then.

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Mine's a generation that loved jazz. Jazz was very.

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much the thing in the late fifties. So

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Peggy Lee always sums up that era for me, and she sings with such

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Amazing concentration.

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and so simply, you wonder how she could pare it down and yet keep it so enormously powerful. So here she is with Benny Goodman.

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Uh

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It seems we stood in tall

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Like this before

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We looked at each other in the same way then

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But I can't remember where

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Peggy Lee and the Benny Goodman Sextet and Where or When. Joan Bacall, that is an incredibly romantic song. I mean, it's loaded with romance, and we think of you as as being

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A precise person, a thoughtful person, but maybe not a romantic person. Do you do you think you are?

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I think I probably am. I think I take that for granted.

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Uh, it's probably just in my nature. I'm I'm moved by

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Lyrical poetry and music, and indeed by love affairs, I just think, um.

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It's very important to be.

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Upbeat about romance, love, attachment in your life. What about motherhood, then? How did you find early motherhood?

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I remember being very joyful at being deliberately pregnant and it was the early days of natural childbirth. I went along with my husband to the classes and did all that and thought I was enormously progressive. I bought Doctor Spock and did all the relaxation. And then when it came to the actual labour, I remember thinking finding that all that went out of the window because the pain was so great. And would they please give me as many drugs as possible? And did being a mother bring you closer to understanding your own mother?

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Oh, very much so. I mean, of course, um having a baby brings you close to your own mother at the time because you need her help and advice. And so that did. My mother did early on use a phrase when I was tangling with my children at the toddler stage, and my mother said, The important thing about bringing up children is you must break their will.

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And I remember thinking, No, I do belong to a different generation. My generation do not believe that that's what you do with children, which is why we had noisy, troublesome, creative, lively, assertive children, and not obedient little robots, which was my mother's ideal. Let's have some music. What's next?

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Well, Bob Dylan has to be here, really. Bob Dylan is the sort of sound of.

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The generation that lives through the sixties in their twenties. The impact of America.

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On my generation was very strong. Basically we'd learnt it from Hollywood, which we'd relied on during the war to keep us cheerful.

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After the war the Americans arrived, tall, golden, healthy.

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And then we learnt to our surprise that back in America there was something called the Civil Rights Movement, and a whole race of people were completely exploited, and that southern America was contorted with social distress. And we became very passionate about the civil rights movement and then subsequently the Vietnam War. And we took we

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absorbed a lot of our culture from America, and Bob Dylan was at the forefront of that. His music and his style and his lyrics and all that he stood for has always been important to me.

Speaker 121:07

Yes and how many years can some people exist?

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Before they're allowed to be free.

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Yes, and how many times can a man turn his head and pretend that he just doesn't see?

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The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind. The answer is blowing

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Blown in the wind. Let's talk then about that period when you were presenting late-night line-up. Life must have been.

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In the wind and

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Very vigorous and exciting. You were coming into contact with all of the major cultural movers and shakers of the time: creative people, thoughtful people, vigorous people, superstars. Well, it was wonderful. It was a programme that had an open remit to interview anyone who fancied really. I interviewed people like Stockhausen and Berrio and poets at the time, Kingsley Ames and John Arlott. And I found myself in this.

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Really quite important programme, talking about television, the future of television, the nature of television, the nature of art, creativity, and so on. And it began to fit me like a glove. I began to feel that something worthwhile was being said. And at this point, would you have started your relationship with Harold Pinter around about the time that you were working on the programme? I first met Harold in 1960 and

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I knew him.

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over forty five years as a very good friend. For seven of those years we had an affair, and I began to know him well, I suppose, about sixty four, sixty five, which lasted till about

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1970. And what about the play? What about betrayal? What about seeing.

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I imagine elements of what had really happened to you portrayed and consumed by audiences and written about and spoken about. I found it a great shock when he showed me the script.

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And decided really that there was nothing for it but to get get over my shock and live with it. People have said since that it was a kind of tribute. I tried to see it that way. He was very eager that I should like it, and indeed always wanted me to see productions. He would always tell me there's a new production of Retail that's in Leicester.

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Oh, she

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Well, that small part of his life I was an important part, and his plays are very, very important to him. And

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That play was very close to our life, and he wanted me to comment on it. The long friendship over decades, in a sense, was more important and sustained by me than the few years of our affair. So the criticism of the play and the appreciation of the play became part of the friendship rather than the affair. You come across to me as somebody who who sees life

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very clearly and is able to express themselves in a very truthful, thoughtful way. Having an affair means that you subvert some of that truth, that you inevitably have to live below the radar, often with your feelings and often with your thoughts. Th that it strikes me that must have been a a curious situation for somebody like you to be in.

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Don't forget that I spoke about the society in which I grew up, in which there was a good deal of hypocrisy, and people very rarely spoke about their emotions or what their emotional life involved. I also learned as a student that actually the thing to do was not get caught, and that you needed to defy the rules of society at that time in order to have the things you wanted, which seemed reasonable. So, in a sense.

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The nature of an affair and the point of the betrayal was, of course, that there were internal betrayals between those who were the protagonists, and it seemed all at one with my attempt to

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Be truthful to myself.

Speaker 325:02

Yeah.

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Right. Rather than being truthful to the conventions of the time. And when you look back on it in the landscape of your life at the age you are now, where does it sit and how does it look in that period?

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Two

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Well, we always said, even until his very last years, that we we had a damn good time.

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We look back on it with a good deal of pleasure.

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And a sense that it had been very important and that it was over, and it had moved on, we'd both moved into a different world. So

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I smile when I think about it.

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Let's have some music. What's next?

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How am I to choose from the great swathe of classical music with which, you know, we're all familiar? But I

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I thought I would go for

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A quintet of Schubert. As I get older I like chamber music much more.

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I love the focus it brings, and the Schubert quintet in C major is just sublime and

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Again, focussed, concentrated, and just purely beautiful.

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Part of the Adagio from Schubert's String Quintet in C major, played by the Emerson String Quartet with Mr Slav Rostroprovich. Um, Joan Bakewell, I'm going to apologize in advance for bringing this up. It's the moniker that has dogged you for decades, which is the thinking man's crumpet.

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It was Frank Muir who said it.

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Um offensive at the time?

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I just thought it was a bit of male flattery. It was seized on by the more militant feminists as an outrageous insult to womanhood, for which they tended to blame me, which I found a bit complicated. So I ignored it. But what I've been amazed at is how it's hung in there. And I can only think it's a tribute to the unoriginality of male editors. No one who's ever interviewed me who has not said, particularly if they're women, I'm sorry to have to mention this phrase, but my editor insists. And so this has been passed down through the decades. And it's still around. And it's flattering. It's quite fun. It's nothing more than that.

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What's next in your choice?

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I should miss the human voice if I were on this island. The human voice is so important. I spend my time talking and enjoying conversations. I would

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Just long to hear the human voice.

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I know that I'm being given a volume of Shakespeare to take with me, but to hear Shakespeare spoken.

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by a distinguished actor, I think, would be enormously inspiring and consoling.

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and would bring back, of course, all the memories I have of decades of theatre going and enjoying talk. So I've chosen one of Shakespeare's sonnets.

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Uh

Dame Joan Bakewell28:37

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

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Thou art more lovely and more temperate.

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Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May

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And summer's lease hath all too short a date.

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Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines

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And often is his gold complexion dimmed

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And every fare from fair sometime declines, By chance or nature's changing course untrimmed.

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But thy eternal summer shall not fade.

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Nor lose possession of that fare thou owest.

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Nor shall death brag thou wanderest in his shade, When in eternal lines to time thou growest.

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So long as men can breathe or eyes can see

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So long lives this

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And this gives life.

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Uh

Dame Joan Bakewell29:35

To the

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Judy Dench reading Shakespeare's Sonnet No. eighteen, Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day?

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You are, Joan Bickle, going to be on your own, I'm afraid, on this island of yours? It will be terrible. Right. I shall miss my family so much, and I shall reminisce about all the good times we've had together. You have six grandchildren now? Yeah. Are you a very participative grandmother? I'm a very insistent grandmother. Yes, I have them to stay with me. Do you? I like to have them to stay with me one at a time, so that for something like three days I set aside all work and two people have a very good time. And they're ranging in age from teenagers to seventeen to nine. So for example, what would you do with the seventeen-year-old when they come together? Well, we recently the seventeen-year-old was the one who came up most recently and we went to see Much Ado About Nothing at the Opener Theatre in Regents Park.

Speaker 130:18

And then

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So you're an improving granny. You're yes. I hope so. I mean improving improving myself as well, I might say. I I want to just ask one more question about your age, because, as I've said, you're seventy six. You are an almost unbelievably good Nick.

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Um, I'm wondering how you take care of yourself. You don't strike me as the sort of person who's popping down to Harley Street for a bit of Botox.

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I am I mean, you're in you are incredibly glamorous. Well, I I continue to behave as I always have. I just refuse to think that, oh, goodness me, I'm past a certain age. I must behave in a certain way. I've always tried to be consistent in my life, so I continue to be interested in

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clothes, even in high heel shoes. I go out and about. I take exercise. I go on holidays. I mean, I just go on living the life I led in my forties, fifty, six. What's different? And for for somebody who's chosen

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As

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We were talking about a rather romantic list. Do you is there romance in your life?

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Only in my heart. I mean, I just I'm open to my to life and to friendships and, um

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Uh and to people. I mean, the interesting thing about living on your own is it does give you a great sense of your own identity and um confidence in the direction that you're taking. So you do live life entirely on your own terms. You don't have to offer compromises or concede at all. Um you can paint the walls any colour you like. I'm having an extremely good time having my own way. Sounds delightful. Tell me about your final choice then.

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I've always enjoyed going to Alborough on the coast of Suffolk, which has become famous for its music because it was the home of Benjamin Britton, where he lived. I was for many years on the council of the Alborough Productions. I visit every year to the festival.

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I've chosen an interlude from Peter Grimes. I regard Peter Grimes as probably the greatest post war opera. There are certain interludes in this magnificent piece of music, and I'd like to hear the opening one, perhaps the most famous and the most lyrical.

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The first of the C interludes from Peter Grimes performed by the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and composed and conducted by Benjamin Britton.

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I'm going to now, as you said, you mentioned, I'll give you the complete works of Shakespeare. I also give you the Bible, and you can take a book, Joan. What are you going to take?

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I thought about this a long time. I thought it had to be something that I know, so that I wouldn't be disappointed. So I'm not going to take Don Quixote or Dante's comedy. I'm going to take Tolstoy's War and Peace.

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It contains everything.

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It contains family, contains war.

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It contains philosophy, it contains domestic life, ambition.

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Everything. So it will continue to reward me throughout my stay. How long will my stay be? I'm not entirely sure. Maybe a very long time. But if it is, then you'll still be reading. And a luxury.

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I recently published my first novel, and I do think that everyone has in them a creative instinct which often doesn't get fulfilled, and mine has always nudged away at my life and never had room enough to expand. So I would like to take an abundance of paper

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A series of pencils.

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Then I could both draw. I think I could derive dyes from the various vegetation around, so that we could transfer that into painting if I needed to. But I think I could also write, so I could indulge what shreds of creativity are left. And I know that you found it almost impossible to find your eight discs, but now I'm going to take you one step further. Unbearably, I'm going to ask you to choose just one.

Presenter34:56

I think it has to be the Schubert, because it quintessentially combines music and insight, contemplation and consolation.

Presenter35:05

It's yours, Dame Joan Bakele. Thank you very much for letting us hear your Desert Island discs. Thank you.

Presenter35:17

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