Gyles Brandreth

Presenter0:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Discs from BBC Radio 4. For rights reasons the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

Presenter0:10

For more information about the programme, please visit bbc.co.uk/slash radio four.

Presenter0:34

My castaway this week is Giles Brandreth. He's had his fingers in more pies than most of us could hope to eat. A former MP and a minister in John Major's government, he's also written biographies, diaries, novels, and stage plays. He has starred in his own West End Review, is a successful broadcaster and accomplished speaker. In his spare time, he set up a teddy bear museum, started the UK Scrabble competition, and campaigns for public spaces. Yet, despite all this, he says the motto that has guided him throughout his life is Don't Dabble, Focus. Whilst at Oxford, he edited the University Magazine, directed the Dramatic Society, and was President of the Union. A glittering career always seemed likely, yet he acknowledges that the first line of his obituary will be that he was the man who wore silly jumpers on breakfast T V. Does that irk you, Giles Brandreth?'Cause you're probably right.

Gyles Brandreth1:28

I accept it completely. I mean, it is more than twenty years since I last wore a colourful jumper on T V, but people do remember them.

Presenter1:29

Right.

Gyles Brandreth1:35

And the story is true that when I turned up at the House of Commons wearing a proper, you know, grey suit to look like one of John Major's men, almost the first time I rose to speak in the Commons, John Prescott clocked me, leant forward, and muttered Woolly jumper

Gyles Brandreth1:54

I was thrown, he kept this up, and eventually I had to point out to Mr. Prescott that the joy of a woolly jumper is that you can take it off at will, whereas the blight of a woolly mind is that you're lumbered with it for life. But of course Mr. Prescott got the last laugh because he became Deputy Prime Minister and is now in the House of Lords and I am here. But I'm very happy to be here and I don't mind the woolly jumpers at all. It's just a reminder that actually once people see you in a certain light it's very difficult to shift an image. But I don't mind and it was fun.

Presenter2:23

Here you are sitting to day with a sort of very dapper looking suit and a beautiful shirt. I've even noticed you've got some tremendous socks on. They look very dapper indeed. Are you happy with where you're at right now?

Gyles Brandreth2:34

Yes, I think, funnily enough, I've always been happy with where I am on the day. I'm quite good at living in the moment. In a sense, what I try to do is whatever I do at the time, I try to do it properly. So the jumpers began in the 70s and 80s when I was appearing regularly on T V. And I read somewhere that what people recollect of what they see on television is about 83% what they see, the visual. I thought, well, you know, what can I do? And so I began wearing these jumpers. And to be honest, it was commercially very useful. I ended up as the director of a chain of knitting shops around the country. I did knitting books. I appeared in commercials. I appeared in Panto. So it was a very profitable line. But I only actually wore them until breakfast. So it was always a costume to me. So when I became an MP, I gave away the jumpers, put on a suit, and whatever I'm doing at the time, I try to do that profoundly and properly.

Presenter3:28

Right, we've sort of got the jumpers out of the way. L l let's move on to the more important things then. There will be lots and lots of words from you today, I'm sure, but also lots of words in the pieces that you've chosen. Tell me about the first uh disc that we're going to listen to.

Gyles Brandreth3:39

We're beginning with Noel Coward, who has been part of my life ever since I can remember. Music, I don't think, has entered my soul. My soul, my heart, my brain, my life is full of words. And Noel Coward is a master of the English language. In the 1950s, when I was brought up, I was listening to records like My Fair Ladies, Salad Days, and Flanagan and Allen, and particularly Noel Coward. This song, written about 60 or more years ago, seems as relevant to me now as it was when it was first created.

Speaker 24:09

There are bad times just around the corn. There are dark clouds hurtling through the sky. And it's no good whining about a silver lining. For we know from experience that they won't roll by. With a scowl and a frown, we'll keep our peckers down and prepare for depression and doom and dread. We're going to unpack our troubles from our old kit bag and wait until we drop down dead.

Presenter4:39

That was nil coward, and there are bad times just around the corner.

Gyles Brandreth4:43

I do recommend, if I may, Noel Card's diaries. They are wonderful. I just love reading them. And his constant refrain is Rise above it, rise above it And really nothing ever goes wrong in my life. You know, I'm just the most spoiled person on the planet. But when anything goes slightly wrong, I just say to myself, Rise above it, as Noel would do.

Presenter4:44

PS

Presenter4:46

Right.

Presenter5:02

You say uh you had a sort of Rupert Baer childhood. That's a great little phrase. E everything was idyllic, was it?

Gyles Brandreth5:08

My wife would tell you that I've never left my Rupert Baer childhood. Yes, I had a lovely childhood. I was born in 1948 in Germany in a British Forces hospital. My father was part of something called the Allied Control Commission. He was in the army, but he was also a lawyer. My mother was a housewife and later a teacher. I had three older sisters and a younger brother. And I had a perfect 1950s childhood.

Presenter5:36

Your parents married within weeks of meeting each other.

Gyles Brandreth5:39

My parents met in the 1930s. My father was a young lawyer. My mother had just come over from Canada. My grandmother was a missionary who rode around India on a donkey with a Bible. And she married an Indian Army officer. And they went to Canada eventually for my mother to go to university. Then they came to London. And my father in 1937, Christmas 1937, bought the first set of monopolies sold in this country. Came back to his digs, and the landlady said, Well, there's a young Canadian student who's just moved in with her mother on the ground floor. Maybe go and meet them. And my father went, introduced himself, met my mother for the first time. They played Monopoly, and a matter of weeks later, they elope.

Gyles Brandreth6:24

They ran away.

Presenter6:26

Now you yourself married maybe not in secret, but you married very, very privately, like your parents. Are are you a very sort of private, guarded person, do you think?

Gyles Brandreth6:34

We did marry in secret. It was several years before we even told our parents that we were married. Why was that? Uh because it was a private thing. And funnily enough, I am a private person. It's quite amusing.

Presenter6:44

Now hold on a second. It was a private thing. Why was it a private thing?

Gyles Brandreth6:48

Well, it if you're getting married, it is it's actually about the person you're marrying, it's about the relationship, it's not about in well for me, it's not about the um the party, because my parents did it that way, I felt able to do it that way, and indeed some of my children got married in that way, and uh I was very comfortable with the way we got married. I I liked it. And the truth is, uh I think I'm professionally gregarious, um but actually at home I'm quite quiet.

Gyles Brandreth7:18

So out there I'm gregarious, but in here I'm I'm quite a quiet person. Tell me what we're going to

Presenter7:25

You're next then, Giles.

Gyles Brandreth7:27

We're going to hear, actually, having said I'm quite a quiet person, this is a lively, lovely number. I was born in Germany and came to England in the early 1950s and spoke German. And my parents had always got the gift of languages and they couldn't, they thought they'd find a German school, but there wasn't one. So they sent me to the French Lysee. I began from the age of seven on my own, going on holiday once or twice a year to stay with families. I was taken to British European Airways. I do remember it. I had a sort of label around me and I was given to a stewardess. I got out, in fact, it was somewhere in Switzerland, and my parents assumed they were sending me to a French-speaking part of Switzerland, but they weren't. They were sending me to a German-speaking part of Switzerland. I actually had to get out of the aeroplane at Zurich and find the railway station, aged seven, to go to this place where I was going on holiday. And maybe the world was different. It was a safer place.

Presenter8:19

Anyway, this piece of music

Gyles Brandreth8:20

This piece of music is French, it's Chartronnet, boom!

Presenter8:20

This piece of music is

Speaker 38:23

Le Vordole Bois Faire.

Speaker 38:25

The bichau aboire fais, la vie sal cassé, fais feric, feric, frag, and fou flick, flick, flag, mau.

Speaker 38:34

Go on over.

Speaker 38:36

Touta veguis de boom, loisau de boom, c'est l'orar.

Speaker 38:41

Boom

Speaker 38:43

Lately I've been with Febook.

Speaker 38:46

Et le bonjudie, bon, dans son faut.

Presenter8:51

That was Charles Renee and boom. Charles Brandruss. Is is it true that when you were young you wanted to be a a sort of Danny Kaye and then home secretary?

Gyles Brandreth9:00

I said that when I was interviewed in about 1967 by The Sun newspaper.

Presenter9:03

Bye.

Gyles Brandreth9:05

As I said the words I knew that in my heart I wanted to be a sort of Laurence Olivier and then Prime Minister.

Speaker 39:12

Ah.

Gyles Brandreth9:13

But I was already observing myself from outside, and I thought, actually, make light of it, don't reveal the truth.

Speaker 39:16

Uh

Gyles Brandreth9:20

As it turns out, I'm me, and I enjoyed being a Lord Commissioner of the Treasury. You can't win'em all. I keep a diary, and last year I published extracts from the diary and had to go through it and edit it, and I found it quite a depressing experience. Looking back, don't look back.

Speaker 39:21

Did you not?

Gyles Brandreth9:40

Don't relive the promise, don't relive the disappointments, live in the moment.

Presenter9:45

Yep.

Gyles Brandreth9:45

Uh

Presenter9:45

You say in your diaries on meeting Jack Straw when you were both just, I think, twenty one at university, you note at the end of one day's entry, I wonder which one of us will become Home Secretary first.

Gyles Brandreth9:56

Yes. I mean, in the early days of Keeping My Diary, I wasn't conscious that I would ever be publishing it. So it is a kind of confessional. But high high ambition you had as a young man. Right from the beginning. But I was I think basically what I've done through all my life is or certainly the first

Presenter10:00

Also

Gyles Brandreth10:11

thirty or forty years, was trying to fulfil my parents' ambition for me. Tell me about that. Essentially, my father Bo went to Oxford in the late nineteen twenties, and when I turned up at Oxford in the late nineteen sixties, I really tried to recreate the Oxford of his time.

Gyles Brandreth10:31

My father at the in the nineteen twenties at Oxford, the things to be were President of the Union, Editor of Isis, you had to direct the OUDs, the Dramatic Society, these were the things to achieve. I turned up at Oxford and I set about achieving them immediately. And as a consequence of this, I just did it and I ended up, in fact, while I was still an undergraduate, doing a T V show as a student.

Presenter10:51

But you didn't um absorb then any of the atmosphere of the times. Of course, this was the sixties, when peop when it it became incredibly not just sort of fashionable, but required a behaviour of people in their late teens and twenties to rebel, to to overthrow the standards that their parents had had set in place post war.

Gyles Brandreth11:07

Yeah, I was an extraordinary caricature. I mean, I looked like Rex Harrison from My Fair Lady in the 1960s. Others, you know, had the the dreadlocks, the curly hair, and the dope and all of that, and there I was, like a middle-aged man. I notice only oft in retrospect that all my choices for these records, and indeed all my references in my life, are to people, personalities who would have been contemporaneous with my father, not with me.

Presenter11:32

Yeah. Let's have your next disc then, Giles Brandrath. What are we gonna hear?

Gyles Brandreth11:35

I went on from my prep school to a boarding school called Bedale's, where almost as soon as I arrived at the school I met the person who became my best friend for life, a young actor called Simon Cadell. Later became famous in Heidi High, Hamlet, playing at the National Theatre, a wonderful actor, and I knew, I think, that his father was a theatrical agent. So I honed in on this boy. I was about 14, he was about 12, and together we listened to records of Noel. You can imagine what we were like, aged 12 and 14, doing our impressions of Noel Card, Flanagan, and Allen, and we could do the whole of My Fair Lady. We competed as to who was the better Henry Higgins.

Gyles Brandreth12:17

I'm very grateful she's a woman.

Speaker 312:19

And so easy to forget, rather like a habit one can always break. And yet

Speaker 312:28

I've grown accustomed to the trace of something in the air.

Speaker 312:37

A custom

Speaker 312:40

Two uh

Speaker 312:43

Face.

Presenter12:46

Simon Cadell, and I've grown accustomed to her face from my fair lady.

Gyles Brandreth12:50

What's interesting about Sam Caddell, who was very much my best friend and who died about a dozen years ago now, we were well, we were a couple of blokes, you know, we were really obsessed with ourselves, but we talked theatre stories all the time. We loved the theatre, and what was fun for us, we were teenagers, and we would talk about, you know, Sir Ralph and do our Ralph Richardson impressions and all this, and we'd compete as to who could be the better Ralph Richardson, not knowing that one day actually we would know these people. And in fact, I realise now, thinking about it for this programme, that all my childhood heroes, I found ways of meeting them.

Presenter13:24

One of the pieces of advice that people are sometimes given is, you know, never meet your heroes. They don't seem quite as glorious as they were when you were worshipping them from afar.

Gyles Brandreth13:32

Oh, that makes them more interesting. When I was an undergraduate at Oxford I put on a production of Cinderella. I wanted for the first night to have my favourite actor come to perform the prologue, and that was Michael Redgrave. And I invited Michael Redgrave, founders of Dresden who's who wrote to him.

Gyles Brandreth13:48

And a few days later I got a telegram from him containing just two words delighted Redgrave.

Gyles Brandreth13:54

Get the telegram.

Presenter13:55

And you got a private performance out of him

Gyles Brandreth13:57

Mm-hmm.

Presenter13:57

I did indeed

Gyles Brandreth13:58

I did indeed. He actually did to be or not to be for me personally. Yeah, it was it was it was flirtation by Shakespeare, but why not? Anyway, the point of the story is this, that Michael Redgrave was a very nervous person. Before the performance, before he was doing this, he was in the wings shaking, saying he couldn't do it, his voice had gone his throat. But I forced him onto the stage, and as he stepped onto the stage, everything changed. The body grew, the lights came into his eyes, they sparkled, and he was golden. And he came off and then crumpled again.

Gyles Brandreth14:30

And that was fascinating to behold as well. So I I like seeing them when they're vulnerable as well as when they're en song.

Presenter14:36

That was a great phrase you used, flirtation by Shakespeare. You you've also uh written about Frankie Howard doing his damnedest to get you to um

Presenter14:44

Well, I don't know quite a lot.

Gyles Brandreth14:45

Quite well to put it, probably you do. Now that I'm in my sixties myself, I realize what I had when I was in my twenties. I didn't realise it until recently. I thought it was these people, you know, were so delightful to me because I was so brilliant and amusing and intelligent and interesting to be with. No, they liked me because I was young. And it's a wonderful thing to be. I think I took full advantage of being young in some ways. I wasn't young like other people in the sixties were young, but I had the best of being young in the sense that older people took to me because I was young.

Presenter15:07

Where's

Presenter15:14

But you are also you are also Giles to use you know it's an overused word now, but it probably suits you quite well. You're quite camp.

Gyles Brandreth15:21

Oh yes.

Presenter15:21

So I'm going to die.

Gyles Brandreth15:21

I mean, I d I don't mind that. It's actually been very, very useful.

Presenter15:24

Yeah.

Gyles Brandreth15:24

People thinking that I'm gay. What a wonderful cover.

Presenter15:24

Yeah.

Presenter15:29

I'm looking at a picture of you right now. I'm I'm I think that's Judy Garland, isn't it? In The Wizard of Oz, and there you are with your plaits in, little red shoes, a petticoat. You look to be th in a full face of make up. You look to be thoroughly enjoying yourself. You're quite happy to embrace that side of yourself.

Gyles Brandreth15:36

Oh dear.

Gyles Brandreth15:43

I loved that. That Kirsty is holding a photograph of me dressed, indeed, as Julie Garland in The Wizard of Oz.

Presenter15:49

Yeah.

Speaker 315:49

Yeah.

Gyles Brandreth15:49

And this, I appeared in a show, and we had this as a sort of finale of me, you know, doing my Wizard of Oz moment. And I have to say, I did love wearing the costume. That photograph was taken by Lord Snowden, you know, Brandruth by Snowden. I don't know at the time of taking the photograph which of the two of us was the more excited. We certainly had a fun time. I'm not excited.

Presenter16:07

I'm wondering, does your wife have this propped on the piano in a silver frame, or is that one for the the drawer, hidden away?

Gyles Brandreth16:11

I have to say, if my wife knew that this was happening now, she'd be shredding the photograph, she won't be listening to the programme, etcetera. But I was happy doing that. I was very, very happy.

Gyles Brandreth16:22

Very happy.

Presenter16:22

Very happy. We're not going to hear Judy Garland now, but tell me what we are going to hear now, Giles Brandreth.

Gyles Brandreth16:27

Let's raise the tone. We're going to hear the choir of St Paul's Cathedral singing Dear Lord and Father of Mankind. I was brought up in London and when I was a little boy I was in two church choirs and I was also a server at St Stephen's Church in Gloucester Road and I was a choirboy and I loved being a choir boy. Particularly in London we got half a crown for weddings and very occasionally we got a funeral and that was worthwhile. Five shillings.

Speaker 316:43

Uh

Speaker 317:10

Alright,

Speaker 317:15

I tied some is my

Speaker 317:19

Give him the earth was praise.

Speaker 317:26

We deep of heaven's faith.

Presenter17:36

That was the choir of St Paul's Cathedral singing Dear Lord and Father of Mankind. So being the MP then, you waited a good long while to be an MP. Is is it the case that you waited because your wife said to you, I don't want you getting involved in politics when we have a young family?

Gyles Brandreth17:50

We Michel and I have many friends who are politicians, and Michel said families and politics don't mix, don't do this well until the children are at least teenagers. And the day my youngest daughter became a teenager, I applied to be a Member of Parliament.

Presenter18:05

Now you were a whip in John Major's government, and and it strikes me that you are somebody who you know, you quite like to be liked. You are somebody who who likes to get on with people. The job of the whip famously is to stay in the shadows and twist the arms. How did you get on with that?

Gyles Brandreth18:20

Quite the reverse. That's part of the job. But of course the more important part of the job is to be liked. I'm much more likely, Kirsty, to persuade you to vote with me on my side if you like me, know me, trust me, love me a little, than if I'm just some fierce barking person who twists your arm. It was the happiest experience of my life, being a government whip.

Speaker 218:26

Uh Mm-hmm.

Gyles Brandreth18:42

I loved that job.

Presenter18:43

And what about those very high flying political ambitions that you'd had as a very young man, when you got close to politics, when you were in among the nitty gritty, did you think at some point yes, you know, I might well be on my way to being Home Secretary?

Gyles Brandreth18:55

Now, I I probably would have ended up as Secretary of State for the Arts because the way you know that's the way the world wags if I'd been lucky. If not Minister of State for, you know, hairpins. But in fact, if I hadn't lost my seat in 1997 and we hadn't been going into opposition for many years, I would have still been there. It was the overriding ambition of my life. Not to make a noise, genuinely, but to make a difference.

Presenter19:18

But that was a case of terrifically bad timing for you, wasn't it? To come in at the sort of fag end of the Tory administration.

Gyles Brandreth19:23

Yes, I mean, absolutely. And yet it was fascinating because to see a government in collapse is also interesting. I mean, I I loved being an observer. I had a ringside seat. Look, I have no complaints. My life has been one long series of, you know, tomato and marmite sandwiches. I've always had what I wanted.

Presenter19:40

But do you think you were a bad MP?

Gyles Brandreth19:41

No, I think I was a good MP. I was a very I believe I was a good MP. When I lost my seat in 1997, having been a Member of Parliament in the great Blair clear-out of Conservative MPs, I lost my seat. The people spoke. In my case, they spoke in no uncertain terms. And my wife said to me, Listen to the people, Giles. They have spoken. They don't want you. So I decided not to go back into politics.

Presenter20:06

Let's have some more music. What are we going to hear now? We're on disc five, Giles.

Gyles Brandreth20:10

Oh gosh.

Gyles Brandreth20:11

Well, I love this disc, and this is going to take you into my area of weakness.

Gyles Brandreth20:17

As I perceive it. This is a number called Warning, Man in Uniform. It's from a show called The Vacques, which I saw at Godolphin and Latimer's school, where my daughter, I've got three children, a boy and two girls, called Bennett, Scythrid and Aphra. Why are they have such amazing names? Because they're such amazing children. And Aphra, my youngest daughter, was in this show, which is why I went to see it. But I just fell in love with the show, and I was bowled over by this particular number.

Speaker 320:45

There should be

Speaker 320:49

Signals off, there should be flashing lights There should be red and left, there should be short tonight There should be helmets worn, there should be rays at dawn Warning men in uniform There should be ramp buster, there should be armor plates There should be mine fills mine There should be panel gates There should be gas bus for short

Presenter20:58

Yeah.

Presenter21:00

Falling Man.

Presenter21:09

We got the

Presenter21:17

Warning Man in Uniform from the Vackeys performed by pupils of Godolphin and Latimer's School, and your daughter Aphra was part of that production, as you say, Giles Brandreth. Your son has gone on to be a very successful barrister, and yet it seems he might be about to give all that up. He's going to venture on to the stage to do is it a bit of stand up comedy?

Gyles Brandreth21:35

I hope he's not going to give it all up. That would be madness. But he has a gift as a stand-up comedian, a raconteur, a storyteller, very, very different from mine. But he is, I have to tell you, sensational. I have a a daughter who's a novelist, another daughter who's an economist, a son who's a barrister, and having these beautiful and gifted children obviously makes people wonder about their paternity, but makes people really realize that my wife is a truly remarkable individual.

Presenter22:05

Um what about Ben, though? If he's as good as you say, and I have no reason to doubt it, might he not get bitten by the bug and say, Yes, Dad, I know I've made you terribly proud with uh the old barristering stuff, but actually I'm off. I'm up to Edinburgh. It's the it's the whiff of the grease paint and the roar of the crowd.

Gyles Brandreth22:19

Well, I say to him you can do both.

Gyles Brandreth22:21

And he's got something that I haven't got. He has physical courage.

Presenter22:26

Right.

Gyles Brandreth22:26

He served in the army, he is a very physical person.

Gyles Brandreth22:30

And I don't have physical courage. I'm aware of that. That is my weakness. I wouldn't be over the top first. I know that. My son would be. Physical courage is important.

Presenter22:41

Do you think that's one of the things that well, you say you enjoyed your um I mean it was a relatively short political career, but you say you enjoyed it enormously, but do you think that was one of the the things that stopped you from maybe having the courage to rise right t to the top of the Conservative Party? Was that you lacked y you know, you you wrote in your diaries, I shan't be Prime Minister, I miss the boat, too busy faffing about on the quayside.

Gyles Brandreth23:03

Oh dear, did I write that? That must have been a bleak day. I think greatness would always have eluded me, because I don't have physical courage. I think probably there are days when I think, oh dear, look all these missed opportunities. You were the golden boy. You had everything when you were a young man. I did have literally you could not imagine anybody with the advantages that I have had. A middle-class English child, born in the middle of the nineteen fifties, has it all. So maybe I should indeed have achieved even more. And I think, actually, in terms of politics, I could well have gone on and done more. I don't think necessarily gone, you know, won the ultimate prizes, but I think I could still have been of more service if time hadn't been against me.

Presenter23:42

But here you are, Giles, you have these sort of hidden shallows, if you will. You know, you write joke books and you write quiz books and you started a c a Scrabble competition in the Teddy Bear Museum. You know, you've done a lot of things that people think, well,

Presenter23:54

Isn't that a bit of a waste for somebody who's as bright as he is?

Gyles Brandreth23:56

In some ways people would say that. Of course, there is a commercial imperative. When I was writing children's books, I was really quite a successful children's writer and wrote a lot of them. How many did you write? Oh, hundreds.

Presenter24:04

Bright

Presenter24:06

How many did you

Presenter24:08

Hundreds, yeah.

Gyles Brandreth24:09

And of course, with a lot of these superficial things that seem and that are superficial, there was a commercial imperative. Yes, I founded the National Scrabble Championship, but I ended up as a director of Spears Games. I mean, the Teddy Bear Museum in Stratford-when Neighbourhood is a delightful teddy bear museum, but I've also been selling my teddy bears on the home shopping channel down in Florida. So there are advantages to it. For now, tell me about what we're going to hear next.

Gyles Brandreth24:35

This is Laurence Olivier speaking a speech from Othello, the speech to the Senate. I saw Olivier perform Othello several times in the early 1960s, and this is him in fact this was recorded, I think, while he was still rehearsing for the part of Othello. It's the speech to the senate, where Othello is explaining to the senators the kind of witchcraft he used in seducing young Desdemona.

Speaker 324:59

She gave me for my pains a world of sighs.

Speaker 325:05

She swore in faith'twas strange

Speaker 325:09

Twas passing strange.

Speaker 325:12

It was pitiful.

Speaker 325:14

Twas wondrous pitiful she wished She had not heard it, yet she wished.

Speaker 325:21

Heaven had made her such a man.

Speaker 325:26

Yeah.

Speaker 325:28

Thank to me.

Speaker 325:30

And bade me, if I had a friend that loved her, I should but teach him how to tell my story.

Speaker 325:37

And that would woo her.

Speaker 325:41

Upon this hint I spake,

Speaker 325:45

She loved me for the dangers I had passed.

Speaker 325:50

And I loved her that she did pity them.

Speaker 325:54

This only is the witchcraft.

Speaker 325:57

I have you.

Presenter25:59

Laurence Olivier giving the speech to the Senate from Ocello. Is it right that uh of your first date you say in your diary your first date with Michelle, this is Michele was not impressed. All the usual stuff fell flat. Unsatisfactory. Curious.

Presenter26:16

Mm.

Gyles Brandreth26:16

Yeah.

Presenter26:16

Yeah, so what you felt you had to win around.

Gyles Brandreth26:18

Well, she's quite a challenge, and I'm still trying, you know. Forty-two years later, here we still are. She has an interesting view of me. She keeps me in my place. She thinks, and she's right, that I'm the world's most spoilt and self-centered person. All of that is true. She feels I've had everything and haven't really appreciated it enough. And she may be right, but that's possibly why one is still questing, wanting more. One's always looking somewhere else. So one should actually enjoy the moment more, which is why I'm loving sitting here.

Presenter26:48

Do you think

Gyles Brandreth26:48

Yeah.

Presenter26:49

Uh

Gyles Brandreth26:50

But

Presenter26:50

That's enough of the flannel.

Gyles Brandreth26:51

Do you think she has to be able to do that? Get on with it. God Almighty, realise how old you are, realise how young she is. For goodness sake, put yourself together, man. Does she have to put up with quite a lot?

Presenter26:51

What is it?

Gyles Brandreth27:01

Yes.

Presenter27:01

Yeah.

Gyles Brandreth27:02

And she does. And she has. And the compensation is our wonderful children. Um, you know, that is the compensation.

Presenter27:10

What about your own parents then? What what did they make of your success and your very public career? Were they private?

Gyles Brandreth27:15

My father died quite a few years ago. My father had been told by a gipsy fortune teller when he was a teenager that he would die at seventy one, and he talked a lot about this, and when he was seventy one he died. He also died at seventy one because he smoked all his life, and he was a wonderful person.

Gyles Brandreth27:32

And a gentleman of his generation. He was a successful lawyer. He wasn't good with money. But he.

Presenter27:40

I wondered about that. I I noticed often in your diaries in in those early days that you talked a lot about money and your father's worries.

Gyles Brandreth27:48

Yeah.

Presenter27:48

Yeah, I think it's a very good idea.

Gyles Brandreth27:51

No. And what is interesting is that I'd completely forgotten that until I re-read the diaries. Rereading the diaries for publication was a horrible experience, in fact. And I'd completely blotted out that this had happened. You know, you don't actually remember the truth. And the truth was, and clearly I observed it at the time, that my father, through the 1950s and 1960s, was really very oppressed by money worries. And I would be in the same position myself, I think, were it not for my wife, Michelle. And she sorts out all the financial side of things. So I've avoided that by having a brilliant wife who, a beautiful and brilliant wife, who is also a brilliant manager. My father didn't have that. So my parents were financially pressed all their lives, and my father died with next to nothing. Time for another disc.

Presenter28:41

What are we gonna hear?

Gyles Brandreth28:42

Oh good. As we move into the third aisle of the programme.

Gyles Brandreth28:48

When I lost my seat as an MP, I my wife said Do whatever you want to do now, do all the things you'd hoped to do and one of the things I'd always wanted to do is I'd wanted to play Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady.

Gyles Brandreth28:58

And unfortunately, I think Jonathan Price was playing it at the National Theatre. Was he any good?

Gyles Brandreth29:04

He was adequate. He was adequate. And then I thought, well, I don't just want to be in that. I wouldn't mind being in, as well as my affiliate, I wouldn't mind doing a bit of Salad Days. And what about a bit of Andrew Lloyd Weber? And then I thought, oh, I could be Judy Garland. And so I created this show called Zip. And we did 100 musicals in 100 minutes. And if we didn't succeed, we gave the audience their money back. And every night during the show, we had a Sun-Time moment. And here is Andrew C. Wadsworth, who was our leading man in the show from the start, and Shona White. I heard this time and again, hundreds and hundreds of times. And I think I've never been happier.

Speaker 329:39

Thanks for everything we did, everything that God endored.

Gyles Brandreth29:41

There's more of love.

Speaker 329:48

None of it was wasted. All of it will last. Everything that's here and now and us together. It was marvelous to know you. And it's never really through crazy business, this, this life we live in.

Speaker 229:53

None of it was wasted.

Presenter29:58

Yeah.

Presenter29:58

See

Speaker 330:21

Can't complain about the time we're getting on with some little to be sure of in this world.

Presenter30:25

Would it all be a

Presenter30:26

We are swimming.

Presenter30:39

That was Andrew Wadsworth and Shona White singing with so little to be sure of from sometimes any one can whistle, as you say the cast recording, of Zip. I'm going to send you away, of course, to the island, all on your own. I mean, you'll have the words, you'll have a little bit of music.

Presenter30:54

How will you fare?

Gyles Brandreth30:56

I think I'll fare extremely well, because you're going to equip me with the complete works of Shakespeare, with which I'm quite familiar. I shall be learning a number of roles, so that I'm ready when I'm rescued. The ship going back, I know I'll have to work my passage by doing my traditional stuff, you know, on the cruise back. But when I return, I shall be turning up at the National saying I have now mastered these parts. I know you think I'd be an excellent Polonius, but I could actually do Claudius, and I have learnt it. Do you think you could be a great actor?

Gyles Brandreth31:26

I could be a better actor now. When I was young I couldn't have done it, and I maybe still don't have I mean the great actors have such technical gifts the precision but I think there is something fascinating about becoming some one else. I wake up in the morning thinking I would love to be able to play Uncle

Presenter31:46

Do ya.

Gyles Brandreth31:46

That's if you want to know what I would like to do.

Gyles Brandreth31:49

I would like to play Uncle Vanya. And so I think maybe now I might be able to play I mean, I did Malvolio at Edinburgh a couple of years ago and enjoyed it and found it a satisfying thing to do. So I think probably on your desert island, that was my plan.

Presenter32:05

Right.

Gyles Brandreth32:05

to do the great Shakspere parts, have the repertoire ready, and to have one of the books of the New Testament learnt by heart. So I'd come back from my time on your desert island fully prepared.

Presenter32:18

Yes. I don't doubt you could manage it. Let's hear your final disc then, Giles. What is it?

Gyles Brandreth32:22

My final dicks, in a way, takes me right back to the beginning. It's John Reed with the Doily Cart Company singing from the opera Patience. I'm a huge Gilbert and Sullivan fan. I'm now writing a series of Victorian murder mysteries featuring Oscar Wilde as my detective. At the school where Simon Cadell and I were boys, the founder of the school was an old man called John Badley, born in 1863, and we knew him in the 1960s. He died aged 101, and this lovely old gentleman had been a friend of Oscar Wilde. So I've shaken the hand that shook the hand that wrote The Importance of Being Earnest. And this takes me back to the 50s when my parents first took me to the Savoy Theatre to see Doily Cart. I loved Patience. It's the opera that satirizes Oscar Wilde and the aesthetic movement.

Speaker 333:08

Then the sentimental passion of a vegetable fashion Must excite your languid spleen, An attachment a la plato for a bashful young potato Or a knot to French French bean Though the Philistines may jostle You will rank as an apostle In the high aesthetic band If you walk down Piccadilly With a poppy or a lily In your meaty evil hand

Speaker 333:31

And everyone will say, As you walk your flowery way, If he's content with a vegetable love which would certainly not suit me, Why, what a most particularly pure young man this pure young man must be.

Presenter33:47

But

Presenter33:51

That was John Reed from the Doily Cart Opera Company and The High Aesthetic Line, from Patience, by Gilbert and Sullivan. So then, Giles, I'm going to give you, of course, as you know, the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare. You're going to make good use of both of them, I gather. But what's the other book going to be?

Gyles Brandreth34:07

Uh the complete plays of Anton Chekhov. Because I fell in love with the theatre, I think, properly, seeing the production of Uncle Vanya with Laurence Olivier and Michael Redgrave. And Chekhov's plays, well, they're just wonderful. So I want to read them and I want to learn them by heart. It's yours. And and the luxury? The luxury, I am torn. I've just come back from the Vatican and I came face to face with Michelangelo's Pietà in St. Peter's. It's either going to be Michelangelo's Pietà or a Cappuccino machine.

Gyles Brandreth34:43

So we could toss for that.

Presenter34:44

I would urge you to take the Michelangelo.

Gyles Brandreth34:46

Would you? I would. Would you?

Presenter34:47

Uh

Gyles Brandreth34:48

Yeah.

Presenter34:48

Yeah.

Gyles Brandreth34:49

Okay, since it's you I'd like to please other people. I'll take the I'll take the Michelencha, but my gosh, I shall miss the cappuccino.

Presenter34:56

Right. And um if I had to ask you to just uh pick one of the eight disks to save, which one would it be?

Gyles Brandreth35:01

Well, as I arrived this morning it was definitely going to be Laurence Olivier giving the speech to the Senate from Othello, but listening to it again it's going to have to be my friend Simon Goodell.

Presenter35:12

It's yours. Charles Brandreth, thank you very much for letting us hear your Desert Island Discs. Thank you very much.

Presenter36:05

You've been listening to a download from the BBC. You'll find more information on the Radio Four website bbc.co. uk slash radio four.