Sir Kenneth Grange

Sir Kenneth Grange0:00

This is the BBC.

Presenter0:03

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.

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

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My castaway this week is the designer Sir Kenneth Grange. He has been at it since the fifties, improving our lives with ingenious solutions to making living better.

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Such is the breadth of his work in theory. You could have started a day by using one of his razors to shave, pressed your shirt with a steam iron he conceived, travelled on a high speed train he dreamt up, before getting to work beneath one of his angle poise lamps, using a pen he created.

Presenter1:05

Part of that post war boom in British creativity, his career in design began before the word itself was even commonly used.

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and the modernism he embraced was a distinct departure from the cream and brown tasseled interior of his childhood.

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He says, I like finding solutions to things. The best jobs are where you run up against one problem after another. I'm never daunted. Sooner or later, I know I'm going to resolve how to make the bloody thing. So welcome, Sir Kenneth Grange. Irons, razors, bus shelters, cameras, fountain pens, trains. You have been designing throughout the last six decades. What do you think has been, to date, your most enduring creation?

Sir Kenneth Grange1:51

I think without a doubt it's the train.

Sir Kenneth Grange1:54

It's given me the greatest pleasure, and it'll see me out.

Presenter1:59

The train being the intercity one two five

Sir Kenneth Grange2:00

The intercity one two five, yes, if I call it the train, knowing it's the only train that matters.

Presenter2:04

Well, it's the only train we really think of actually when we think of a train. It celebrated its fortieth anniversary just last year, twenty sixteen. They've now named one of the trains the Sir Kenneth Grange. Just tell me a little bit about how you designed it.

Sir Kenneth Grange2:17

I was asked to decorate a new train that they were working on and they gave me quite a lot of time in which to do this simple decoration, to add their own livery to this new train. Sufficient time that I could play in my own time, with my own initiative, at perhaps changing the appearance of it, changing the whole style of a train. And we would make a model in the daytime, take it down to Imperial College, and men would wind up the wind tunnel and we'd experiment until gradually, gradually, we'd developed a shape. And we were looking at the aerodynamics simply as a means of determining what direction the shape could take. It's become iconic.

Presenter2:56

But at the time it was little short of revolutionary because it didn't have the old buffers on the fronts. You know, we thought of the old fashioned trains as having it. It was this terrible well, it is, this terribly sleek frontage that that looks very beautiful and rather determined as it swoops through the countryside.

Sir Kenneth Grange3:12

Its personality comes from that one key difference. It has no buffers. Traditionally, a train, a locomotive, the power car as they're now called, was used for other jobs than carrying passengers. Shunting, for example, needed buffers so you could push and pull. And it was realised quite late in the process, a huge benefit for me, that we actually didn't need buffers because in this particular train, uniquely at that time, it would have a power car at either end of a set of coaches. The one at the front pulled, the one at the back pushed. And that's what happens today if you get on the train. So it's two power cars working together. And they don't do shunting with this train.

Presenter3:51

Just one area of your design has been doing a lot of domestic appliances and your kitchen mixers and so on.

Presenter3:57

It occurred to me when I knew I was coming to talk to you today that nobody has ever really designed a very, very good and safe potato peeler. I'm not talking about a vegetable peeler, a potato peeler. Can you tell me why?

Sir Kenneth Grange4:10

Well, potatoes come in peculiar shapes, you know. Is that the problem? And that's the heart of the problem. Uh you you know yourself you're trying to peel anything. You need quite a lot of skill to peel an apple properly. And and apple's pretty much set up for peeling. Potatoes are not. Right, you because you almost have a

Speaker 14:15

Uh

Presenter4:15

Yeah.

Speaker 44:15

Yeah.

Presenter4:25

Right, you s'cause you almost sounded like you were blaming me there, Kenneth.

Sir Kenneth Grange4:29

Almost the best way of dealing with potato is to scrub it.

Presenter4:32

Right, I'll do that from now on in. Tell me then about this first piece of music. What are we going to hear? Why is it you've chosen this piece?

Sir Kenneth Grange4:38

I come from a very ordinary, very happy, not very well-off, but a very happy family. And my mother, a remarkable woman, I think to the day she died, she didn't really know what I did for a living, but she was a great encourager. And in her generation, in those years, popular music was everything. And so she would have heard it perhaps on the radio, more likely in the music hall. She would have been introduced to popular songs. And particular artists got to perform particularly well. Balboli was part of our life.

Speaker 45:12

Wee.

Speaker 45:14

The sweetest thing.

Speaker 45:17

What else on earth could ever bring Such happiness to everything?

Speaker 45:27

I love those stories.

Speaker 15:27

Love those stories.

Speaker 45:34

Last strangest thing.

Speaker 45:36

No song of birds upon the wing

Speaker 45:41

Shall it our hearts more sweetly sing?

Speaker 45:46

Man loves all stories.

Speaker 45:50

Whatever our hearts may desire, Whatever life may stand.

Speaker 46:00

This is a tale that never will tire This is the song without end

Presenter6:09

Uh

Presenter6:13

That was Love is the Sweetest Thing, sung by Al Bowley. Let's talk for a moment, Kenneth Grange, a little bit more about design in the modern world. I mean, our our world is so saturated with design now at every turn. Do you think quantity has bred quality?

Sir Kenneth Grange6:29

One of those doesn't follow the other at all. In fact, we have an excess of everything, and as a consequence, a poor valuation of very many things. And it's that, frankly, we think we benefit, but things are for the most part much too cheap. And as a consequence, we don't put enough value on them. So we are not surprised if they don't last. We almost enjoy the idea of changing the kettle every year or changing the iron every year. It's a terrible disease of overproduction worldwide.

Presenter7:01

I am more conscious to day than normal as I sit opposite you of the design of our studio, and I wonder I sort of feel like I should constantly be apologising to you for the quality of the chairs or the desk. When you walk into a new environment, are you always assessing it for the the standard and the capability of its design?

Sir Kenneth Grange7:18

You just can't help it. It's like the air you breathe. You know, you wake up and whatever you look at is there to be looked at and considered. And particularly remark upon how everything is made. One of my favourite little tricks is to ask a bunch of students or any group to tell me how they think everything in the room is made. Really quite fundamental things, carpet, table, lights, whatever. And of course, there'll be complex answers or complex reasons behind a lot of things. But underneath it all, many, many things start with a very, very

Sir Kenneth Grange7:51

Basic Principle of Construction

Presenter7:53

And given that you are now you're eighty seven, yes, uh do you find now that your ability to design is I mean, I'm sure it's affected by all the experience you've had and all the products that you've designed that have and have not worked, but do you find that as an eighty seven-year-old you walk into a room and you're more interested in how it works for you as an eighty seven-year-old than you you might have been previously? Does age come into it?

Sir Kenneth Grange8:13

As you get older, lots of bits and pieces don't work as well as they used to when they're young. So you have chairs which are not impossible, but pretty uncomfortable to sit on as a 60-50 year old. It starts early. Youngsters don't even notice. It's impossible for the youngster and often he's on his hobby horse here, you can see, it's very difficult to get out of this sort of cycle where the person asking for the product, the company who determined to make this particular product, will be increasingly governed by young managers and they have no concept of what it's like to not be able to feel a button. And I get very bad tempered if I can't get hold of a button and press it and know I've pressed it, etc.

Presenter8:57

I'm hoping that you have a wonderful designing and inventing shed at the bottom of your garden. Do you?

Sir Kenneth Grange9:03

Yes, I have more than one.

Presenter9:03

Do you?

Presenter9:05

Is it immaculate?

Sir Kenneth Grange9:08

I learned something a long time ago that as you get busier, you have less time to waste. So tools, in my mind, have to have a home before they're used. And then when a tool's got a home, you don't waste time searching for it. You know exactly where it is. And so we had a regime in my workshop that we'd buy all sorts of tools, hand tools, more complex tools. But you were not allowed to use them until they'd been given a really permanent home.

Presenter9:37

So everything's housed immaculately. Yes, yes, yes. Which is satisfying. Tell me about your second piece of music, Sir Kennis Grange.

Sir Kenneth Grange9:38

Yes, yes.

Sir Kenneth Grange9:43

Well, i in that time of my life, so I'm talking now about my twenties and thirties, I loved dancing. I danced as long as I can remember.

Presenter9:53

Were you a terrific dancer?

Sir Kenneth Grange9:54

Yes yes yes immodesty forbids, but it's true.

Presenter9:58

Now's the place to come clean.

Sir Kenneth Grange10:00

I danced every Wednesday and every Saturday, mostly at Wembley Town Hall. Grand life, grand life.

Presenter11:07

That was Ted Heath and his music and Take the A train. You said you'd chosen that, Sir Kenneth Grange, because it reminded you of your very happy early dancing days. You would go dancing about twice a week. I want to rewind a little bit and and talk about your very early beginnings. You were born in the East End of London, nineteen twenty nine. Your mum and dad were Harry and Hilda.

Presenter11:26

This cream and brown tasseled interior um I love that phrase. What was your house like?

Sir Kenneth Grange11:32

Very modest and comfortable, you know, over-upholstered and tassels and all that stuff. And tell me a bit more about your mum then. She was born in 1900. In 1915, like a lot of other girls in the country, brought to the cities to work in armaments. And she got a job. She found her home in a factory. She loved it. And later on in her life, she was in the Second World War, also back at work, this time in a spring factory. And when she left the spring works at 80 or whatever it was, she carried on. They gave her whatever she wanted as a gift, and she asked for a spring. And so, in our household, many households, you would have a fireplace and a couple of easy chairs and perhaps a standard lamp. We didn't have a standard lamp. We had a walloping great spring, about three feet high, impossible to lift, and it was her most.

Speaker 112:13

Uh

Speaker 412:13

Yeah.

Sir Kenneth Grange12:22

Cherished possession, this walloping great spring. A bit of that must have rubbed off on the way.

Presenter12:28

Your father was a policeman. He worked for the Met. What were his hobbies outside of work?

Sir Kenneth Grange12:30

Yeah.

Sir Kenneth Grange12:33

started on the beat in by the docks, so he grew up in a roughish place, but he made him a tough man. But he was a banjo player, very good, and he was in the Metropolitan Police Midstrel Band.

Presenter12:41

Yeah.

Presenter12:44

Ah

Sir Kenneth Grange12:45

And every week, more than once a week, they'd black their face and white their lips, and it would be quite a big big band, I imagine. And that's probably where they met, when he was on the platform playing away. And my mum's one of the girls in the place waiting to be asked to dance. When we moved to Wembley at the outbreak of war, he had been promoted, but he was then turned into a bomb disposal expert. And we were moved to Wembley. We had bombs out there too, but in the plan it was going to be easier. And as a boy, I was in a terrific advantage because he'd come home with bits of bombs, you see. And in those days, if you went to school, your status in the school was very much judged by how much shrapnel you could collect on the way. I'd started with a bomb, or a bit of a bomb, so I was way ahead of the field.

Presenter13:35

Of all the things I expected to hear today, that was not one of them. Tell me about your third. Why have you chosen this? Uh

Sir Kenneth Grange13:41

I've grown

Sir Kenneth Grange13:42

to be alert to and very mindful of the quality of the spoken word. I think Burton nailed this particular piece of poetry absolutely perfectly.

Sir Kenneth Grange13:56

Yeah.

Speaker 113:56

At the beginning.

Speaker 113:59

It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and Bible black.

Speaker 114:05

The cobbled streets silent and the hunched courters and rabbits wood limping invisible down to the slow black slow, black, crow black.

Speaker 114:14

Fishing boat bobbing sea

Speaker 114:18

The houses are blind as moles, though moles see fine to night in the snouting velvet dingles, or blind as Captain Cat, there in the muffled middle by the pump and the town clock, the shops in mourning, the welfare hall in widow's weeds, and all the people of the lulled and dumbfound town.

Speaker 114:39

are sleeping now.

Speaker 114:43

Hush, the babies are sleeping.

Presenter14:48

That was Richard Burton reading part of Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas, and Chosen Sir Kenneth Grange by you because you want the quality on the island of the human voice. You left school at fourteen. You went to Wilsdon School of Arts and Crafts in London for a four year course. What do you remember about the first couple of years there?

Sir Kenneth Grange15:04

People, if I tell this tale today, barely believed that it was possible to go to, as it were, an advanced education at age 14. But it was quite an ingenious plan. The first two years you spent in a mix of art and general studies. And then at age sixteen you chose between fine art and commercial art. You chose commercial art, presumably? Well, I had to earn a living. And in the college, it would now be called graphic design. Yes. And I learned to do a bit of finished lettering. But on the way, I had some craftsmanship drummed into me somewhere. And so that finished lettering was about a judgment and the character and the type and this, that and the other, but how well you could use a fine brush to draw a line.

Speaker 115:30

Yeah.

Presenter15:48

And to be a teenager during the Second World War, it must have all seemed very vivid to you. What's your strongest memory of that wartime period?

Sir Kenneth Grange15:56

I left college one afternoon and it was a beautiful day and my journey home meant I had to walk from the college to a particular busy road. Now we know North Circa but in those years, those days it was very little traffic and from where I stood on the bridge I had a long, long, long view into the distance, perhaps a mile or so away and out of the sky came a rocket.

Sir Kenneth Grange16:20

And I'm probably one of the few people ever to have seen a V-2 rocket actually land. It was so far away, like looking at a big aircraft in the sky today. They're going very, very slowly. So this rocket came out of the sky, slowly, slowly, slowly into the ground, and then a sort of lots of smoke, and pieces of railway engine would go up into the sky, and there'd be wheels on the end of an axle, like a diabolo, just winkling their way up into the sky, all silent from where I was standing. And then, of course, the time lapsed, and I then got the sound and got the impact of this explosion. Were you scared?

Sir Kenneth Grange16:59

No, no, I think you're not scared. It's just an extraordinary moment. But to a child in those years there was an awful lot going on, and you you weren't aware of the news and and you didn't get anxious as they make you anxious to day. You didn't eat terribly well, but you didn't eat badly, and life was pretty good for a kid. Tell me about your f

Presenter17:17

Four.

Sir Kenneth Grange17:18

What

Presenter17:18

Oops, what we can

Sir Kenneth Grange17:18

Well my fourth Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong who are great hero and heroine of mine and it's got a particular memory that I just started on my own I'd landed a very big job and in order to get it done and I was working all hours that came but a friend from the tennis club a typographer by trade he'd leave his work come home stop with me we'd have something to eat and work until 12 o'clock every night and through the weekend we had one record one disc a 33 record and we took turns to turn it over all night and all the weekends this one record was worn out almost and that was the record so I have to play that

Speaker 417:57

Yea is heaven.

Speaker 418:01

I'm in heaven.

Speaker 418:06

And my heart beats so that I can hardly speak.

Speaker 418:13

And I seem to find the happiness I see.

Speaker 418:21

Come we out together, dancing cheek to cheek.

Speaker 418:27

Take it Ella, swing it.

Speaker 418:29

Heaven

Speaker 418:32

I'm in heaven.

Speaker 418:36

And my heart beats so that I can hardly speak.

Speaker 418:44

And I seem to find the happiness I see

Speaker 418:52

When we're out together, dancing cheek to cheek

Presenter19:02

Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong performing cheek to cheek, and you, Sir Kenneth Grange, were singing all the way throughout that

Presenter19:08

It is interesting that your remarkable career in design coincided with the well, it's it's no coincidence, is it? There was this remarkable explosion in people's need for consumer durables for them to express themselves through the environment they lived in. That began really in Britain, with the Festival of Britain, which was in nineteen fifty one. You were twenty two at the time. It must have been a very exciting, vibrant time to be involved in design.

Speaker 119:23

Could be five

Speaker 119:23

Damn.

Sir Kenneth Grange19:33

The f

Sir Kenneth Grange19:35

Yes, well I got really lucky. I've worked for three different firms of architects and the first two were deeply involved in the Fest of La Britain. They are beginning to be useful in an office. The first office was Bronnick, Katz and Ket and Vaughan and they were going on to design the Homes and Gardens section of the Festival Britain. I remember it so, so carefully, although I had a very modest job.

Presenter19:59

Round about the sort of 1950s, when you were beginning to establish yourself, looking at your C V, it sounds like you were a complete workaholic.

Sir Kenneth Grange20:06

It's true. Mostly unmarried. Pretty much prospered. And now got quite a big office with my partners. I've started Pentagram. Maybe forty or fifty people. So in our world, pretty successful. And um I'd got an E type in the garage and I was a pretty flash dresser, so I was I was well set.

Sir Kenneth Grange20:24

And I could work whenever I wanted. So the journalist came to see me one day and said, you know, you must be much older than I thought. And I said, no, I said, but I've worked a lot longer than most people. And if you just work a lot longer and you have the opportunity to work and you're reasonably good, you don't have to be brilliant. You just overhaul everybody else.

Presenter20:44

Your first marriage was, what it lasted about six years, eight years? Yes. What were the circumstances of the divorce? Why di was it because of how hard you were working?

Sir Kenneth Grange20:52

Well, I'd go to work looking forward to going to work every day, and it becomes an addiction in all sorts of ways. And um there's no doubt about it, a selfish beast. Just drifted apart and and uh we we parted uh amicably. But there's a tale to tell um and in those days divorce was by no means easy. We were absolutely s satisfied with w what we were doing. Yes. Money and this, that, the other. Um and the lawyer sent me to Brighton.

Speaker 121:16

Money

Sir Kenneth Grange21:20

and booked me into a hotel and I go up to my room and take my topcoat off and jacket and I'd been told to get into bed and I did. After a while a lady knocked on the door and took her coat and hat off and so on and got into the bed and a moment later in came a photographer, took the pictures and that was the evidence and that was the highly organised but you can see a pretty effective way of proving adultery.

Presenter21:45

Tell me about your next piece of music. We're on to your fifth now, Sir Kenneth Grange. What is it? Yes.

Sir Kenneth Grange21:49

What is it? The famous Nina Simone, probably one of the greatest jazz singers and very inventive, a great musician by any terms. And it sort of summed up my introduction to popular music, but presented in a more and more thoughtful and more and more sometimes ingenious, but wholly rich way.

Presenter21:52

Probably

Speaker 422:11

Fish and you see, you know how I feel.

Speaker 422:17

River running tree, you know how I feel.

Speaker 422:23

Blossom on the tree, you know how I feel.

Speaker 422:28

New dawn, it's a new day, it's a new life for me and I'm feeling good.

Speaker 422:45

Dragonfly out in the sun, you know what I mean, don't you know?

Speaker 422:51

Butterflies all having fun, you know what I mean?

Speaker 422:58

Sleep in peace when day is done, that's what I mean.

Speaker 423:03

And this old world is a new world and a bold world.

Speaker 423:09

Whoa.

Presenter23:10

That was Nina Simone singing Feeling Good. The nineteen sixties then was a period of particular activity for you. You won the Duke of Edinburgh Award for Elegant Design. You came up with irons, cameras, beautiful hair dryers, toasters, typewriters.

Presenter23:26

Tell me about the particular challenge of redesigning the Kenwood mixer. You did it in just four d

Sir Kenneth Grange23:33

Days. Working only on my own in my little garage was I was making a model. I I knew I was running out of time. Pretty desperate, so I cut it in half, this model. I could finish half sooner, and took a mirror. And Kenneth Wood, who I came to admire, and became a really good friend, a wonderful man.

Presenter23:51

Who was Mr. Ken Woods?

Sir Kenneth Grange23:53

That's yes, Mr Ken Wood. I don't think he knew a good design from a bad, but he knew a good salesman. And I think he he thought this was a terrific trick. Well, it wasn't in any way

Presenter23:54

Yeah.

Sir Kenneth Grange24:04

you know, hadn't been ingeniously thought through of necessity. But it's that one little event sewed us together forever.

Presenter24:11

You've got to work with people who they're not just paying your

Presenter24:14

Bill, but also you have to take on board, you know, uh what they think and what their opinions are.

Sir Kenneth Grange24:20

A designer in my trades, only as good as his client, will allow the pair of them to be. It's all to do with the calibre of the people, and I stand on the shoulders of umpteen engineers and managers and clients, and I you know enjoy the glamorous end of it, but there's no doubt they're the people who've made it work.

Presenter24:39

Well, tell me a bit about the glamour, because I and I'm thinking now of your lifestyle. You know, the fifties and sixties I mean, my impression of it is from watching Madmen, for goodness sake, you know, that it was that era when anything was possible, when, of course, a certain sort of white man ruled the world, and it w it was his playground.

Sir Kenneth Grange24:55

And is that about right? It is, absolutely. There's no doubt. And your reference to Mad Men is absolutely true. It's hard to believe. But my very first client was a typewriter firm who had bought my English client, which was Imperial Typewriters, and they'd resurrected one of the designs that I'd made for Imperial. So I was there in America, my very first visit, and we're having a meeting in an advertising agency on Madison Avenue. And we left the office, go to lunch. And it was exactly like Draper of Mad Men, this chap that I walking down a busy street in America, the winds blowing between us, very cold day. And I've obviously made a pain of myself in this early meeting. And he said, Ken, if you've got to have it.

Sir Kenneth Grange25:38

People pass. Learn to love it. One of the best bits of advice I ever had.

Presenter25:43

Or was it sort of cocktails over lunch and

Sir Kenneth Grange25:46

Gin and tonic you drank all through the day. Let's have some more music, Sir Kenneth Grange. It's time for your sixth. This is um the beginning of my introduction to opera. And this is um one of the greatest singers of our time, of course, the Maria Callas, singing her classic aria from Tosca.

Presenter27:12

Vise d'Arte from Puccini's Tosca, sung by Maria Kellas, conducted by Georges Pretre. You are a visiting professor at the Royal College of Art, Sir Kenneth Grange, and students can seek you out for these one to one sessions for advice. I'm wondering which question they ask you the most.

Sir Kenneth Grange27:31

A very common one is is to do with how they're going to find employment.

Sir Kenneth Grange27:36

And I tell them that

Sir Kenneth Grange27:38

It's a very much changed world, and I've seen design grow from being absolutely a novelty, more than novelty.

Sir Kenneth Grange27:47

Unknown to the great majority of people to become a great plaything. And a lot of design now is to do with entertainment.

Presenter27:55

Um we don't have, of course, that manufacturing base that we once had in this country. Do you think that presents particular challenges to young designers?

Sir Kenneth Grange28:04

It doesn't in a sort of structural sense, because you could say it doesn't matter so much where it's ultimately made the whatever it is. But there's a lot of pleasure in really knowing the industrial process. That's a peculiar advantage I've had. And if you're having something made the other side of the world, you may never ever get to see the plant, the factory and so on. And there's a risk that you will not get to know the intimate details of the construction difficulties and so on.

Presenter28:32

And although it is a a different way of doing things, and you've acknowledged time moves on and people inevitably do things differently, do you think that that has a detrimental impact on people's design and people's understanding of what good design is?

Sir Kenneth Grange28:48

I hesitate because it's a very complex discussion. But the machines, the tools, the computers that are now available to everybody are so sophisticated that it's, I think, too easy to indulge fantasies. And I think the motor cars we see on the street today suffer badly from this. I mean, the great majority are, in my view, extraordinarily ugly. And I think it's because experiment is the order of the day in that particular trade. So shapes develop out of fantasy. And we're going to hear your seventh. What is it? I've come very much to admire the huge range of skills that go into making what we call musicals. And I think this particular one, Money Money, and Lisa Minelli, I think, singing, the lyrics are worth listening to as much as the music.

Speaker 429:42

Mainly.

Speaker 429:43

Money makes the world go around, Zafir go around, Zaporos go around. Money makes the world go around, it makes the world go round.

Speaker 429:52

A mark a yen, a buck or a pound, a mark of a pound a buck or a pound. It's soils that makes the world go around. That clinking, clanking sound, can make the world go round.

Sir Kenneth Grange29:58

For example.

Speaker 129:59

That makes a world dog.

Speaker 430:06

Money, money, money, money, money, money, money, money, money, money, money, money, money.

Presenter30:07

Yeah.

Speaker 430:10

Good job.

Presenter30:11

That was Liza Mannelli and Joel Gray singing Money Money from Cabaret.

Speaker 430:11

Yeah.

Presenter30:15

I know you're still working and working hard, but do you ever ponder what you'd like your legacy to be, what you'd like people to say about what Kenneth Grange designed?

Sir Kenneth Grange30:25

If somebody has something that that I had something to do with, and it's gone on beyond a reasonable expectation of its life, that cheers me up no end.

Presenter30:35

Is it true that you've I mean, I'm I'm hoping you're not going to need it for a long time. Is it true you've designed your own coffin?

Sir Kenneth Grange30:40

Yes.

Sir Kenneth Grange30:42

Yes. It doesn't seem so peculiar to me really. But um well it's a bookcase. It's apparently a bookcase. When I'm done. It's a bookcase. It stands up. It's full of books. And when the time comes, I hope, April will take out the books, my wife, put me in it and shut the lid and off we go.

Presenter30:42

What's the problem?

Presenter30:44

Yeah.

Presenter30:48

It's currently a

Presenter30:57

This is your wife, yeah.

Presenter31:02

Is it made to measure?

Sir Kenneth Grange31:03

Oh, of course.

Sir Kenneth Grange31:05

And it's quite an amusing-looking thing standing there. It started when my mum died. I'm in this awful sort of shop, dark velvet curtains, and we're looking at a catalogue of coffins. They're awful. They're so banal, it's so predictable, and so expensive. And I know my mum would have wanted me very much to choose the cheapest. But of course, as the son, you have to think what your uncles and aunts are going to think about it. So you tend to sort of steer your way towards something a little bit more elaborate. Silly. But I thought on that day, you know, I really don't want this.

Sir Kenneth Grange31:41

So I started making my own.

Presenter31:43

And as you say, the coffin that you've designed for yourself, there is a deal of humour in it. It is done with style, and it is currently used as a bookcase. Have you ever thought about going into the manufacture of them for other people? Because I think there would be a market.

Sir Kenneth Grange31:55

It's it's not entirely isolated. I hear about uh coffins that are made now out of basket work or paper or whatever. So so I'm not alone in thinking that there's another way.

Presenter32:05

You're a very practical man. How are you going to be on this island, all alone, cast away?

Sir Kenneth Grange32:09

Oh, I shall be king, there's no doubt of it. I shall probably annex the nearby island.

Presenter32:14

How shall you fashion your environment? What will be the first things that you will build and make?

Sir Kenneth Grange32:18

Well, it's a shelter, and and um I quite look forward to it. I revel in in make do and mend, or improvisation, and I sometimes even engineer it. Let's have your final piece, Sir Kenneth Grange. Tell me what we're going to hear. My final piece is another piece of opera. My wife April and I, we really have come to love opera. It's one of our greatest pleasures. We're going to listen to a particularly famous Aria from Onegin. Recently, in the last ten years, I guess now, we've been getting used to seeing opera in a well-appointed cinema coming live, mostly from the Met in New York. And the consequence of that is that we're seeing opera much less expensively than if we tried to go to the Opera House. All the audience have paid for their tickets, so you're not in the company of bored-out-of-the-skulls corporate entertainment. And the great thing is that it's made as a film with very good direction, very good camera work, and so on. The performers have, I think, got better and better. So I think the whole of opera has improved as a consequence of making it more accessible.

Speaker 433:29

These evolves are steep a porridge.

Speaker 433:40

Lagat bore.

Speaker 434:07

Erginiostrik niesta.

Speaker 434:22

Trust me.

Presenter34:25

Graman Zaria from Tchaikovsky's Eugene Erniegen Son by Frode Olsson with the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Sir Andrew Davis. So, Kenneth, it is time for me now to give you the books. You get the Bible, as you know, and the complete works of Shakespeare, and you can take another book with you. What's it going to be?

Sir Kenneth Grange34:43

I thought

Sir Kenneth Grange34:44

Very carefully about this. I my sort of practical nature c kicks in and I've therefore decided it should be a book about the Bauhaus. Plenty of pictures and it's huge book. It's I don't know nearly five hundred square, big bo thick book. It comes in a case. So very heavy, so it could be very useful as a tool.

Sir Kenneth Grange35:06

I could use it as a mallet.

Presenter35:08

Cover you. Right, that's your book then. Uh a luxury item too.

Sir Kenneth Grange35:12

My luxury item is going to be a trombone. Apart from anything else, of all the musical instruments, it's probably the easiest maintained, apart from the slide you just spit on to make it work. If you asked earlier about my thoughts about living as a boy in the wartime, well, it was in the end of the war, I was thirteen, fourteen, and I um joined the boys' band in the Salvation Army, and I tried various instruments, and I wound up with the trombone as my favourite. So I'd like to pick up where I left off.

Presenter35:37

Right, it's yours then. And finally, if you were to save just one track from the eight that you've chosen, which disc would it be?

Sir Kenneth Grange35:45

That's the most difficult decision of the whole lot. I think it probably better be Tosca and Maria Cullas.

Presenter35:52

It's yours. Sir Kenneth Grange, thank you very much for letting us hear your Desert Island discs.

Sir Kenneth Grange35:56

Absolute pleasure for me. Thank you.

Presenter36:38

You've been listening to a download from the BBC. You'll find more information on the Radio 4 website, bbc.co.uk slash Radio 4.

Sir Kenneth Grange37:11

This is the B B C.