Gillian Reynolds

Gillian Reynolds0:00

This is the B B C.

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Hello, I'm Kirsty Young. Welcome to Desert Island Discs, where every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, the book and the luxury item that they'd want to take with them if they were cast away on a desert island.

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For rights' reasons, the music on these podcast versions is shorter than in the original broadcast. You can find over two thousand more editions to listen to and download on the Desert Island Disc's website.

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My castaway today is the writer and broadcaster Gillian Reynolds. The very embodiment of the word de Doyenne, she is the most experienced and respected radio critic around. For over half a century, she has tuned in and turned her attentive ears to what's on offer on the wireless, picking apart and praising without fear or favour. It hurts when she puts the boot in, I should know, because her love for and knowledge of the medium is evident in all she writes. And at a stage in life when most people are deep in retirement, she has just pulled off a stunning career coup, leaving the Daily Telegraph after 42 years and taking up with the Sunday Times. She has made something of a habit of flouting convention. Born and brought up in Liverpool, her mother was a market trader. Her father was a seaman and inveterate gambler. Against all the odds, she was the first in her family to attend university, going up to Oxford in 1954 to read English. She says of her work, listening lets your mind make the magic. So welcome, Gillian Reynolds. Have you thought before now about what might be in your list of eight for Desert Islanders? Constantly, eternally. For years I've been getting on and off buses, walking around supermarkets, going up and down escalators, thinking, is Tina Turner in or out? I have thought about this programme ceaselessly since I first heard it, which is many years ago. You've been listening with a professional ear to radio for over 50 years, but I'm wondering what it means to you personally. Well, I've been listening to the radio pretty much for eight decades. I mean, I was brought up with the radio, born in 1935. We were all ushered out of the room when war was declared. So my mind is conditioned to listening, but also to having radio as part of the calendar of my life. What's the point of reviewing? What do you want to achieve with your reviews? I want to have a conversation in a metaphorical sense with the people who listen to the programme and with the people who made it, because I think there is this extraordinary, unique interaction between the production of a programme in radio and the people it speaks to. It's much closer than television, and radio is very personal because what goes in your ear goes straight into your imagination somehow. So when I write, I'm sort of talking to myself, but I'm sort of asking people, Am I wrong here? And I dread the moment going to a party and you see someone coming toward you, reaching into their inside left pocket or into their handbag, and you know the yellowing cutting is coming out, and someone will come up and say, You bit, you ruined my life. It's happened.

Speaker 33:34

Yeah.

Presenter3:35

Will you tell me who and where and when? Well, it wasn't you. And I said many things about you. You did. You've been very nice about the programme since you. Well, I was wrong, you know, and I get things wrong. Did that happen to you? Actually, somebody got a book. Oh, yeah. One of their reviews. More than once. It still happens. People will say to me, You have ruined my life.

Gillian Reynolds3:37

Well, it wasn't you. And I said, Do you think?

Gillian Reynolds3:42

What?

Gillian Reynolds3:46

Oh yeah, one of the reviews.

Presenter3:52

But that's only for today, you know. Tomorrow's another day, isn't it? In a sense, given that there is such a proliferation of choice, critics can curate and point us in a direction and say, This is a podcast that might get your attention. This is why this might be useful to you. You've used a word I hate. Well, that's going to happen more than once, Gillian, so we're going to have to deal with that. We will fence them in one by one. Curate. I mean, I write a column about things I've listened to, things I've liked, things I've disliked, the reasons why. I am there for entertainment. If I can use a homely analogy, it's a bit like being a DJ.

Gillian Reynolds4:07

Mm-hmm.

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There's loads of music.

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But there are some DJs you follow. Let's go to your music then, uh Julian Reynolds. Tell me about this first one. Why is it made it? Oh, because

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I like a dance. Now I'm past the age when I can dance in public. Indeed, I passed that age a long time ago when I discovered on holiday with my children when they were younger that the ultimate threat was to say, if you don't behave, I will get up and dance. I'm going to have Earthwind and Fire September. It is the danciest music in the world. It's irresistible.

Speaker 35:00

You remember?

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I'm chasing the clouds away

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Uh

Gillian Reynolds5:15

Uh

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Output transcript.

Gillian Reynolds5:16

Bangladesh.

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Uh

Speaker 25:17

Keep our souls singing.

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As we dance through the night

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Member

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Uh

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Are the stars rolled tonight?

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That was Earth, Wind and Fire in September. Julian Reynolds, when you were a very little girl, you lived, I think, with your parents and your grandmother. You lived in her house. How many people were in the house altogether? My first memory is of living in Eight Norwyn Road in Liverpool Eleven. And in the front bedroom, there was me.

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My brother Billy, my mum and my dad. In the back bedroom, there was Grandma, Auntie Nancy, Auntie Doreen, and Auntie Pearl. And in the small bedroom, there was Uncle Harold, who was an apprentice tradesman, an object of great admiration in the family, and Uncle Bud, who was a long-distance lorry driver. I'm at ten so far. There you are. That's not counting passing people who would sleep on the sofa and whatnot. So this house had elastic walls.

Gillian Reynolds6:08

That

Gillian Reynolds6:09

There you are.

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And you grew up helping you were on the market stall, sort of helping out? From a very early age. In the wartime, the market was bombed and there were very few stalls left. It was freezing cold. It was an old stone Victorian building. And from about five, we'd go in, and I remember my brother being asleep under my grandma's stall, and he was all wrapped up. What were you selling? What were they selling? Well, in the wartime, my grandma sold the mill ends of fabric, odd lengths, and anything else that she could get her hands on that wasn't on coupons. And I remember one of my first jobs was to go through this huge box of buttons and try and find two that matched. And to this day, I have an absolute horror of button boxes. I can't be doing with them at all. Is it true that your grandmother spent time in Strangeways? Yes, she did, I think, nine months.

Gillian Reynolds6:39

And he was all r

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For black market trading, she was entrapped. She accepted merchant navy coupons from a woman who pretended to be pregnant. But, I mean, she got off with a lot more than she actually got sentenced for because in the war we didn't go short. Grandma got away with a great deal, but eventually she paid the price. And put it this way: we were more akin to gypsies, tramps, and thieves, but we were very intellectual with it. We read, there were always books in the house. I was brought up to be a lady in capital letters. I did not want to be a lady. I did not want to have straight hair and lyl stockings and a string of real pearls.

Gillian Reynolds7:18

Flow.

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I want it to be Rita Hayworth in Gilda. And why wouldn't you?

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Let's have some more music, Jillian Reynolds. Tell me about your second one. Well, I would love to hear the signature tune of a show that ushered me into a magic world, the world of Paul Temple and Steve. It ran for years and years and years. There were six Paul Temples, but there was only one Steve, Marjorie Westbury, who had this very high, pretty voice. And so when Paul said to her, that's a lovely little hat, Steve, she'd say, thank you, Paul. And this posh world where these amateur detectives would assist Scotland Yard in solving copious mysteries. And the signature tune, Coronation Scot, brought me absolutely into this world.

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Coronation Scott, the Paul Temple theme, composed by Vivian Ellis, performed there by the Queen's Hall Light Orchestra, conducted by Sidney Torch. Gillian Reynolds, am I right in thinking that your mum told you you'd been born lucky?

Presenter9:28

Absolutely right. That's fascinating. She instilled this into me. I had red dots on the soles of my feet, and we all had one bath a week in the olden days. And as she dried my feet, she'd lift up my foot and show me, see those dots, you're lucky, you're born lucky. And she would tell me that all the time. Now, she might have had in mind that there was a child before us, Pat, who died age four and a half from diphtheria. Pat was beautiful. She had blonde hair. She could eat with her own knife and fork from the age of one. I hated Pat in my heart, but I couldn't give into it because everyone else adored her. But I was clever. I was brought up to be clever. I was brought up to be lucky. And I was brought up not knowing everything, but having the confidence to go and try and learn it.

Gillian Reynolds9:59

In my heart.

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There was a time in your childhood then when you moved out of your grandmother's home and you moved into the Norris Green estates. What are your memories of then? It was the rougher end of Norris Green, and the Protestants lived on one side of Parkhurst Road and the Catholics lived on the other. It was in the time of the bombing. We lived in what was called a kitchen house. There was one room downstairs and it had a range in it. There was a long scullery at the back with a boiler. The lavatory was outside on the porch and in the winter it was so cold it would freeze over. But this was a model estate built in the twenties. It's vanished now. It's all been demolished. And the first school I went to was Monksdown Road. My mother took me away from there because I came home from school saying, Everyone else got this pink or green note, and I didn't get one. And the next day she took me into school and she said, Were they knit notes? And the teacher said, Yes. And she said, You're leaving. You're going to Broad Square. What a good piece of luck, Kirsty. I am born lucky. Well, what is it? Because that school was remarkable. Well, you're born lucky, or you're born with a mother who is sort of slightly remarkable sounding, isn't she? She did divorce, and that would have been pretty unusual. It wasn't. She remarried somebody who you had known as Uncle Bill. Yes, he was my dad's best friend. My dad was a gambler, and she got really fed up, and she married Bill, who turned out to be a drunk. And one time, when we were barricading ourselves in from one of Bill's drunken fits, my brother and I said to her, Why ever did you marry him? And she said, Well, at least with a drunk, you know where you are. Ah, well, yes.

Gillian Reynolds11:14

What is that?

Gillian Reynolds11:23

It was a stage.

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She expected from you then to get a good education. The books were in the house and you knew that the important thing was getting good results in school. Would that be fair? Oh, absolutely fair. I mean, not good. You had to be taught. That was because she'd had to leave school at 14 and she always resented the fact that she'd never been able to go to university. And she really pressured me to go for this selective scholarship. And there were eight of these awarded each year to the whole of Liverpool. And our primary school got three that year. It was me and another girl and another boy. Let's have some more music, Julian. It's going to be your third of the morning. Tell me a little bit about this choice. I think I was about 15 when I heard this record. And I would have heard it on Jazz Club, which was either David Jacobs or Humphrey Littleton. And it was Miles Davis, Birth of the Cool. I liked jazz, but I didn't like trad. And my brother and I became fanatical bopsters. And this record represents for me the portal between Bop and all of the music that's come after. This was recorded in 1949. And it's still as original as the sun rising.

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That was Miles Davis and Godchild recorded in 1949 and as you said, introducing that Julian Reynolds as original as the sun rising. Three cheers to that. So 1954, you went up to St Anne's College, Oxford, to read English. What did you make of... I'm thinking now of the actual environs, of the sheer honeyed beauty of the place. Staggeringly beautiful. I remember going for my interview and I got to Oxford, I couldn't believe it. Even in March, it was gorgeous. Clearly, you had a strong brain in your head, but just socially, how was it for you? I was brought up to be fearless in some respects. Fearless socially. Nothing bothered me. I had the wardrobe. I had the shoes with the heels. What was the wardrobe? You had to have a black suit for formal occasions. Mine had a pencil skirt and a fitted jacket. I mean, mine was a killer's suit. That was not my interview suit. My interview suit was a ladies' suit.

Gillian Reynolds15:01

Currently.

Presenter15:08

To be worn with flat heels, no jewellery, and no lace on your petticoat. But when I actually got in, lace on petticoats abounded. Social mobility, of course, is something that we concentrate a lot on these days. Back then, you say you were fearless, but were you conscious of the class system? I was a beneficiary, one of many in my generation, of the 44 Education Act. It got us into the old grammar schools free. They'd been paid for previously. It got us into university free, completely free. Your city paid for your maintenance. And that was when you saw a huge influx of kids from grammar schools, not just in the north, but all around. And all of us had been taught by teachers who'd quite often just come out of the forces. So there was this huge impetus for social change after the war. And so you were encouraged as a bright girl by the principal of your college to apply for a two-year internship. Part of that would happen in America. All of it would happen. All of it would happen in America. And were you at this point sort of purposeful? Did you think, well, once I've done that, I'd like to do this? Did you have a sense of what your working life or the rest of your life might hold?

Gillian Reynolds16:09

All of it would happen in America.

Presenter16:21

Well, again, my mother's philosophy, having seen the bailiffs take the furniture out with my dad, she was firmly of the opinion that mental training was portable capital. So I never had any direct career ambitions. But by the time I got to Oxford, Lady Ogilvie, my principal at St Anne's, had noticed that I was odd. I wasn't pretty, but I was kind of attractive and I was funny and I was original. And said, have you thought of America? Have I thought about it? It's all I've thought of. Dream upon dream. Jillian Reynolds, time for some more music. Tell me about this next one.

Gillian Reynolds16:54

Yeah.

Presenter17:00

Well my fourth choice is another sort of portal record because when I got to America I listened constantly to the radio and discovered what was happening was the black music was coming through and hearing Ray Charles was just another flame lit in my heart because this is the track that opens the door between gospel, rock, folk, everything.

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Damn mama to treat me wrong.

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Come and love you, daddy, all right long, all right long.

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Hey, hey.

Speaker 317:58

Yeah.

Gillian Reynolds17:58

Alright.

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See the girl with the diamond ring?

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She knows how to shake that thing alright now

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Hey, hey

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Yeah.

Gillian Reynolds18:14

Hey, hey.

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There you mama!

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Tell you, Paul.

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I'm gonna send you back to Arkansas. Oh, yes, ma'am. What I'd say, Ray Charles, Jillian Reynolds, it was 1958 then. You were doing your masters and you threw it all up for love. Yes, Cupid arrived, so I got married. And that was to Stanley Reynolds, who was a journalist. That's right, he was a journalist on the local newspaper. And you came back home to have your first of three sons. Why did you not want to make a life in America?

Gillian Reynolds18:37

And that was

Presenter18:48

Well, I discovered that America was not like my dream of it. I discovered it to be far more class conscious than Britain, far more race conscious than Britain, and far more socially exclusive. But the main factor in moving back was I was pregnant, and in those days, if you were a resident alien, if anything went wrong with the marriage, I would have no rights to the child. And even then, two and a bit years into being married, there were little sort of fractures and difficulties to be on the safe side.

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I've just moved back. By 1967 then you were doing your first radio critics job. That was for The Guardian. Yes. Here you go. Lucky again. Stanley was by that time The Guardian's television critic and John Course the features editor thought it would be really cute, Spence Tracy and Catherine Herbert star to have the radio critic and the television critic related. And this was the moment when BBC Local Radio was born, when the BBC networks as we know them now were being formulated and coming in, the advent of Radio 1, the death of the pirates, and leading up to, of course, the advent of commercial radio. And there was a point when you were actually a controller of a commercial radio station. It was Radio City in Liverpool, I'm right. Yes. That was because I'd worked with, well, the person, Terry Smith, who was the founder of commercial radio in Liverpool. And he said, would you come and do it? Because having a woman do this job was a huge novelty. Now, was that luck? Or was it somebody else taking a a gamble? Who knows? And the actual practicalities, the day-to-day running of a station, the programming, dealing with the stars, dealing with the egos, how did you find all of that?

Gillian Reynolds19:40

Yeah.

Gillian Reynolds20:07

Yeah.

Presenter20:35

Hard.

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I'm not good at meetings. Bits of it I could do. I could do program ideas. I picked very good people, but I really wasn't terribly good at it. I had to go. I didn't do it very well. Tell me about your next piece of music then, Jillian. We are on to your fifth. I've chosen something very different because it relates to a completely different part of my life. It relates to the bit where I was thinking about the world, its history, and I was listening a lot to the radio. And I heard something which had a very strange effect on me, a long-lasting effect, and it was listening to the music of Shostakovich. And I've chosen now violin concerto number one. I think he finished it in 48. And he didn't hear it publicly performed for five years because it was a ban on the public performance in Russia of all music that wasn't overtly patriotic. Now, can you imagine that? And when it gets to the final movement.

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You here?

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How he's th thumbs his nose at the lot of it, and he just goes into this triumphant dance, and the way it's played reflects the joy, the defiance, and the triumph of art over politics.

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Part of the fourth movement of Shostakovich's violin concerta number one in A minor. That was Lydia Mordekovich with the Scottish National Orchestra conducted by Neyma Yarfi. You said that you were about two and a half years in, Gillian Reynolds, when you realised that your marriage might not be a walk in the park. You were to have two more children, but at what point did you begin to think that there was a lot more to this than you might have wanted? There wasn't just one point. He drank a bit, and there was the odd romance, first on his side, then on mine. And it was difficult.

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He died uh a year ago. He remarried. I didn't remarry. How long were you together? Seventeen years. I left

Presenter23:38

uh, Liverpool and moved to London, and I wrote to everybody I knew who I'd ever worked for, and so I knew there might be a possibility of work, because my work had paid the mortgage. And I needed to keep that up for the security of the boys.

Presenter23:55

You say the boys, I read an interview with you where you said that really at that point what you needed to do was secure a home, because you were working in London and they were still living in Liverpool with their father. Yeah, they were living in the house. And it was he was kind of using a bit of pressure on me to go back and using the boys as a bargaining point for a long time. And my oldest boy left home. And did you go back?

Gillian Reynolds24:04

Yeah.

Presenter24:20

No.

Presenter24:21

No, no, there was no going back. He'd have killed me. I mean, I'm not joking. He'd have killed me. I wouldn't be sitting here. So I left. How do you look ba you know, at the time we're in our lives and we're living it?

Presenter24:33

But you're of an age now where I imagine there have been plenty of occasions when you've looked back at what was probably the most tumultuous period of your life and thought a good deal about it. What do you think of it now? Well, you can always do things better in hindsight.

Gillian Reynolds24:39

So

Presenter24:46

But I don't believe in that. I believe you've got to stand by what you've done. Your reasons might have been wrong. You might have made mistakes, but you have to learn from the mistakes that you made. My mistake was not taking the boys. I did run away with them, the two younger boys, for a couple of weeks, but he got his court order and got them back. The two younger boys were kept in suspension for a long time. So that was difficult. But in the end, by working quite hard, I got the money to employ a really good lawyer. I had the money to buy a big enough place to live. I schooled myself for the court case. Difficult, because if you're the mother who has left her children, you're down the hole. But I had a brilliant brief who acted for me, and a wonderful solicitor. So I was supported by

Gillian Reynolds25:26

Oh, you're dead.

Presenter25:34

women all the way and finally the boys came to live with me and they still remember the anniversary, I don't.

Presenter25:42

Um, I learned from it. I learned from it.

Presenter25:47

You said that um your husband married again and you did not. No? Is that a conscious thing? Well, yes. Yes. I like living on my own. There was a period when I had a bit of cohabitation and when my cohabite reproached me for spending too much money on flowers. I remember thinking it's my money.

Presenter26:09

It's my bloody flowers, I'll do what I like. And the iron entered my soul, and from that day on, lovers yes, but partners no.

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Gillene Reynolds, let's have some of your music now. Tell me about what we're going to hear. Well, this is quite appropriate to the discussion of love and where it stands in one's life, because you can't do without it. It creeps in by windows, and as time goes by, you realise it's quite a precious thing. It's from an opera called One Touch of Venus by Kurt Veil, with lyrics by Ogden Nash, who's known, of course, as a comic versophile. And his lyrics are beautiful. And there are very good songs in this show. But this song, Speak Low, is the best love song in the world, I think.

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When you speak

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Or summer day with those who wait to sing, to sing Speak L and you speak alone

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A moment is swift, like ships adrift, waves swept apart

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Kurt Vil's Speak Low lyrics by Ogden Nash. It was sung there by and Sophie von Otter with the NDR Z Infonia Orchestra conducted by John Elliott Gardner. Let's talk a little bit, Julian Reynolds, then, a little bit more about the trade, the profession, if you will, of the critic.

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You've described podcasts as ready meals, dinners for one. What a great little phrase. Just explain a bit of that. What do you mean? Well, I'm mildly resistant to the podcast because there are a lot of people now whose business it is to say this is the saving of audio. It's not the saving of audio. It's just audio branching out. You did a podcast for a while at The Telegraph. Did you enjoy it? We did a six-week thing. Nobody encouraged us, and they dropped it without notice and without acknowledgement. But I'm delighted to say that my co-presenter then, Pete Norton, is now head of podcasting at The Telegraph. So maybe their ideas are changing. Maybe I was slightly ahead of the wave. I mean, they're hugely popular, aren't they? People download podcasts in their tens of millions. Tens of millions. Worldwide, too. Yes, indeed. And also, people can say things that they wouldn't say in front of a live mic, that they wouldn't be allowed to make the edits on Radio 4. In a way, that's kind of the joy of them. The stays are off, if you will. The stays are off. Now, there are good things about that. People can talk about their anorexia or their sexual problems or their problems with their frightful mother and so on.

Gillian Reynolds28:30

Uh

Speaker 228:30

Uh

Gillian Reynolds28:31

Ten five.

Gillian Reynolds28:31

Uh

Presenter28:54

That's really good. And it is a new forum, it's more personal and will find its own audience. The slightly dangerous thing, I think, for the BBC is that you've got political presenters who are meant to maintain steadfast independence of any political viewpoint.

Presenter29:15

Occasionally seeming to nudge into one shade of opinion or another. And I think that's actually quite dangerous. And I think someone ought to have a serious think about it before they get too carried away. Time for some more music, Jillian. We're on your penultimate disc, actually. Tell me about your seventh. I have to take onto Milkwood. When people talk about revolutions in broadcasting, that was one. It wasn't a drama, it was a feature, ripped page by page from the author, Dunn and Thomas, and has become one of the great internationally recognised radio classics of the world. There's something about it, certainly in the original radio version, that always made me cry. But this is the magic one. This is the one with Richard Burton.

Presenter30:00

To begin

Speaker 330:00

Yeah.

Speaker 330:01

At the beginning.

Speaker 330:04

It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible black, the cobbled streets silent and the hunched, quarters and rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the slow black.

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Slow.

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Black

Speaker 330:19

Crow black fishing boat bobbing sea

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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 330:42

are sleeping now.

Presenter30:44

Richard Burton reading part of Dylan Thomas's Under Milkwood.

Presenter30:49

You've been head hunted at the age of um I will say your age at the age of eighty two, Julian Reynolds. That's quite an unusual experience. What does it feel like?

Gillian Reynolds30:54

Yeah, yeah.

Presenter30:58

Um more thrilling than marriage. It's very nice to be head hunted. What over the years and you have a I think probably a unique perspective given the amount of time you have done the job that you've done what has been the biggest surprise to you about what has happened in the radio landscape?

Presenter31:15

The continued

Presenter31:17

flourishing of it, the continuing fact that people love it, rely on it when it's snowing they don't turn on the television when there's a teacher's strike they turn on the radio when you feel miserable in the middle of the night

Presenter31:31

When you're ill, you turn on World Service or Radio Five Live or whatever. It's a joy. I mean, it doesn't mean to say everything's brilliant. Loads of times you

Presenter31:42

Throw the tea towel at the radio and say, be gone. Tell me about your eighth and final choice, then, Jillian Reynolds. What are we going to hear? Well, this comes from my middle of the night listening. I had a bad miscarriage, this 10-year gap between my first and my second sons, and I had a terrible miscarriage, and it was awful. And I started listening to a lot of radio of a different nature, and I discovered the late quartets of Beethoven. And one of the great blessings of my life, as my mother would have said, born lucky, was I have wonderful friends. And the other week, I went with three friends to Liverpool and we went to hear Stephen Hough play the Beethoven concertos with the Liverpool Phil. Now, the Liverpool Phil is one of my pride and joys. And the resident conductor now is the remarkable Vasily Petrenko. And hearing Stephen Huff play with them, with my friends around me, equally spellbound, we sat and watched him. He listens to the opening of the concertos. It's a long introduction and he takes the feel of the orchestra. And when it comes time for him to play, he swivels on the seat and he plays. And he is beyond belief a master. So I would like this record for the pure joy of the encounter with great minds.

Presenter34:08

That was part of the third movement of Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. One, performed there by Stephen Hough, with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Vassili Petrinko. It was recorded for B B C Radio three at the Philharmonic Hall, Liverpool, on the twenty second of march, twenty eighteen.

Presenter34:23

It's time then, Gillian, of course oh well, you may know this already, it's time for the books. I give you the complete works of Shakespeare and the Bible.

Presenter34:30

What are you going to take along with them?

Presenter34:31

I've decided that what I would need on this island is escape to another world, if only in my mind. So I will take a book I love, but I haven't read it yet. So I brushed in to show you for Hogarth, A Life in a World by Jenny Huglo, who is one of my absolute favourite, favourite writers. I want to go and hang around with Hogarth and the gang, with Pope and Swift and Hazlitt. And this has got pictures as well, so that's a bit of a cheat. I have to ask you a serious question though. Have I got my glasses with me?

Presenter35:04

Well, let's be benevolent and say there's a distinct possibility you do have your glasses. Every time I set foot on a boat from now on, my glasses will be on my nose.

Gillian Reynolds35:08

Uh

Presenter35:12

Um what about a luxury?

Presenter35:14

Well, being a a long time listener to this programme, I remember, was it Norman Mailer who ordered the Giant Spliff? Yes, it was. I would like an endless supply of scotch, please. Would you like a single malt or a blended whiskey? A blend, please. Woman after my own heart. It is yours then, Gillian. And what then about your track to save? Very hard choice, but I'd have to take the Beethoven because.

Presenter35:36

Nick Kenyon, a former controller of Radio Three, I once went to interview him and I said, Why does music matter? and he looked at me and he said very kindly, Because there has to be another way of saying things without words.

Presenter35:50

And that's what Beethoven does. It's yours. Julian Reynolds, thank you very much for letting us hear your desert island discs. Thank you.

Presenter36:09

I hope you enjoyed that interview with Gillian Reynolds. You might be interested to know that over on our sister station, they're running a series called Critical Eye and as part of that, over the next four weeks, they'll broadcast the Desert Island Discs editions with Clive James, Blanche Marvin, A. Gill and Faye Mashler.

Presenter36:26

Many of the radio presenters that Gillian has been critiquing over the years have been cast away, and they include Bob Harris, John Peel, and Terry Wogan, who was dispatched twice, and Sue Lawley cast away Chris Evans in two thousand five.

Presenter36:40

Chris, it's nineteen eighty three. You're seventeen. You've just passed your driving test, and your idol was a guy called Timmy Mallett, a DJ on Piccadilly Radio in Manchester. You and thousands of other kids, I s suspect, in the North West. But you got to meet him and you got a job out of him. How did you do that?

Gillian Reynolds36:58

Well, I just passed my driving test, as you say. My mum bought me a car, which was very sweet of her. And Timmy Mannock was doing a road show, and um he was just awesome.

Gillian Reynolds37:07

And after the show finished I followed him home. Terrible.

Presenter37:09

He was dull.

Gillian Reynolds37:10

Yep. Uh but I got a puncture, which I'd never had before'cause I never had a car before and I didn't know how to fix it. So I just thought, Well, I'll go and see if Picard I'll just see the building. So I went to see the building. It was pathetic Sunday afternoon. And as I was outside looking at the building, just staring at it agog.

Gillian Reynolds37:26

Timmy walked out'cause he'd been to drop his records off.

Presenter37:28

This was fake.

Gillian Reynolds37:29

Yeah, and I accosted him and I said, excuse me, but I work for Hospital Radio. Can I interview you? And he said, yeah, come tomorrow night before the show. 15 minutes from the show. Do you work for Hospital Radio? No, of course not. And so I did. And when I was there, this mad kid came in and he stormed in and stormed out again like a whirlwind. I said, who's that? He said, no, that's my assistant, Andy, but he leaves tomorrow. I can't talk to him. He's going back to university. I'm not happy with him tonight.

Presenter37:38

Did you work for hospital?

Speaker 237:39

Do I

Gillian Reynolds37:52

So um I let that go and then got home and wrote a letter to Tony Ingham, the program controller saying, look

Presenter37:58

Okay, so you didn't let it go. Yeah, let it go there and then quick.

Gillian Reynolds37:59

Yeah, let it go there. And um and wrote to Tony Ingham the next day and said uh uh dear Mr Ingham, I will do anything for nothing. I understand Timmy's assistant is leaving. So the next night, the Wednesday, I was in answering the phones on the show. You got a job for nothing, no pay. Oh god, I didn't get paid for three and a half years, but it didn't matter'cause I you can't buy that kind of experience.

Presenter38:09

So

Presenter38:18

Is that

Presenter38:19

But you said that you learned ninety percent of what you went on to use yourself on the radio from Timmy Mallett, is that right?

Gillian Reynolds38:26

Yeah, I was at the foundation of it, definitely.

Presenter38:28

How would you characterize it? What do you think you learned?

Gillian Reynolds38:30

Perfection, um, attention to detail, thoroughness, the fact that everything can be done and we don't ever say no.

Presenter38:38

And you have to have original ideas. That's what it's really all about in your trade, isn't it?

Gillian Reynolds38:42

I think so. Yeah, I mean that was what Timmy's very good at.

Gillian Reynolds38:45

Um but that's about about n being fearless.

Presenter38:49

But, you know, I'm thinking about on TFI Friday, for example, you had Peter O'Toole reading the Spice Girl lyrics, didn't you? And you had Nasser Hussein batting mini television sets into the Thames. I mean

Gillian Reynolds38:55

Did you

Presenter39:00

These are the fruits of the Evans' imagination, honey.

Gillian Reynolds39:03

I'd like to claim the O two one, but that was Danny Baker's idea. Um but you know, all similar similar kind of things. I think if you do something that's weird, it's already interesting, which is half the battle. So that if it's not funny, it's still interesting. If it's funny as well, it's even better.

Presenter39:06

Yeah.

Presenter39:13

So

Presenter39:17

And you can always put another record on.

Gillian Reynolds39:19

And that's the greatest thing about being on the radio.

Presenter39:22

Chris Evans, you can of course download all of these programmes either via the Desert Island Disc's website or via your usual podcast provider. And as ever, it'd be great if you could rate the programmes. Next time, I'll be consigning the cosmologist Professor Carlos Frank to the lonely isolation of the island.

Presenter39:40

I have a sense it's something he might rather enjoy, what with all those stars to contemplate. I do hope you'll join us.

Speaker 239:56

In June 2017, the fire at Grenfell Tower in West London killed 71 people. Now a public inquiry is underway to establish what happened and what caused it. Alongside the inquiry, a new podcast reporting every day the inquiry sits, explaining the evidence and demystifying the jargon so we can all better understand what this important inquiry is doing. That's the Grenfell Tower Inquiry Podcast with me, Eddie Mayer.

Gillian Reynolds40:22

This is the BBC.