Fyfe Robertson

Speaker 30:01

BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts.

Speaker 30:05

Hello, I'm Lauren Laverne and this is the Desert Island Discs podcast. This is the only extract the BBC has of this episode, and for rights reasons the music is shorter than on the original broadcast. The presenter is Roy Plumley. I hope you enjoy listening.

Fyfe Robertson0:30

Our castaway this week, ladies and gentlemen, has talked and written his way around the world and into most people's homes. He's the television reporter Fife Robertson.

Presenter0:41

Robbie, are you a musical person?

Presenter0:43

I'm a musical person in the sense that I love listening to music, but I'm quite uneducated musically, and I don't play any instrument, I'm sorry to say.

Fyfe Robertson0:51

Yeah.

Presenter0:51

And you play disc.

Presenter0:52

I play discs quite a bit, yes. What was your plan in choosing this? Slender.

Fyfe Robertson0:57

A ration of eight.

Presenter0:58

Well, you know, I found it surprisingly difficult to choose, but my plan really was to choose things which have special associations for me, which

Presenter1:06

It would remind me of my desert island.

Presenter1:09

occasions, but more particularly of people I would like to think about.

Presenter1:14

What's the first one you have there? Well, as I say, I've chosen things that have special associations for me. I can't think of any music that so readily takes me back to my childhood and boyhood as Handel's Messiah.

Presenter1:27

My father used to conduct a huge choir in Edinburgh, and I have sung for years in the chorus, you know, drowned in a sea of bass all round me.

Presenter1:37

So i I s I would would never dream of not having something from them side, my desert island. And what I've chosen is the quartet since by man came death.

Fyfe Robertson1:38

Well i

Presenter1:47

It's not one of the best known, but uh I I'm very fond of it.

Fyfe Robertson2:50

Since by man came death from Handel's Messiah, a performance conducted by Sir Malcolm Sargent with the Huddersfield Choral Society and Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. Let's have record number two.

Presenter3:02

Well, record number two is by way of being a family joke. It's a bit of Bach, the air on the G string.

Presenter3:09

It's a joke because it was one of these pieces that I light on every now and then that are especially good for for unwinding and I tend to play them a lot. And I did so at a time when my two daughters were growing up to the point where they were beginning to educate me and I found it very interesting. And they always used to say that

Presenter3:30

You know, I was really falling behind musically. Poor old Pop, they said, has got really hung up on the G string. But it's still lovely to hear. So let's hear it.

Speaker 33:49

Yeah.

Fyfe Robertson4:43

The air on the G string for poor old Pop.

Fyfe Robertson4:46

It's from Bach Suite number three in D major, and that was Pablo Casals conducting the Marlborough Festival Orchestra.

Fyfe Robertson4:54

You're from Edinburgh, that's right. What was your boyhood ambition?

Presenter4:58

I didn't have any until I was well up in my teens. I it was intended that I should follow my father into the church, and I remember when I was about fifteen telling him that I simply couldn't get the kind of

Fyfe Robertson5:05

Remember

Presenter5:11

conviction that I thought was necessary for this calming and he was a very reasonable person and he said well if that's the way you feel I wouldn't consider it.

Presenter5:21

What did you do when you left school?

Presenter5:23

When I left school, I had already been writing for the press as a schoolboy, and I took a job running a little weekly newspaper in a little Lanarkshire town. I was everything, you know, editor, reporter, circulation manager.

Presenter5:40

This is wonderful. Even advertising, it was a wonderful experience, but it was bad experience in one way, in that I had no experienced journalist.

Fyfe Robertson5:40

This is wonderful.

Presenter5:48

Supervising me. And so, after about eighteen months, very successful months there.

Presenter5:54

I took a job with the very old.

Presenter5:56

uh English weekly newspaper in Shrewsbury.

Presenter6:00

where I was supervised and

Presenter6:02

Where I managed to get the kind of jobs that I could never have got in an industrial area, you know.

Fyfe Robertson6:09

What did it mean, Showsbury, uh of of flower shows and and coroners in

Presenter6:13

No, oh no, the the juniors did all these bits and pieces. I had cooked my age by three years and I was their senior reporter, the only man with a motorbike, you see. So I had a very free life. I could more or less choose what I did. I had no court work to do practically.

Presenter6:32

It was mostly feature stuff I did. Yes, you wrote the leaders and

Presenter6:36

I wrote a good many of them. I had a very lazy editor.

Presenter6:40

And after Shrewsbury? After Shrewsbury, I I moved up very briefly to a bi-weekly at Fries and then was asked to

Presenter6:48

by Sir Robert Bruce, the then editor of the Glasgow Herald, to come up and and join them. And I took it because I was anxious to see the inside of newspaper production. I became a sub-editor. Yes, I've got a note here that you studied medicine in in Glasgow. Well, I did. You see, it's a family profession and my older brother, by ten years, wanted me to qualify and join him in a two man practice where we'd both specialize. It was a most attractive proposition, but

Presenter7:17

I still had a yen to journal.

Presenter7:20

So I packed up medicine after eighteen months in Glasgow. Yes. How long did you stay in Glasgow?

Presenter7:26

Altogether just over four years.

Presenter7:29

And then?

Presenter7:30

And then I left after

Presenter7:33

More or less an upset with the paper because they wouldn't let me go on to reporting and I joined Northwest Newspapers, their new paper at Derby.

Presenter7:43

for a pretty disastrous year because I mean after a few months every Monday we met a diminished band to shake hands that we were still there

Presenter7:55

What were you doing in Derby? I was a picture editor and when I got the job in London they asked me, you know, if I knew about picture editing and I said I knew pretty well everything there was to know about picture editing. In fact, I knew nothing about it at all.

Presenter8:09

but got coached by the picture editor of Glatt.

Fyfe Robertson8:12

Cool.

Presenter8:12

Okay.

Fyfe Robertson8:12

Illustrated paper and did quite well. Well, there you are. We've got you south of the border, and we've got you as picture editor in pictorial journalism. So I think this is a point where we might break off.

Presenter8:20

Enjoy

Fyfe Robertson8:22

Pure third record.

Fyfe Robertson8:24

Yeah. My third

Presenter8:24

Play code.

Presenter8:25

He's an opera.

Presenter8:27

Some of the music from Prince Igor, and I've chosen it because it was the very first opera I ever saw.