Helen Fielding

Presenter0:01

BBC Sounds, Music, Radio Podcasts. Hello, I'm Lauren Laverne and this is the Desert Island Discs podcast. Every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, book and luxury they'd want to take with them if they were cast away to a desert island. For rights reasons, the music is shorter than the original broadcast. I hope you enjoy listening.

Presenter0:43

My castaway this week is the novelist Helen Fielding. Twenty five years ago she penned a fictional diary in the Independent newspaper exploring the inner life and outer misadventures of an unhappily single thirty something.

Presenter0:57

And so Bridget Jones, one of Britain's most memorable and successful comic heroines, was born.

Presenter1:03

The weekly newspaper columns became a book, and Bridget Jones's diary was described by The Guardian as one of the ten novels that best defined the twentieth century. Three more novels and blockbuster films would follow. Long before the age of social media, Bridget was gripped by self-doubt and status anxiety, though her metrics were calories and units of alcohol rather than likes and follows. Thankfully, the character's ability to make readers laugh has proved as enduring as her insecurities, something her creator considers crucial.

Presenter1:34

The second of four siblings, brought up in Yorkshire, Helen's love of storytelling began when she was a child, saw her read English at Oxford and took her into journalism, working in T V at first, before moving into print. She says, I grew up with a real mixture of dark and light, and work ethic and glamour, and that's informed my life. Helen Fielding welcomed Desert Island Discs.

Helen Fielding1:56

Hello, it's such an honour to be here. Thank you so much.

Presenter2:00

Well, thank you very much for joining us from your home. We're not in the studio. So twenty five years on since Bridget arrived on the scene, Bridget has endured. New readers are finding her all the time. I wonder what your feelings are about Bridget Jones to day.

Helen Fielding2:14

Add fuel

Helen Fielding2:15

Very grateful to Bridget for what she's done for my life, and I feel very pleased that.

Helen Fielding2:23

In particular, young girls are still enjoying the book.

Helen Fielding2:28

I think

Helen Fielding2:28

What happened with Bridget really was that I wrote it so unself-consciously that I wasn't thinking about how it would be received. And therefore, that freed me up to be very honest about what it is like being a human being, really. And I think it's that that has resonated. I think the social circumstances surrounding Bridget then are different from now. I think it wouldn't have been possible to write it in that way. Now, things have changed happily.

Presenter3:01

Why do you think it wouldn't have been possible what what's changed?

Helen Fielding3:04

I took my kids to see a screening of the movie. I hadn't seen it for years and years and I I was staggered. You couldn't write that now. The level of sexism that Bridget was dealing with, the hand on the bum in so many of the scenes. Richard Finch, you know, let's have a shot at the boobs. I mean, in the end, she turned round and stuck it to them, but it was just part and parcel of her life.

Helen Fielding3:30

And it was quite shocking for me to see how things have changed since then.

Presenter3:34

Helen, we're going to hear your tracks today. How hard was it to get to you finally?

Helen Fielding3:36

How hard was it to get to finally? Really difficult. For a start, I love self-help books, so my first list was a sort of musical self-help book, beginning with Climb Every Mountain. But then I tried to do what I was told and stick to records that made me think of specific moments or people or times.

Presenter3:57

Well, with that in mind, let's see your first, shall we? This is disc number one.

Helen Fielding4:00

This is Fly Me to the Moon. I was brought up in a mill town where they made the cloth for donkey jackets for miners and steel workers. And it was all quite Victorian in a way, sort of chapelley and dark. But my parents were really good at fun. My dad bought this dormobile, and my mum used to put tins of food in it, like tins of spam and things, all year. And then when it came to the summer, we used to get all fancy and go off to the continent. And she's quite old now, and she loves listening to old records. And when I played her this one, her face just lit up. So this is my first one. I also think it'd be lovely for me to dance around on the island.

Helen Fielding4:42

Fly me to the moon.

Speaker 14:44

And let me

Helen Fielding4:44

And let me play among the stars

Speaker 14:47

Let me see what spring is like on Jupiter and Mother.

Speaker 14:53

In other words

Helen Fielding4:53

Are there ways

Speaker 24:54

Uh

Helen Fielding4:55

Hold my hand.

Speaker 14:55

Hold my

Speaker 24:55

Okay.

Speaker 24:58

In other words.

Speaker 25:01

Darling girl

Helen Fielding5:01

It's me.

Speaker 25:03

Uh

Helen Fielding5:04

Fill my heart with song and let me sing forevermore You are all I long for, all I worship and adore

Presenter5:14

Julie London and Fly Me to the Moon, taking you back to your childhood, Helen Fielding. So you grew up in Morley in West Yorkshire, the second of four children. Your dad, Michael, was a mill manager. Tell me a little bit more about him.

Helen Fielding5:28

Well, he was the most lovely man he was a really good man.

Helen Fielding5:33

Very, very kind, very clever, very musical, and terribly funny. Northern humour was a big thing in our house. It was all sort of Les Dawson and Morecombe and Wise, and really the essence of the joke was bringing the pretentious down to earth, really. And my dad used to spend a lot of time with me, used to play snooker with me and tell me all about his business. In later years, in the entertainment business and moving to LA, all those good lessons about honesty and work relationships I think were really useful. And our house was quite noisy, and everyone played musical instruments.

Presenter6:04

Uh

Presenter6:09

What did you play?

Helen Fielding6:09

The violin, ghastly, and the viola and the piano. So it was sort of terrible really. There was sort of violins and trumpets and then my dad got an organ. But it was a very happy family. They were quite glamorous as well, my mum and dad. My mum was really beautiful and they used to get all dressed up and go out to the Nouveau Club in Leeds. And my mum was really keen on food.

Presenter6:31

Read

Helen Fielding6:34

Uh

Presenter6:34

Yes, she

Helen Fielding6:34

It's a cookery.

Presenter6:34

Being a cookery teacher, is that right?

Helen Fielding6:36

Yeah, she'd been a cookery teacher and she used to love making fancy food, rather like Bridget's mother, sort of meat with fruit, and then serve it in a hostess trolley. She was quite scatty, like me. She set the kitchen on fire three times till my dad bought her a deep fat fryer. There's quite a lot of cake.

Presenter6:55

Yos So good at fun and glamorous, and your dad with this quite wry northern sense of humour. Were you good at making him laugh?

Helen Fielding7:05

Yes, he liked my sense of humour and he was a lovely, gentle teaser. And he was very handy and practical, my dad, as well. He built our house that we lived in. I suppose they built it not that long after the war. And it was full of hiding places in case the enemy came. And it had a a cellar with a generator that you could hide in. But he was always adding bits onto the house. Very practical person.

Presenter7:29

It sounds like a gift for a child with a big imagination.

Helen Fielding7:32

Yeah, I mean there was always both of them, mum and dad, there was always room for imagination. I I had this set of plastic animals and I used to play with those on this fireplace in the hall and make up stories for them.

Helen Fielding7:44

So it was a a house where there was room to to be who you wanted to be really. I was allowed to have this room and I painted it dark purple and as I got into my teen years I was doing a lot of writing of terrible poems and sort of listening to Cat Stevens and Leonard Cohen.

Presenter8:02

So your ambition to write came early.

Helen Fielding8:05

Yes, it was always something that I felt I knew how to do. I knew my way around with words for some reason. It just felt easy.

Presenter8:13

It's time for disc number two. What's it gonna be?

Helen Fielding8:16

Okay, well this is The Windmills of Your Mind by Noel Harrison. And it was one of the Ernest introspective records that I was very keen on. I was a teenager. But I distinctly remember my dad... I can remember where he was when he listened to this. I can remember the wallpaper, which I think they thought was fancy. It was black with tropical fish on it. And he just thought this song was really funny because he said it was a pretentious rambling on the word round and he'd never heard a larger collection of clichés, particularly the world is like an apple whirling silently in space. And he also thought it was like the machinations of my own mind which was applying a great deal of thought to the wrong things.

Speaker 18:54

Round like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel, never ending or beginning on a never-spinning reel, like a snowball down a mountain, or a carnival balloon, like a carousel that's turning, running rings around the moon, like a clock whose hands are sweeping as the minutes of its face. And the world is like an apple whirling silently in space, like the circles that you find in the windmills of your mind, like a tunnel that you find.

Presenter9:25

Noel Harrison and the Windmills of Your Mind

Presenter9:28

Helen Fielding, I've heard you describe Life as a Teen in Seventies Morley as being about work ethic and glamour, and I want to start with the glamour, obviously. Where did one find that at that point?

Helen Fielding9:39

We used to dress up a lot and my mum used to go mad. I'd sort of wander around with a bare midriff and things like that. And we used to go out to nightclubs in Leeds. In fact, one time horrifyingly we went to a nightclub. My parents were there. It's awful. Sometimes just like parties in church halls and things like that, but it seemed glamorous to us.

Presenter9:59

What about the hard work? You had a secret ambition to go to Oxford. Did it seem like an achievable goal?

Helen Fielding10:04

Well, when I was little, I was very clever at school, and you know, I used to do really well, and then it sort of went off the boil a bit. I used to be quite plain. I had winged glasses and sticking out teeth and plaits. And then, when I was about fifteen, I got rid of the glasses and got contact lenses, and my teeth were straight. And then I dyed my hair blonde, and then I became distracted from my studies for quite a period of time. But I did really want to go to Oxford, and then when they were asking everyone

Speaker 110:35

Everyone?

Helen Fielding10:36

To apply, they didn't ask me at school because I'd sort of let things slide a bit. So then I decided I was really going to work, so I spent the whole summer working.

Presenter10:44

You made it to St Anne's College in Oxford in 1976, but apparently you weren't happy at first. Why not?

Presenter10:51

Yeah.

Helen Fielding10:51

Um

Helen Fielding10:52

Well, I wasn't unhappy. I was proud to be there, but I found it quite intense, given that we'd come from such jollity really. And also, coming from the North, I wasn't really prepared, you know, even just silly things like

Helen Fielding11:06

dinner was at lunch time. So the first time my tutor asked me for drinks before dinner, I turned up at quarter to twelve. And then when I was invited to a dinner party, I went in a long dress and everyone was just in jeans having spaghetti. So there was a bit of adjustment like that.

Presenter11:21

Hmm.

Helen Fielding11:22

But I found some friends and then I had this idea that I was going to be an actress and I got a part in a play called Mad Dog Blues by Sam Shepard playing Marlena Dietrich in fishnet tights singing Falling in Love Again and doing a dance with a chair and at the end of this performance this posh boy came up to me and said I would like to be your boyfriend and I was like oh it was Richard Curtis. He invited me out for lunch and there was a whole load of these boys all living together in the house and they were just really funny. They said they thought I was really sophisticated till I opened my mouth and this Yorkshire accent came out. They were good people.

Helen Fielding12:03

and still are and really funny.

Presenter12:05

Think it's a perfect moment to hear some more music. What's it gonna be?

Helen Fielding12:08

Oh yes, this is It Must Be Love by Madness and it just reminds me of that lovely time in my 20s when I lived in Bristol, I worked for local news down there and then living in Camden Town, a big shared house with lots of people and just really all the times of friendship that I've really enjoyed.

Speaker 112:33

As soon as I wake up, every night

Speaker 112:37

Every day.

Speaker 112:39

I know that it's you I need to take the blues away

Speaker 112:46

It must be love, love, love.

Helen Fielding12:51

Uh

Speaker 112:51

In my soul We love

Speaker 212:52

Love her, love.

Speaker 212:55

Nothing more, nothing less, nothing

Presenter12:58

What is the bad

Presenter13:02

Madness and it must be love. So, Helen Fielding, you'd fallen in with friends that you would keep for life, Richard Curtis, you were a couple for a time, and Rowan Atkinson, and they took you with them up to Edinburgh to take part in a review. How did it go?

Helen Fielding13:16

Uh quite badly.

Helen Fielding13:18

I wasn't really very good at acting and all my parts were taken away from me one by one, apart from Miss Guided the Mute Chambermaid. And I ended up just being in Grimm's Fairy Tales. It was very sad. But so that was really the end of my acting career. It was blighted. They got successful very quickly. The gang grew to include people like Rick Mayle and Aide Edmondson and the Cambridge people and I wasn't really I was always slightly part of it and not part of it because when I left college then I went to Bristol to work for the BBC.

Presenter13:52

Yes, you were making films for Nationwide and Play School, which hints at a very rich brief. Well, then I'm I moved.

Helen Fielding13:58

Move to play school after nationwide. And that was a really great job. You got to choose which window to zoom in through.

Presenter14:04

You also made films for comic relief, which of course was created by Richard Curtis, on Ethiopia, Sudan, Mozambique. What impact did that work have on you?

Helen Fielding14:14

I think my twenties was quite an interesting time because it was very fun, but also it was a time when my father died when I was about twenty four and

Helen Fielding14:27

Life became a bit more serious for me, and I became more interested in issues, if you like.

Speaker 114:32

Uh

Presenter14:32

The

Helen Fielding14:32

I remember in nineteen eighty four when there was a famine in Ethiopia in Wallo, and there was some extraordinary footage that came from the camp by um Mohammed Amin, the cameraman. And then Michael Burke put on

Helen Fielding14:48

An extraordinarily beautifully written commentary about the light coming through at dawn and lighting up a famine of biblical proportions. So yes, I did go out at the start of that. And then, much as I loved play school and light entertainment and all that, I then decided I wanted to become a serious journalist, which of course I never managed. I've always ended up in the shallow end. But I decided I was going to make a documentary. There was this story about locusts swarm in the Sudan, blotting out the sun, the teeth of the wind, they were called. And I managed to get Thames TV to say I could make this story. But then when I got there, the locusts had all flown off to Chad. And I remember the producer coming out and marching me along the banks of the River Nile saying, Seldom has a story collapsed so dramatically.

Helen Fielding15:38

But then we went down instead to do the South Sudan war and that was pretty dramatic. We camped on the border of Kenya and the Sudan and then I was really cross because the crew set off without me to go and interview John Garang, the rebel leader, and they left me behind because I was a girl. And then they didn't come back and

Helen Fielding16:02

I I knew something had gone wrong. I went to bed that night and then something made me at three o'clock in the morning get up and get dressed and half an hour later they arrived and they'd driven over a landmine and a soldier had been killed and the producer had been killed.

Helen Fielding16:18

So

Helen Fielding16:21

Uh it was very dark.

Helen Fielding16:23

And after that I really felt

Helen Fielding16:28

I got a little bit close to the the danger and I should rain it in a bit. It wasn't really fair on my mum.

Presenter16:34

Yes, your mum, who had lost your dad around that time, quite unexpectedly.

Helen Fielding16:39

Yes, it was an accident.

Helen Fielding16:42

It was very hard, and one thing I've been thinking about a lot actually during this epidemic is how.

Helen Fielding16:49

Important it is to be able to say goodbye to someone when they die, and I wasn't able to do that with my dad.

Presenter16:55

It's my

Presenter16:56

Let's take a break to hear some more music. This is your fourth disc today.

Helen Fielding17:00

This is a piece of music. It's quite dark and complicated, and I really like it. And I think it's one of the most difficult piano pieces there is to play. So I've I often listen to this. It's just a really good piece of music if you're in a certain mood.

Presenter18:15

Part of the first movement of Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 3, played by Donny Smutsuyov, and the Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra conducted by Valery Gegyov. So, Helen Fielding, you found a place at the independent newspaper after going from job to job for a while in print journalism, and it was a pretty cool place to be in the mid-90s. How would you describe it?

Helen Fielding18:41

It was very cool, it was very exciting working for The Independent and The Independent on Sunday. I'd been really trying to get into journalism for a while. It wasn't easy, but it was a time when everyone was wanting columns. And Andrew Marr, the editor and Charlie Ledbetter, asked me to write a column as myself originally. And I said, No, but I'll make a character up. And I think it was a time when the image of the single girl in her thirties had not caught up with the reality of it. And I still would go up and see my parents, and somebody would say, Oh, how's your love life? And when are we going to get you married off? and all that sort of thing. You know, I think most comedy comes out of quite dark things, and it was hard. And I think it still is hard for girls in their 30s.

Presenter19:26

So Bridget was born twenty eighth of february, nineteen ninety five, with that now iconic photograph, yeah, of uh Susannah Lewis with the cigarette and the wine glass.

Speaker 119:31

Uh

Helen Fielding19:31

Plus graph

Speaker 119:32

Uh

Speaker 119:35

Yeah.

Presenter19:36

You were writing anonymously. It was unattributed at the beginning. It was interesting that you said, you know, the the comedy of Bridget is is underpinned by sadness, by darkness. What were you going through?

Helen Fielding19:49

That's so funny you're asking me that because I always deflected any questions about myself in relation to Bridget and I always denied that she had anything to do with me. But of course she was very close to me in some ways but not in others. I was a single girl in London and I was having a lot of fun. I had a group of friends very much like Bridget, my girlfriends, my gay friends, my married friends. I used to have dinners and try and cook and I had several different boyfriends, all very gorgeous. It's amazing the number of people that lay claim to be Daniel.

Helen Fielding20:25

Oh Mark, including kiss domain.

Helen Fielding20:28

But um I am quite a private person, so it was quite startling that this little thing that I'd written suddenly became a big thing. But imagine what it feels like to write your sort of behind the curtain things of your life that you wouldn't particularly want people to know about, or feeling stupid about

Helen Fielding20:51

and then suddenly finding it.

Helen Fielding20:53

Of all the things I've been trying to do, my serious book, Course Celeb, about celebrities and famine and

Helen Fielding21:00

You know, my journalism, this thing that came from left to field became the popular thing. And what does it feel like?

Helen Fielding21:09

Well, on one level it's the most brilliant thing that could have happened.

Helen Fielding21:15

For me personally.

Helen Fielding21:18

Um

Helen Fielding21:20

It was a little confusing that I suddenly had this alter ego that was sort of me and not me. People used to expect me to behave like Bridget, and still do, and and I very often do.

Helen Fielding21:31

But it was kind of liberating as well, because it gives you the ability to laugh at yourself and also realize that it's not just you thinking these things, it's not just you.

Helen Fielding21:42

Questioning yourself or comparing yourself

Presenter21:46

Helen, it's time to hear your next track. What's it gonna be?

Helen Fielding21:49

I suppose a big theme in my life has been travel. And I was thinking, when I was thinking about the desert island, I remembered, oh, I have been stuck on a desert island. I was with my friend Emma and we were in Honduras and we met these two diving instructors and they took us diving and then they said they'd take us to the original Robinson Crusoe Island and they got a fisherman to take us on a boat and then a storm came and the fisherman didn't come back so we had to spend the night on the island in the rain.

Helen Fielding22:19

And we end up sleeping on cardboard under a sort of hut. Anyway, this song reminds me of that particular night when we got stuck on the island, but also just the freedom of travel that I love so much. The sun and nature. All those things are really important to me. So this is La Isla Bonita by Madonna.

Presenter22:41

Last night I dreamt of something

Helen Fielding22:47

Just like I never was gone, I knew the song The Young Girl With Eyes Like Perfect

Presenter22:54

Uh

Presenter22:57

It all seems like yesterday, not far away.

Presenter23:01

Golden island breeze, all of nature wild and free.

Presenter23:06

Where I long to be La Isla

Helen Fielding23:09

Only Yeah.

Presenter23:12

Madonna and La Isla Bonita. So, Helen Fielding, we talked about the people who loved Bridget and connected with her. Sadly, not everybody took to her so well. What did you make of the feminist critiques of the book at the time? Some thought that you writing as Bridget Jones was setting the cause back years. Others said that you offered a defeatist view of womanhood. What was your reaction back then?

Helen Fielding23:35

I always hope to stand like a great tree.

Helen Fielding23:39

In the face of criticism, but of course, it always gets to me because I'm a human being. But having said that,

Helen Fielding23:46

I did deliberately put the line in Bridget Jones, There is nothing so unattractive to a man as strident feminism. I think in the knowledge that it might annoy some people. And I think at the time Bridget actually said that being a feminist with a capital F was another thing that she felt she wasn't very good at. And I think what's

Helen Fielding24:08

great now is that feminism has sort of lost its capital F. And I think the fact that the book was written in with the plot of Jane Austen, so it had a happy ending and a romantic ending was a bit of a red herring because Bridget does not straightforwardly just want a man.

Presenter24:24

You say that feminism has changed now. It's different these days. Is your feminism different now?

Helen Fielding24:32

I think

Helen Fielding24:33

It's a struggle. It's still a struggle.

Helen Fielding24:38

I

Presenter24:38

Do I find this so difficult to talk?

Helen Fielding24:40

Talk about

Presenter24:41

You know what's interesting is that it is hard to talk about, and I think a lot of people find it hard to talk about, and hard to define and describe.

Helen Fielding24:51

Yeah, and I think it's something you have to be very careful talking about. That's the other thing. You have to be very careful what you say now. You know, anything I say about feminism, I'm just so aware of those women. You know, I'm a lone parent with two kids with all the privilege that I have. Those women, you know, with kids on their own, no money.

Presenter24:58

Hmm.

Helen Fielding25:14

You know, that's where the fight really is. And I think it's a bit of a red herring to get hung up about Bridget. And I think the way that Bridget operates is the way that your friends operate. When you see your friends at the end of the day for a glass of wine, you do not go in and say, Oh, I've been such a marvellous feminist. You go in and say, Oh, God, you'll never believe what happened to me today. And then you support each other.

Helen Fielding25:38

Well, on that note, it's time for some more music. I couldn't go to a desert island without including this classic. This has been the soundtrack to so many brilliant nights with my girlfriends with far too much wine. It's very overblown, but it's completely fabulous. And I will dance round on the island pretending I'm in little shorts and roller skates, and it's I will survive.

Helen Fielding26:03

Walk out the door, just turn around now, you're not welcome anymore.

Helen Fielding26:11

Aren't you the one who tried to break me with the vibe? You think I crumbled You think I lay down and died

Helen Fielding26:39

Oh no.

Presenter26:42

Gloria Gaynor and I will survive. That is going to sound great on the Desert Island, Helen Fielding.

Presenter26:48

So the film version of Bridget Jones's Diary was released in two thousand one and it boasted the irresistible combination of Hugh Grant as Daniel Cleaver, Colin Firth as Mark Darcy and Renee Zellweger as Bridget. And of course the screenplay was by you, by Richard Curtis and Andrew Davies. How hard was it to turn the book into a film?

Presenter27:08

It was one of those

Helen Fielding27:09

Incredibly

Helen Fielding27:11

passionate, chaotic, difficult creative processes with a lot of people who knew each other very well and were very fond of each other. We all thought it was going to be a disaster. There was one point where one of the rough cuts, you said it was like a third world documentary.

Helen Fielding27:28

And we were all sort of working on it, people in different cutting rooms. I was sort of shooting mock ups in my house and putting music onto things. I put Raining Men on to the fight scene. Everyone was suggesting things.

Helen Fielding27:43

But everyone thought it was going to be a disaster. And then the first screening in New York, which I tragically was not at, everybody laughed. And it was miraculous. And it suddenly was liked. It was brilliant.

Helen Fielding27:56

Yeah.

Presenter27:56

You left the UK in nineteen ninety nine and met Kevin, your partner Kevin Curran at the time, and he was a scriptwriter on The Simpsons. You met while promoting your book and you'd go on to have two children together. You lived in LA. What did you make of Hollywood when you first set up home there?

Helen Fielding28:10

It was a fantastic thing that happened with Bridget. And of course, I'd always had this thing from being little of if I was a writer, I could have a swimming pool. And I realized that for the price of a two-bedroom flat in London, I could actually have a house with a swimming pool. And I met Kevin, and we were living the dream. I had an open-top car. I was friends with Carrie Fisher, who was just the most interesting, great person to know in Hollywood because she knew all the history and she was very astute about how to navigate it.

Presenter28:45

It's time for your next disc, Helen. What's it gonna be?

Helen Fielding28:47

This is the moment when I finally got the pool after all those years of trying to write and I thought I'm just so lucky. And it's I've Got the World on a String by Frank Sinatra.

Speaker 129:07

I've got the world.

Helen Fielding29:10

Pulled on a string.

Speaker 129:12

Uh

Helen Fielding29:13

Sitting on a rainbow

Helen Fielding29:17

Got the string around my finger

Helen Fielding29:24

What a world.

Helen Fielding29:26

What a life I'm in love

Helen Fielding29:31

I got a song.

Presenter29:32

I've Got the World on a String, Frank Sinatra.

Presenter29:36

Helen Fielding, you talked earlier about the death of your father, and in the past few years you've lost Kevin, your children's father, and your good friend Carrie Fisher as well. When dealing with huge losses like that, what helps?

Helen Fielding29:50

This sounds really corny, but

Helen Fielding29:52

To me, they don't go away. I'm not very.

Helen Fielding29:56

Deathy in terms of graves and things like that, they're they're still there in uh in in my mind and in spirit. Um

Helen Fielding30:08

And yes, it's it's part of the ride we're all on. And I think during the epidemic I've I've felt it very keenly. I think so much loss around brings your own losses back and

Helen Fielding30:22

You know, and just makes you feel all those people um and all that that sadness and and pain. But

Helen Fielding30:34

you know, life has its dark notes, life has its light notes and

Speaker 130:34

Enough.

Helen Fielding30:39

I um I think I'm quite good at at surviving and finding the joy and the fun as well as feeling the things that you feel.

Presenter30:46

Mm.

Presenter30:49

You've spent twenty five years intertwined with Bridget. How much have each of you changed, do you think?

Presenter30:57

Yeah.

Helen Fielding30:57

Um that's an interesting question.

Helen Fielding31:00

Well, I think in the books she's still essentially the same, but in that in that later book she's a person who's lived a life and with all that goes with it.

Helen Fielding31:10

And I think me too, you know. I'm still full of thoughts going round and round like the windmills of your mind and still loving my family, my kids and my friends. And I think I've had to develop a resilience and

Helen Fielding31:27

I think I've learnt to be contented. This has been a very strange time to live through, and I think we'll be much more appreciative of the basics, sounds like, than the clichés my dad would laugh at.

Presenter31:42

Time for one more disc then. What are we going to hear?

Helen Fielding31:44

Well, this is my cocktail song. It's Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered Stangoetz and the Oscar Peterson trio. And I suppose with all the trials and tribulations that I like to remember that I have actually had, even though it hasn't been a straightforward married life, it's been a very romantic life. And I think on the island I'd like to have a cocktail hour and perhaps make a little black dress out of a pirate flag. But also this reminds me of when the kids were little. And I was so happy to have my children and I just love being a mum and I've loved every stage of it. The babies and the toddlers and now the teenagers are so brilliant and funny. And I used to bath them and then put them in front of the fire in towels and play nice music to them and this was one of the things I used to play to them.

Presenter33:36

Bewitched, bothered, and bewildered Stan Goetz and the Oscar Peterson Trio. So, Helen Fielding, it's time to cast you away to your desert island. We're going to give you the books to keep you company, the complete works of Shakespeare, and the Bible to take with you, plus, of course, a book of your own. What would you like to choose?

Helen Fielding33:53

Well, it's very, very difficult. It's almost like choosing the the songs. But I think I'll go with Pride and Prejudice because it is the perfect novel.

Presenter34:01

You can also have a luxury item to make your stay on the island more enjoyable.

Helen Fielding34:05

No Mr Darcy, I assume? Sadly not. Okay, well this is slightly cheating but I'm going to have a magic tree which is a fruit tree but also has chocolate orange and the sap is chilled white burgundy wine.

Presenter34:15

You get top marks for creativity. And finally, if you had to save just one of the eight discs, Helen, which would you go for? It would be, it must be love, the most important thing.

Presenter34:24

Helen Fielding, thank you very much for sharing your desert island discs with us. Thank you.

Presenter34:41

As we leave Helen sipping her white burgundy and eating her chocolate orange, there's just time to remind you that both Hugh Grant and Colin Firth have been cast away, Hugh in 1995 and in 2005 Sue Lawley interviewed Colin. She asked him when he first got the acting bug.

Speaker 134:58

I about five years old. Pantomime infant school is somewhere in Essex and I was Jack Frost and it was a pair of silver satin pants, a blue satin sash and, portentously, a billowing white shirt.

Speaker 235:16

Were you a hit?

Speaker 135:17

I was. I I don't know if I've been as big a hit since, and uh that's when I got the bug. That's where I thought where the love and attention lies.

Speaker 235:26

You remember recognizing that at the end of the day.

Speaker 135:27

Oh God, yes. I mean I there was nothing else that gave me that sort of praise, that level of approval.

Speaker 235:28

I mean that

Speaker 235:32

Yes.

Speaker 135:33

I didn't take kindly to being sent to school, to being sent into this rather cold environment where you're given lots of or instructions and nobody loves you. You know, you're sort of on your own. I couldn't believe that I had to go back again the next day. I can remember that. I thought, my first day of school was over. Thank God that's over. Now I can get on with my childhood. And it was a horrible shock, day two. Suddenly the environment of school warmed up around me.

Speaker 235:57

But you liked the idea of storytelling as well, didn't you? You liked the business of narrative, of it's

Speaker 136:03

been absolutely what's driven me through life, I think. Even if you write a diary of what you did that day, suddenly your day looks different because it has narrative form. It has a kind of ending to it.

Speaker 236:16

It's quite childlike that, in a sense, though, isn't it? That enjoyment, or that suspension of disbelief.

Speaker 136:22

It's entirely childlike and I think that the skills an actor has to have are childlike. I think unless you have that, you can't do it.

Presenter36:29

Colin Firth, and you can find both Colin and Hughes' editions of Desert Island Discs and over two thousand more to listen to on BBC Sounds. Next time, my guest will be the Secretary General of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg. Do join us then.

Speaker 237:06

Uh

Speaker 237:06

Hello, I'm Dr. Hannah Fry.

Speaker 137:08

And I'm Doctor Adam Rose.

Helen Fielding37:09

Rutherford and we present the curious cases of Rutherford and Fry. That's me and her. Certainly do. And every week what we do, we take a listener question, an everyday mystery if you will, and we try and investigate it. Using the combined powers of science, books and occasionally the internet. Sometimes we just look it up. But anyway, we are back with a new series that's investigating queer

Speaker 137:29

Queries like, why do our tummies rumble? Can we make it rain? And what exactly is the point of wasps?

Helen Fielding37:36

What is the point of wasps?

Speaker 137:36

It's the end bit, the other end of their faces.

Speaker 137:40

Yeah. Loles.

Helen Fielding37:40

Ha ha ha.

Helen Fielding37:42

Yeah.

Speaker 137:42

I was ready.

Helen Fielding37:42

Yeah.

Speaker 137:42

I'm pleased with that.

Helen Fielding37:42

You can hear all the answers.

Speaker 237:45

These questions and more by subscribing to the Curious Case of Rutherford and Fry on BBC Sounds.

Speaker 137:50

or wherever you get your podcasts.