Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Desert Island Discs
Presented by Roy Plomley
BBC newsreader and host of the Miss World pageant.
Eight records
The eight records for this collection haven’t been catalogued yet.
The keepsakes
The book
The luxury
Not recorded.
In conversation
Presenter asks
What was the experience of being evacuated during the war like for you?
A very unsettling experience for a child, I should think. It was. I suppose I can blame all kinds of uh character defects on that ever since. … [Taken] out of London with a with a label round your neck, not knowing where you were going.
Presenter asks
Was there any show business background in your family?
No, none at all.
Presenter asks
As a youngster, what did you want to be?
Well, I was terribly keen to be an actor. Always wanted to be an actor. I'd go to the pictures and then re-enact everything I'd seen. I also wanted to be an artist, a cartoonist, and used to draw funny faces and people would say, Who is it supposed to be? Nobody, just a funny face. But I enjoyed that.
Presenter asks
The recording
Timestamps play the recording from that turn
Michael Aspel
This download is the only extract the BBC has of this edition of Desert Island Discs. The presenter was Roy Plumley.
Michael Aspel
I was born in London and in Wandsmouth. I have lived here for a very short time because I've been away living in Wales and other places and I was evacuated during the war for nearly five years to Somerset. Come home talking like that with my brothers and sister. And that lasted, as I say, nearly five years. A very unsettling experience for a child, I should think. It was. I suppose I can blame all kinds of uh character defects on that ever since.
Speaker 2
Take notes
Michael Aspel
Yeah.
Speaker 2
out of London with a with a label round your neck, not knowing where you were going.
Michael Aspel
No, we had been rehearsed. They took us off one day, uh put us in a train normally we'd only gone as far as the platform, but we went into the train this time and were put in the Town Hall of Child in Somerset, and people came and took us away one by one, and uh my brother and sister were taken. I in fact was the last child to be taken from the town hall.
Michael Aspel
driven off in a small car, and actually left in the parlour of the house. There was no one there at the time, and I just stood there, label still swinging, wondering what had hit me.
Speaker 2
There we go.
Speaker 2
Was there any show business background in your family? No, none at all.
Speaker 2
As a youngster, what did you want to be?
Michael Aspel
Well, I was terribly keen to be an actor. Always wanted to be an actor. I'd go to the pictures and then re-enact everything I'd seen. I also wanted to be an artist, a cartoonist, and used to draw funny faces and people would say, Who is it supposed to be? Nobody, just a funny face. But I enjoyed that. What did you do when you were at school? I joined a publishing firm and worked as an office boy and met all sorts of well-known authors who drifted in and I enjoyed that very much. That was only for a year or so before National Service struck. Yes. You were a paratrooper? I was a paratrooper in the territorial army after the two years in the infantry. I spent a year in Germany. Yes.
Michael Aspel
I did the parachuting to get over my terrible fear of heights. It didn't work.
Michael Aspel
I had to do it. And after the publishing bit? Well, I came out of the army, and the only good thing I think to be said for national service people say it's made a man of you. They never realised, of course, we were two years older and would have changed anyway. I I thought it a dreadful waste of time, but it did have the one great advantage that it made one reappraise one's life and think again about what one was going to do. And I knew that publishing or any anything in the world of commerce was certainly not for me. And while I thought about it, my father said, Get out and earn some money, son. And I took a job with a bedding firm.
Michael Aspel
They were very generous people, who sent me to Cardiff. For bedding what, plants or people? Uh people, they made very comfortable beds and uh
Michael Aspel
They sent me to Cardiff to learn the retail trade and instead of learning the retail trade I met some broadcasters there and threw everything else in and applied for an audition to the BBC. Yes, radioacting.
Speaker 2
Yeah.
Michael Aspel
In Cardiff, surely, that involves
Speaker 2
Horror's a lot of plays with a Welsh background.
Michael Aspel
Yes, of course I wouldn't have been allowed to be a full-time member of the Welsh BBC because I didn't speak the language. But I was taken on because I could do different accents. I did an Irish accent and a radio play within a week of being auditioned, because it was in Wales, I suppose, and I fooled a few people.
Speaker 2
Person
Speaker 2
When the few
Michael Aspel
But it was only a part time or from time to time job and like everybody else I worked on building sites and cut the grass for a living in between. So I'd be a in a counter spy espionage play on a Friday and back to cutting the grass on Saturday morning. And then what brought you to the metropolis?
Michael Aspel
Well, uh they were having periods of employing guest television announcers in the late fifties. This was nineteen fifty seven and I was recommended from Cardiff, came back to London, took an audition, that worked, and uh used to sit there wearing the old common old dinner suit with a peg in the back, so that it fitted me. Yes.
Michael Aspel
Now you had a long, long time as a television newsreader, didn't you? It lasted about eight years altogether. It was never my intention to be a newsreader. Some people think that it's an ambition. I always regarded it as a stepping stone, and have in fact fallen foul one or two ex-colleagues by by saying publicly that I regarded the job as a bit of a sinecure because it wasn't uh demanding enough. And it seems to me that if you read other people's words for a living, it uh it isn't enough, and that's why I had to move on.
Speaker 2
Michael, quickly, without thinking, which news bulletins that you read come to mind?
Michael Aspel
Well, it sounds rather shallow, I suppose it is, but uh when uh Marilyn Munro died I had to announce it with what was described as a a brutal sense of drama. Of course the Kennedy stuff and the the Abervan aftermath. Cause
Speaker 2
Now, you can't do television for long without something going wrong. What went wrong when you.
Michael Aspel
You were reading the news.
Speaker 2
Uh
Michael Aspel
I suppose the most spectacular thing that went wrong was when the phone rang and I blandly said, excuse me, and it wasn't there. The phone wasn't? It was hidden somewhere. It was caught under the table and all the viewers saw for the next 30 seconds was my left ear because the film broke down three times. And the other time, I said, is when I had a black eye. I played cricket, got a black eye, read the news, which was, believe it or not, reported in Francois and in Time magazine. The idea of a BBC announcer with a shiner was too good to resist.
Speaker 2
It's a national China.
Michael Aspel
Yeah.
Speaker 2
What other T V shows did you do in Oze? You had a spell on Come Dancing. Yes, I did all that. All that pink tool.
Michael Aspel
Yes, I never learned a thing about it, but I did it. And that was more dangerous than any outside broadcast, because uh a a formation team that has lost is like a rampaging elephant. They don't take it too lightly.
Speaker 2
Yeah.
Michael Aspel
It did that and as many other programmes as news would allow.
Speaker 2
Zoo time, of course. Yes. Everybody in this business gets a label, and one of yours is the glamour boy who looks after Miss World. You've ducked out of that now.
Michael Aspel
Well, I'm resting at the moment, let's put it that way. Um, I've uh I suppose over about ten years that's I've been doing that programme.
Speaker 2
It always looked to me to be a rather sticky dew.
Michael Aspel
But
Speaker 2
Um some of the young ladies aren't terribly good at
Michael Aspel
interview material. Oh, the interviewers. I they're they're the most um
Michael Aspel
perfunctory things in the world. I have to prepare sixty interviews in ten different languages, none of which I speak, because I don't know which seven I have to talk to. And if a girl doesn't speak the language and is is very nervous, it isn't likely that she we're going to talk about Vietnam or any other philosophical or political matter.
Speaker 2
It doesn't l
Michael Aspel
In later years there was the risk of getting lynched by women's lip supporters as you left the hall. Yes, that was very funny actually, because we left and people were prostrating themselves before the coaches and the girls had no idea what this was all about. And there were the people hammering on the windows of the coach, screaming, you're debasing the female sex. And the girls inside were first of all frightened, then they retaliated and you had We Shall Overcome being sung inside the bus as well as that. Very strange.
Speaker 2
Nice time.
Speaker 2
For you it led to a profitable sideline in in judging beauty contests around the country and thereby debating the female sex pretty well in every county. Oh yes I
Michael Aspel
I've I've brought them down all over the place, yes. Uh it's a very lucrative uh sideline, although it isn't my favourite way of spending my time, I'm very grateful for it.
You were a paratrooper?
I was a paratrooper in the territorial army after the two years in the infantry. I spent a year in Germany.
Presenter asks
What brought you to the metropolis [London]?
Well, uh they were having periods of employing guest television announcers in the late fifties. This was nineteen fifty seven and I was recommended from Cardiff, came back to London, took an audition, that worked, and uh used to sit there wearing the old common old dinner suit with a peg in the back, so that it fitted me.
Presenter asks
Which news bulletins that you read come to mind?
Well, it sounds rather shallow, I suppose it is, but uh when uh Marilyn Munro died I had to announce it with what was described as a a brutal sense of drama. Of course the Kennedy stuff and the the Abervan aftermath.
“I was the last child to be taken from the town hall.”
“I did the parachuting to get over my terrible fear of heights. It didn't work.”
“I always regarded it as a stepping stone, and have in fact fallen foul one or two ex-colleagues by by saying publicly that I regarded the job as a bit of a sinecure because it wasn't uh demanding enough.”
“I have to prepare sixty interviews in ten different languages, none of which I speak, because I don't know which seven I have to talk to.”
“There were the people hammering on the windows of the coach, screaming, you're debasing the female sex. And the girls inside were first of all frightened, then they retaliated and you had We Shall Overcome being sung inside the bus as well as that.”