Barry Norman

Speaker 30:00

Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Disc's Archive. For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen seventy nine, and the presenter was Roy Plumley.

Presenter0:31

On our Desert Island this week is the author, journalist and broadcaster Barry Norman. Barry, how well could you adjust yourself to loneliness?

Presenter0:39

Well, not very well to loneliness, but to solitude I think I could adjust myself fairly well because.

Presenter0:45

As a child I was a fairly solitary person. I used to spend ages in my room by myself writing the most appalling short stories. I came across some the other day and they really make me shudder to write them again. But so solitude and being alone, yeah, I can cope with that. Tell me about your musical background. Have you any musical talent yourself? Do you play an instrument? No, I have absolutely no musical talent whatsoever. And in fact I came extremely late to any kind of appreciation of music. I think largely because I was taught it rather badly at school. Do you play discs while you're working? While you're at your typewriter?

Presenter1:19

Yes, I do. Um not so much discs. Usually the radio is on. I suppose you shouldn't really use music as a background sound, but nevertheless, yes, I do like to have it about. What's the first one you've chosen for your island?

Presenter1:32

Well the first one I've chosen for my island is a really corny choice I suppose. It's the Vaughan Williams arrangement of green sleeves because it would remind me of England and I'm a great anglophile and when I listen to this it reminds me of old green fields, country pubs, playing cricket on the village green. If it was really written by Henry VIII I'm sure he didn't have that in mind but that's what it means to me so I could sit and listen to that and think of the parts of England that I really love.

Presenter2:53

The Vaughan Williams Fantasier on Green Sleeves, Sir Adrian Bolt conducting the London Symphony Orchestra.

Presenter3:00

You were brought up with a film background, weren't you? Oh, very much so, because my father

Presenter3:05

um who happily is is very much alive, but he he was a film producer and film director. My mother worked in the cutting rooms. In fact, my entire family, except me, have all worked in the film industry at one time or another, so we always had film people and

Presenter3:19

stars and directors and what not wandering in and out of the house. Yes. Let me interject that your father is Leslie Norman, who

Speaker 23:22

Uh

Presenter3:26

produced The Cruel Sea and Mandy and Dunkirk and quite a number of other distinguished films, mainly at Ealing. Didn't you want to follow him?

Presenter3:36

I did for a while and uh I had a vague ambition of going and working in the cutting rooms which is where my father had started and then working up to be a director which my father was by that time but the film industry was in one of its periodic slumps and so I had a long chat with with my father and he said you know there's really not much future in this why don't you think of something else and writing was something that had always occupied me so I thought journalism might be the thing for me and so I drifted casually into that. How did you set about it? Oh I set about in a fairly businesslike way. I went and learned to do shorthand and typing. Then I just sort of cast around to see if I could find a job somewhere and there was an advertisement in the World's Press News for a trainee reporter on a paper called the Kensington News. So I went along there and I got the job and my first day's work started at nine o'clock in the morning and finished at one o'clock the next morning. And then I began to regret not going to the film industry because there were no pretty girls around. It just seemed to be solid slog. What was it? Flower shows and funerals and that sort of thing. All that, British Legion meetings, councils, courts, going down to the police station. Oh, the usual thing, yeah. How long did you stay with the Kensington News? Well I stayed there for about 14 months and the last two months of that I realised that every day I was doing precisely what I'd done on the same day the year before and I I figured since I was earning three pounds five shillings a week that this was not actually the way I wanted to earn my living forever.

Presenter4:56

And so I had a friend who'd moved out to South Africa and I'd corresponded with him and I told him in one of my letters that I was very fed up and he said, well come and work in South Africa and so that's what I did and I went to Johannesburg. Did you fix the job here or did you go out on spec? No I fixed it here and they would have paid my fear out but I was wasn't quite sure whether I wanted to stay so I insisted on paying my own fear so that I could in fact come back and then did come back in a rather shorter time than than most people who who went out there from here. Was it rather like the Kensington News with a better climate or was it different?

Presenter5:34

Oh, journalistically, it was much different because it was a daily paper, it was an evening paper, so one had really urgent deadlines to meet, which I'd never known about before in my life, and that was a bit terrifying. It was also quite an important paper, it was the Johannesburg Star, it was a big paper in the Transvaal.

Presenter5:51

It was very different in that one was dealing all of a sudden, you know, with Afrikaners, with Africans, with Indians, and suddenly I was hurled, a naïve 19-year-old who'd really never thought about politics or race or anything, into this maelstrom. It had a really quite traumatic effect. So I went to Rhodesia and worked on the Salisbury Herald for about seven months. And then at the end of that time, I felt that my future did not lie in southern Africa and I'd better come home again. Right, at which point let's have your second record. Well, my second record is Sir Lawrence Olivier from the film Henry V, The Once More Unto the Breach, Dear Friends speech, for all kinds of reasons. I think probably because films have always dominated my life one way or another. And that film, Henry V, was one that I remember.

Presenter6:37

had the greatest, most vivid effect on me soon after the war when I was a kid.

Presenter6:42

And I've never forgotten it, and apart from anything else, I regard Olivier as the finest actor I've ever seen or probably ever will see, so I could I could really listen to that for a very long time.

Speaker 26:50

I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips, straining up on the start. The game's afoot. Follow your spirit, and upon this charge, cry God for Harry, England and Saint John!

Presenter7:19

Laurence Olivier on the soundtrack of Henry the Fifth. So you're back in this country, Betty. Was it easy to get fixed up?

Presenter7:27

Well, it was easier than I thought it was going to be. I did actually get offered all kinds of jobs in the provinces, about three anyway, but I ended up taking a job as a gossip writer on the Daily Sketch. And the reason that I stayed in London and didn't take what were actually better journalistic opportunities outside London was because I had fallen madly in love with an extremely pretty girl who, oddly enough, worked at Ealing Studios. And I didn't want to leave her. So I took this job as a gossip writer at the Daily Sketch, for which I think I was singularly ill-fitted. The Daily Sketch was a rather gentle paper, wasn't it, on the whole? Not then it wasn't. It had been before. It was really rather scurrilous at that time.

Barry Norman7:50

So I

Speaker 27:59

It had been

Presenter8:05

And you helped it on its way.

Presenter8:07

Well, I'm afraid I did. I wasn't really very good as a gossip writer because the sort of stories we dealt with concerned, let us say, the wife of an Earl who had run away with the Master of the Foxhounds. So I'd be sent down to the Earl's house in Chelsea to knock on the door and ask him to talk about this. And I did this with much trepidation. And I would knock on the door and the Earl would answer it. He'd say, Who are you? and I'd tell him and he said, What do you want? and I'd say, Well, your wife's run away with the master of foxhounds and I want to ask you about it. And he would say, What the hell's it got to do with you? And I was stuck for an answer, always, because I knew it had nothing to do with me. And I said, Well, it's really got nothing to do with me unless you want to tell me about it. He said, Well, I don't, bang, and the door would shut. And this happened all the time. How I lasted, I don't know, but it it was really a very uncomfortable period. How long did you last? Well, I I obviously must have lasted quite well because I ended up by editing that um

Presenter8:55

that column and when I was given the editorship of the column the editor of the paper said, If you do it for about three months, I'll give you a rise in salary. So I did it for three months and no rise came through and I went to see him and I said, Look, about this this rise in salary you promised me.

Presenter9:11

And he said, Ah yes, yes. Well um let me think it over for a couple of days and I went away and the next morning he used to put up a bulletin every day saying what he thought of the paper and the next morning there was the most scurrilous attack by the editor on the gossip column which I edited and the same thing was repeated the next day and the day after that and the day after that then finally he called me in and said well you see what I think of your gossip column I can't give you any more money so I resigned. There didn't seem much else to do.

Presenter9:37

And

Presenter9:38

Well then I I went to the Daily Mail, again actually as a gossip writer. I seemed to be stuck in that but and I stayed there for a couple of years before finally I did manage to get away at the time when there was a great outcry against all the Fleet Street gossip columns in the early 1960s and the the Daily Mail decided to change its policy entirely and I got off the gossip column and finally became a show business reporter.

Presenter10:03

Yes, I did in the in the end, you know.

Speaker 210:04

Yeah.

Presenter10:05

And you you'd married a lady who is is also a journalist and a writer. Indeed she is, yes, yes, Diana. Um yes, she's written a couple of of books. One called The Stately Ghost of England, which was she went around with a clairvoyant in sniffing out the ghosts in the stately homes. Uh then a biography of a man called John Dodd, and now she's just actually written

Presenter10:24

A novel set in the 12th century, in the time of Henry II, which she's worked on for ages. Yes, and you settled in a Hertfordshire village where you're still settled. Where I'm still settled, yes. Now, let's go back to the Daily Mail. There was a bit of a reorganisation now, wasn't there? What a nice way of putting it, Roy. Yes, the reorganisation actually entails somebody saying to me, get out.

Barry Norman10:46

Mm-hmm.

Presenter10:46

What in fact happened was that they merged the Daily Mail with the Daily Sketch in in 1971 and made half the joint journalistic staffs redundant and I was one of those who was made redundant. Seemed a terribly insulting thing to do to one at the time, although I've I've never ceased to be grateful to the Daily Mail since. Right, well that seems a good

Presenter11:08

Benevolent point to break for record number three. Well, record number three.

Presenter11:13

I would like to have the Beatles.

Barry Norman11:19

When I get old I'll lose my head many years from now

Barry Norman11:26

Will you still be sending me Valentine Birthday greetings, bottle of wine? It might be out till quarter to three.

Barry Norman11:36

Would you lock the door?

Barry Norman11:39

Will you still need me, will you still feed me, When I'm sixty-four?

Presenter11:46

The Beatles.

Presenter11:47

Right. Slung out of the Daily Mail, no steady job what have.

Presenter11:52

Well, I then had to start hustling. Um I had been thinking actually for about three years before I left the mail that I really ought to get out and and see what else I could do, but I never had the courage.

Presenter12:03

Because there's something very consoling about having money coming in all the time. But then when it wasn't coming in all the time, I realized I had to go and hustle and and knock on people's doors.

Presenter12:13

So that's what I did, and

Presenter12:16

Gradually um I began to build up some regular work. I started doing television reviews for The Times and I I became a casual jobbing leader writer for The Guardian and that eventually developed into a once a week column. Which you've been doing now since then? Yes.

Presenter12:31

When did your broadcasting career start?

Presenter12:34

Well that started um at the end of 1971.

Presenter12:38

I had been on a couple of programmes in Manchester, television programmes, as a television pundit, but on those programmes, as on commercial television, they had a hand picked audience. It had been Gallup pole picked in fact. And they used to have pundits up from the newspapers to talk about various television matters.

Presenter12:54

and the audience was encouraged to butt in.

Presenter12:58

Um I got up there. I'd never really been on television before.

Presenter13:01

And there were two other pundits who had been on the programme before and really knew the score.

Presenter13:06

And so the chairman asked them what they thought about whatever the topic was and and they put forward their opinions and then he said to me, Well, Barry Norman, what do you think? and I would say, Well, I think and a voice at the back shouted rubbish and somebody up there shouted I disagree and an argument went on between the audience and all I ever got to say was well I think is and I th I thought this is absurd. I did this twice, I was worse the second time than I had been the first time. So at the end of the year when I was invited onto late night line up with a lot of other television critics to talk about the television awards of the year, I really did feel by that time that television was something that other people did, that I wasn't particularly interested in doing. I admired those who did it well, but I felt I was a writer. And I did this programme for late night line up and enjoyed myself immensely and picked up twenty quid and a couple of drinks and went home happy.

Presenter13:53

And a couple of days later a man called Ian Johnston phoned me up and said, I'm the producer of a programme called Film Seventy Two. Would you like to come and present it for me?

Presenter14:01

And I said, Well, I'd love to do that, but I've never done anything like it in my life. And he said, Well, never mind, it's easy. And he was such a great psychologist, or rather a con man, that he actually persuaded me that it was easy. And I'd been doing it for six weeks before I realized it wasn't. And since then there's been film 73, film 74, and on and on. And on and on. Right, record number four.

Speaker 214:18

Yeah.

Barry Norman14:18

And on and on.

Presenter14:22

Well, record number four.

Presenter14:24

I think I would like something that would remind me of my wife. And so I picked the film music from The Lion in Winter by John Barry, because she is a great devotee of the 12th century. She loved the film The Lion in Winter, which of course is about Henry II. She's spent ten years writing a novel set in the time of Henry II, and a very good novel it is too. And this piece of music she likes very much indeed. So every time I played it, I'd be reminded of home and my wife.

Presenter15:21

John Berry's music to The Lion in Winter. Now, Hollywood Great profiles of the kings and queens of Hollywood.

Presenter15:30

You've done what, two series of those? I've done three series of those. Three now, yeah.

Speaker 215:33

Please

Presenter15:35

Fifteen programmes in all. And they're the late greats, they're all dead.

Presenter15:40

Well, yes, that came about very much by chance. Originally, um I had intended to do a series on five living stars, people like Clint Eastwood, Marlon Brando, Barbara Streisand, anybody.

Presenter15:54

And Barry Brown and I, the producer of the series and myself, we got in touch with lots of these people.

Presenter15:59

In many cases they did agree to do it, but we discovered that they're all going to be scattered all over the world and we only have five weeks in which to do the interviews.

Presenter16:07

And it just wasn't feasible to be in Tokyo one week talking to XYZ and then back in Hollywood talking to ABC on another week. So we then scrapped that idea and went back to basics to have a look at Hollywood in its golden age, the thirties and forties, and the stars who made it the curious, strange fairyland place it was.

Presenter16:26

And so Barry and I and the researcher sat down and drew up a list of who we thought were the the greats of Hollywood of that time, and the first five that we did were on everybody's list, so we chose them for our subjects.

Presenter16:39

And

Presenter16:41

I suppose by the law of averages they were bound to be dead really, since they'd all been stars in the thirties and forties. So you'll work out a tight schedule of interviews.

Speaker 216:45

Yeah.

Presenter16:48

Then you'll go over for so many days, so many weeks, and you do really all the background interviewing for that series.

Presenter16:55

That's what we did, yes. We were over there

Presenter16:58

About five weeks at a time, a week in New York and four weeks in California.

Presenter17:02

um, talking to virtually everybody who could still move. You must have sat beside a lot of very nice swimming pools in all those weeks. Oh, indeed I did, yes. Uh the way people live in Beverley Hills, and Bel Air particularly, is is quite unbelievable.

Presenter17:18

Record number five we got to.

Presenter17:21

Record number five, well that again is to remind me of home because the first record that my daughters ever bought me was a record called Prokofiev's Greatest Hits. It always makes me laugh, you know, Beethoven's Greatest Hits, Prokofiev's Greatest Hits. But on it was something that I'm very, very fond of indeed, and that's the Lieutenant Kijet suite, and particularly the Troika movement, so that

Speaker 217:33

We just sit

Barry Norman17:33

Okay.

Speaker 217:33

Yeah.

Presenter17:42

If I can listen to that, then I can remember my children as I like to remember them fondly. And of course this is more film music. And again it's film music. Well yes, it's probably as good a piece of film music as anybody has ever written.

Presenter18:55

The Troika from The Prokofiev Music to Lieutenant Keeje.

Presenter19:01

You've just done a book on the Hollywood Grades. Well, I gave up all other kinds of writing really last year in order to do it. What was interesting about it was the extra material that one could put into eight or nine thousand words, written words, that one couldn't actually get into the television programmes. It's a it's amazing how little you can really get into fifty minutes of of television documentary. I probably shouldn't say this really, but I I feel that

Presenter19:27

In 50 minutes on television, you can do a biographical sketch, and one hopes a very good one, one trusts a very good one. You can get much more into.

Presenter19:35

several thousand words of a book. So it it was really quite fascinating to take all the television material and add to it and rewrite. This is far from being your first book.

Presenter19:45

Yes, it's the gosh, it's the seventh now, because I've done uh, what, five novels and a book of essays and this one. The novel's fairly light-hearted.

Presenter19:55

Yes, indeed they are. Um I I don't know, I feel there's enough gloom in the world without my adding to it with the prognostications. I've always liked humour. I've I've always admired people who can write humour well, because I I do feel it's the most difficult thing in the world. Um and it's it's something that I'm an apprentice in and therefore try to write humorous light-hearted books. I'll confess that A Season of Defeat is the only novel of yours that I've read and I admired it very much.

Barry Norman20:22

Yeah.

Presenter20:23

Record number six.

Presenter20:25

Well, record number six is Klemper conducting Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, and that's sort of general nostalgia because I remember it. Obviously, it has associations with wartime for very, very obvious reasons. But I think mostly because, as I said, I came very late to music and I can still remember very vividly about 15 years ago at least, I was at home by myself one day and I suddenly had a hankering for some music. So I put on Beethoven's Fifth.

Presenter20:57

conducted by Klempere. And I also put on Lena Horn and I played both of them one after the other all morning. I had the most marvellous morning, a tremendous contrast in music, but um it's the Beethoven which actually I remember most vividly of the two.

Presenter22:10

The opening of the Beethoven Fifth Symphony, Otto Klemperer, conducting the Philharmonia Orchestra.

Presenter22:16

Now so far we've almost managed to keep the conversation off cricket. Cricket is an obsession of yours isn't it? Oh a total passion, yes. It it always has been. Cricket seems to me to be the finest way of wasting time that man has ever devised. Of course you can't explain it to anybody who isn't himself passionate about the game, but it seems to me to be the closest thing to human chess that anybody could think of. And I can spend hours, I can spend days watching or playing cricket and even reading about it. You play for your Hertfordshire village? Oh I do, yes. You have your own ground?

Presenter22:50

Oh, we do, yes. A lovely village ground. It's it's beautiful setting. You do your turn with the heavy roller?

Presenter22:56

Well, I have to admit that I haven't been doing that lately. I don't actually do much of the ground work, but I do do some of that heavy work at the end of the day. Bravo, let's have another record. Right.

Presenter23:05

Cleo Lane and There Was a Lover and His Lass, and I think it's the first time she recorded it. It's a beautiful arrangement and she sings beautifully.

Barry Norman23:13

It was a lover and his less With a hay and a ho and a hay non-e-no.

Barry Norman23:27

Battle the green cornfield departs

Barry Norman23:34

In the spring time, spring time.

Barry Norman23:40

The only pretty ring time

Presenter23:43

Clear Lane singing Arthur Young's arrangement of It Was a Lover and His Lass, and she made it in 1955. Now Barry, the castaway bit, how do you stack up as a Robinson Crusoe? Could you organise somewhere to live? Oh no, no, no chance whatsoever. I mean there would have to be a cave there or some previous castaway would have to have left a hut because otherwise I would just die of exposure. Would you try to escape?

Presenter24:08

After a bit, I think if you're very kind and you put me on an island where there's a lot of sunshine and maybe some nice fruit growing on the old tree so that I don't have to work too hard to actually keep myself alive, I think I'd be perfectly happy under certain circumstances to stay there for some time. Trying to escape, yeah, nice idea. I don't know how I would do it, because I couldn't build a raft or a boat or anything like that, and I certainly couldn't swim to anywhere. Then you can't escape. Well, I can't escape. I'm really stuck there. Last record.

Presenter24:36

Well, the last record is the Jupiter Symphony. Again, it's a recent.

Presenter24:41

Memory. It seems odd to say that it actually reminds me of driving over the Pyrenees. There's nothing in the music to suggest driving over the Pyrenees, but on a recent holiday we were driving over the Pyrenees and we played this on the car stereo, both going down and coming back. It was a smashing holiday, lovely family time. It all sounds terribly sentimental, but why not? And so I would have the Jupiter Symphony.

Presenter25:05

To remind me of that.

Presenter26:03

Mozart's Jupiter Symphony, number forty one. The Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Herbert von Karrion. If you could take one disc only out of your eight, which would it be?

Presenter26:15

I think the Beethoven. The Beethoven Fifth Symphony. And you're allowed to take one luxury with you.

Presenter26:21

Well, I intend to cheat by swimming to this desert island with a typewriter and an inexhaustible supply of paper strapped to my back, because these are not luxuries, these are necessities of life, because one of the

Presenter26:32

Things I would do there is to try and write all the books that I want to write and never had time to do. So, having got all that, what do I want for luxury? Well, I was going to say one cricket ball, but one cricket ball's not enough because I'd then have, having bowled it, I'd have to go back and bowl it back again. So, I'd like a large supply of cricket balls. I wouldn't have minded. And you want the paper and the typewriter. Well, these aren't luxuries. Those are necessities. The cricket ball is the luxury. Well, suppose we give you a desk.

Speaker 226:48

Wouldn't have minded

Speaker 226:55

Great.

Presenter26:57

Half the drawers full of paper and half the drawers full of cricket balls. Is that all right? That'd be marvellous. I promise I will have to. And a typewriter on top.

Barry Norman27:03

Come to

Presenter27:06

I would come back as the finest offspin bowler the world had ever seen. On sand. On sand, probably, yes. And one book apart from the Bible and Shakespeare and big encyclopedias.

Speaker 227:11

Yeah.

Barry Norman27:11

And probably

Presenter27:16

Well, I would go eventually and that's it's not an easy choice, as you well know, Roy, but I would go for The World of Jeeves by PG Woodhouse because

Presenter27:25

Every time I read those Jeeves stories, I fall about with mirth. And every time I read them, I learn just a little tiny bit more about the art of comic writing. I mean, the man is the master. One bows down in front of him. So I could read that both for entertainment and for enlightenment. And I could read it and re-read it. Right. And thank you, Barry Norman, for letting us hear your Desert Island Disc. Well, thank you, Roy. It's my pleasure. Goodbye, everyone.

Speaker 327:58

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.