John Mortimer QC

Speaker 30:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive.

Speaker 30:05

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in 1982, and the presenter was Roy Plumley.

Presenter0:29

Our castaway this week is a playwright, a novelist, and a lawyer. I hope I've got that order right. It's John Mortimer, QC. John, how do you feel about this Desert Island project? Could you endure it?

John Mortimer QC0:43

Well, I'm quite good at being alone in the day. I wouldn't mind the days. I do get a bit restive in the evenings, I think, and I haven't really spent many evenings alone in the course of my life.

John Mortimer QC0:55

But I I don't mind being alone. I think I should miss an audience. I mean, I'd have to write plays for the seagulls, presumably.

Presenter0:59

May I have to wrap it

Presenter1:02

How much does music mean in your life?

John Mortimer QC1:04

It means a great deal increasingly. I play a great deal of music and I have become, late in life, addicted to opera.

Presenter1:13

You don't play any instrument.

John Mortimer QC1:15

No, I'm I'm really totally tone deaf. If I were to sing, it would be a very painful experience. Did you have any plan? Well, I tried to think of records which would have some sort of relevance or some sort of theme of my life, but it was very, very difficult.

Presenter1:30

What's the first one?

John Mortimer QC1:31

The first one is, I thought, appropriate to the desert island, because it's Sua Velvento from Cosi Fantuti, and it means peaceful winds, peaceful breezes, and I hope that would be appropriate to the island.

Presenter1:44

This is the trio.

John Mortimer QC1:45

Yes.

Speaker 41:59

Mercy on

Speaker 42:31

Smooth.

Speaker 42:40

A prayer seal.

Presenter2:48

The trio Suave Sier Ilvento from Mozart's Cosi Fantuti, sung by Kiri Tecanua, Frederico von Stader and Jules Bastin.

John Mortimer QC2:59

You're an only child.

Presenter3:00

Is that right?

John Mortimer QC3:01

Yes, I am, and I was addicted to theatre from a very early age, so I had to perform the entire works of Shakespeare.

John Mortimer QC3:09

taking all the parts, and I used to duel with myself as Hamlet

John Mortimer QC3:14

make love to myself as my own mother, and drink from my own poisoned chalice, so it r it was really rather an embarrassing performance which I used to give.

Presenter3:22

Your father had the great misfortune to lose his sight, but he continued in his profession as a barrister. This must have involved a great feat of memory, or many feats of memory on his part, apart from showing enormous and extraordinary courage.

John Mortimer QC3:37

Well, he he did have an extraordinary memory. He could take a huge thick bundle of letters and say to the judge, Look at the letter on page two hundred and one. It's the letter dated the seventeenth of June, and the judge would look at it, and that was what it was.

John Mortimer QC3:50

I never quite knew whether it was courage or whether he just refused to admit that he was blind and went on regardless. And he went on planting his garden and pricking out and uh

John Mortimer QC3:59

talking about the flowers when he couldn't see them for years.

Presenter4:03

And your mother, of course, briefed him and was his right-hand

John Mortimer QC4:06

Was his r

John Mortimer QC4:08

My mother was his right hand man, and my mother earned the reputation of sort of saint.

John Mortimer QC4:13

And they used to travel up in the train from Henley on terms, and she used to have to read aloud this very embarrassing evidence in divorce cases.

John Mortimer QC4:21

and the train used to grind to a halt round Slough, and the whole first class carriage would fall totally silent, listening to my mother reading out this awful evidence of what happened in divorce cases.

Presenter4:33

Your childhood, a kindergarten in Sloan Square, a member of the Sloan Square Wolf Club.

John Mortimer QC4:37

That was a very exciting period of my life, because the only activity we ever had in the Sloan Square Wolf Cubs was that we used to be taken on to Wimbledon Common by the cub mistress, and she would stand with her legs apart, and we had to scatter into the undergrowth.

John Mortimer QC4:51

and the cub which was able to creep

John Mortimer QC4:53

through the cup mistress's legs before she noticed, would get the box of Cadbury's milk tray, and that was the only

John Mortimer QC5:00

military discipline which I ever underwent, really.

Presenter5:03

It sounds wonderful trades, I must say.

Presenter5:06

So prep school, then Harrow. Would I be right in saying, John, that on the whole your school career was undistinguished?

John Mortimer QC5:13

Well, I had a wonderful moment of glory when I played Richard the Second at the Dragons School. The Dragon School was a wonderful preparatory school in Oxford, in which Antonia Fraser was the captain of the rugby football team. Really? Somewhat after my time. But uh I was elec you you stood for election for all the great Shakespearean roles, and I was actually elected to play Richard the Second, and I don't think my career has ever offered such a triumph since then. I'm sure. But at Harrow I was only noted for growing mustard and crest on my top hat.

Presenter5:44

That's something. And you did at Harrow become a one-man Communist cell with

John Mortimer QC5:48

I was a one-man Communist cell and I had great difficulty with the Communist Party because the war was on, and they sent me an instruction.

John Mortimer QC5:57

when Russia was on the same side as Hitler, which was to go slow on the factory floor. So I went down to the classical fifth, which I was in. I said, translate Virgil very, very slowly. And then I got a contrary instruction when Hitler attacked Russia, which was to speed up production on the factory floor. So I rushed down and I said, Translate Virgil as quickly as you can.

John Mortimer QC6:18

But after that I became an anarchist because I really couldn't cope with these changes of plan on behalf of the Russians.

Presenter6:23

Let's have your second record.

John Mortimer QC6:25

My second record is really to do with the fact that in the intervals of performing Hamlet for my father my great ambition was to be a song and dance man.

John Mortimer QC6:34

and I saw myself coming down a great white staircase in a top hat and

John Mortimer QC6:39

White tie and tails with a silver knobbed cane and singing like Jack Buchanan.

Speaker 46:44

Fans stay on meeting.

Speaker 46:48

For just one fond greeting.

Speaker 46:52

When days are so fleeting

Speaker 46:56

And a few

Speaker 47:00

A paradise steaming With no thought of scheming A dream was a dreaming come true

Presenter7:13

Jack Buchanan with Elsie Randolph in That's a Good Girl.

Presenter7:18

Now, you went to Oxford and studied law. You felt you had a a bent for law. You wanted to follow your father's career.

John Mortimer QC7:25

Not particularly. I I wanted to be a writer. I knew from about the age of ten that I was going to be a writer.

Presenter7:30

You had written a little bit at Harry, you've written short stories.

John Mortimer QC7:32

I actually won my first money, which was ten shillings, by writing a short story at Harrow, and I told my father that I was going to be a writer, and he offered me the law, rather like girls who say they're going to go on the stage. Their fathers offer them secretarial courses, you know, to have something to fall back on.

John Mortimer QC7:49

and my father offered me the law to fall back on.

John Mortimer QC7:52

And Reddy, I've been falling back on it ever since.

Presenter7:56

Now, the war was on and you joined in order to aid the war effort. You joined the Crown Film Unit. What, were you? A writer?

John Mortimer QC8:04

No, no, to start with I was a thing called a fourth assistant director.

John Mortimer QC8:08

whose duties we're ready to make tea for the rector and say quiet please at the start of every shot.

John Mortimer QC8:13

And as I was very nervous, I said quiet, please, very, very quietly.

John Mortimer QC8:18

And every one on the set went on sawing up wood, and hammering, and making love, and playing pontoon, and took absolutely no notice.

John Mortimer QC8:25

And then one day I got very, very angry, and I yelled quiet, please, and they all went on strike.

John Mortimer QC8:30

And so I was such a disaster as a fourth assistant director that they said I'd do less harm by being a scriptwriter.

Presenter8:37

And so you wrote a lot of uh propaganda and documentary films, stuff about democracy and that sort of thing.

John Mortimer QC8:42

Yes, and how to put your old toast rack out for salvage and other useful hints.

Presenter8:47

I believe it was the prospect of writing a script about town planning in Glasgow which choked you off for the first time.

John Mortimer QC8:53

Yes. And also the alternative was to go into the rank organisation where there were rather distasteful films with Margaret Lockwood carrying riding whips about the place, you know, which I didn't want to join in.

Presenter9:02

So you got a job teaching English to Christiane Dior models. How do you get a job like that?

John Mortimer QC9:09

Well, honestly, I can't remember. Perhaps the memory of the job itself is so vivid. But I know that I went to Paris, and I hadn't of course one thing about my generation was that for four or five years you were unable to get out of England.

John Mortimer QC9:22

And so it was enormous excitement to go to France.

John Mortimer QC9:25

And I determined to stay there as long as possible, and I hit upon this most congenial work. In short.

Presenter9:30

Suspended

Presenter9:32

And then you took up legal practice, and also began to write quite a number of novels.

John Mortimer QC9:38

I read about four or five novels, and the disadvantage of novels it's very lonely, like all writing is, and you very rarely catch anyone actually reading one of your novels, and no one has a party.

John Mortimer QC9:50

And uh I I got lonely and a bit depressed, but I needed to write them to get the advances because I had about five children by

John Mortimer QC9:58

some strange quirk of fate by that time, and I needed to keep all those children, so I used to keep on writing novels.

Presenter10:01

I needed to keep

Presenter10:04

Right.

Presenter10:05

Record number three.

John Mortimer QC10:06

Well, I know that on my desert island I'm going to miss England very much.

John Mortimer QC10:10

I mean, I think England has the best climate in the world, and also the best food in the world, Kiri Sina.

John Mortimer QC10:15

and I can think of no more English.

John Mortimer QC10:17

music than the Elgar cello concerto, and no one else could possibly play it except Jacqueline Dupre.

Presenter11:24

Part of the first movement of the Elgar Cello Concerto, Jacqueline Dupre with the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sir John Barbie Rowley.

Presenter11:33

So there you are as a barrister. You wrote a short play, as a an alternative to all those novels you were turning out a short play about an old barrister called The Dock Brief.

John Mortimer QC11:45

Well, that was really the turning point of my life.

John Mortimer QC11:48

And it was entirely due to a lady who I think happily is still alive who worked in radio at the time, called Nestor Payne.

John Mortimer QC11:55

And she wrote to me and actually asked me to write a play.

John Mortimer QC11:58

And I thought of a lot of old, sad barristers who used to sit round a court called the London Sessions, waiting to pick up

John Mortimer QC12:06

what were called dock briefs in those days. The criminal could pick out a lawyer, and you got paid a guinea or two guineas.

John Mortimer QC12:14

And so I thought of that play about an unsuccessful barrister and a very unsuccessful murderer, and really the point of the play was that the murderer was trying to cheer up the barrister and was very sorry because he'd lost the case and sorry for him.

Presenter12:26

It was a two-character plug.

John Mortimer QC12:26

It was a

John Mortimer QC12:27

It really was a two-character play. And

John Mortimer QC12:30

That was really the first bit of writing I did, I think, in which I found my own voice.

Presenter12:35

You had to write another one actor to complete the evening for the theatre.

John Mortimer QC12:38

Yes, Michael Codron, who was now a very successful manager, was just starting off. He had the lyric Hammersmith rented.

John Mortimer QC12:47

And he said, Would I write another play to go with the dock brief? And he said, If I couldn't think of another play, he'd have to do the dock brief with a play by UNESCO.

John Mortimer QC12:55

And I thought that UNESCO was a sort of educational branch of the United Nations. I certainly didn't want to have a play done with that, so I thought I'd better write another play, and I wrote a play called What Should We Tell Caroline.

Presenter12:58

Good.

Presenter13:00

Hey, Tim.

Presenter13:05

And as a result of this, your your debut as a as a playwright, you spent several spells in in Hollywood, some of them not as fortunate as others.

John Mortimer QC13:14

Well, if you write a little play about one very old murderer and one very old barrister in one set.

John Mortimer QC13:21

The film companies immediately think you're the right person to write The Decline and Fall of Genghis Khania.

Presenter13:26

I agree.

John Mortimer QC13:26

or anything which needs a thousand extras and a few wars.

John Mortimer QC13:30

And I then went back to films, which I'd been in in the war.

John Mortimer QC13:35

and I had a very happy time being taken round the world at great expense and luxury.

John Mortimer QC13:40

But a less happy time and films have always been the least enjoyable things for me because I think writers are treated in films.

John Mortimer QC13:47

Rather like the peasants who built the pyramids, you know, a few of them die and another peasant takes over.

Presenter13:52

To write a film about London you were taken to Hawaii, I believe.

John Mortimer QC13:54

I was taken to the top floor of the Illikai Hotel in Honolulu by a Mr. Preminger. I've heard of him.

Presenter14:01

Let's have your fourth record.

John Mortimer QC14:05

I I did have in my youth a bit of the Vie de Boheme, which I'm not sure that writers get now. I mean our Cafe Momus was the Swiss pub in uh in Soho, and you could go there and meet writers and painters.

Presenter14:15

You couldn't

Presenter14:18

Renowned in song and story.

John Mortimer QC14:20

Absolutely. So that I invariably cry at Bohem and

John Mortimer QC14:25

I am particularly fond of the time when the friends are calling from the street, come down to the pub, and he is busily making love, and I think it's very beautiful.

Speaker 414:37

Also have a fun cholera.

Speaker 415:24

Yeah.

Presenter15:34

An excerpt from the latter part of the first act of Puccini's La Boheme.

Presenter15:39

Luciano Pavarotti and Birella Freini.

Presenter15:43

Now, you wrote a number of full-length plays, The Wrong Side of the Park, Two Stars for Comfort, and you also adapted a couple of Faideau farces.

John Mortimer QC15:52

Yes. Well, that was a very happy experience for me because I met a wonderful French director called Jacques Charon.

Speaker 415:58

Uh

Presenter15:58

Yeah.

John Mortimer QC15:58

who directed those players, and I learnt about Farce.

John Mortimer QC16:03

and I learnt that the great secret of comedy is that it must be absolutely serious and rather tragic and extremely real.

John Mortimer QC16:10

and that fast is really tragedy played at a very high rate of speed.

John Mortimer QC16:15

And I think I learnt more about the theatre from Jacques Charon and from doing that Faido play than I have from most other people.

Presenter16:22

You were keeping up the two careers, a very successful career as a writer, doing plays and films and books, and also as a barrister.

John Mortimer QC16:29

Yes, my barrister career hadn't really taken off at that time. I used to divorce people. I mean, I've I've divorced the parents of most of the people I ever kn I ever knew.

Presenter16:38

Now, the bar and stage have strong links. You you never felt any desire to be an actor.

John Mortimer QC16:38

A few

John Mortimer QC16:47

Well, I I really started life wanting to be an actor, but uh

John Mortimer QC16:52

I now prefer to make up my own lines, which I can do in court, and the idea of people learning my words I find so amazing, and I have such respect that they'd bother to do it. I don't think I could sit down and learn anything, or do it more than once,'cause I have a very low threshold of boredom.

Presenter17:02

I don't

Presenter17:07

You wrote a very moving play about your father.

John Mortimer QC17:10

Yes, I read a play called Voyage Round My Father, and first of all Alec Guinness did it and uh a a wonderful actor called Mark Dignum actually started it and then Alec Guinness did it and Michael Redgrave did it.

John Mortimer QC17:21

And finally Laurence Olivier has done it as a as a television film.

John Mortimer QC17:25

What it's done really is to remove my father into a sort of

John Mortimer QC17:30

fictional character and I'm I'm no longer quite sure what he said or what I've written for him to say.

Presenter17:35

He's merged into your own

John Mortimer QC17:37

he's merged into my work as writing my own story, my life has. And it is it's a strange thing. If you give someone who's very close to you to the public, you lose them in a in a curious sort of way.

Presenter17:49

Very insulted.

John Mortimer QC17:51

Record number five. Record number five is a record by Bob Dylan. There was a time just at the end of the sixties in which I was for a moment uh identified with the what has come and gone, which is the permissive society. And I did a trial called the Oz Trial, and people used to say make love, not war, which is something they're not saying very much nowadays.

John Mortimer QC18:16

And I then started a very happy life with my present wife.

John Mortimer QC18:21

And it was one of those periods of life when we started

John Mortimer QC18:23

Really a Gare, and all we had was a small portable television set and her record of Bob Dylan. And this is a a song called Just Like a Woman which reminds me of her and of those times.

John Mortimer QC18:37

She takes just like a woman.

John Mortimer QC18:42

Yes he does, he makes love just like a woman.

John Mortimer QC18:49

Yes, she does, and she peaks!

John Mortimer QC18:52

Just like a woman.

John Mortimer QC18:56

But she breaks just like a little

John Mortimer QC19:00

Good

Presenter19:06

Bob Dylan, just like a woman.

Presenter19:09

The lighter side of the law has produced a splendid character you've been writing about for a number of years now, Rumpole. Which came first, the book or the television series?

John Mortimer QC19:18

Ah, what came first with Rumper was one single B B C play, a play for today.

John Mortimer QC19:25

Uh I've been thinking for a long time that what I needed for my old age was uh a character like Magrey.

John Mortimer QC19:32

And

John Mortimer QC19:33

Sherlock Holmes had been a great character in my father's life, and he knew all Sherlock Holmes stories by heart.

John Mortimer QC19:40

and we used to walk around in Switzerland. Spent a lot of time in Switzerland because his eyes he had eye operations there, and he used to tell me the Sherlock Holmes stories.

John Mortimer QC19:49

and I thought I must find a character.

John Mortimer QC19:51

and I thought well I'd find this rather fat down market criminal barrister and I began just writing speeches for him to say.

John Mortimer QC20:00

And then I wrote that first B B C play.

John Mortimer QC20:04

And the the characters in the chambers weren't there then?

John Mortimer QC20:07

And then Leo McKern, who I'd

John Mortimer QC20:10

thought of acting it, and very, very happily agreed to do so.

John Mortimer QC20:14

I rang up and said, Well, we must do some more plays about Rumpo, so then we did the series it.

Presenter20:19

Is Rampoel taken from life?

John Mortimer QC20:21

Well, there's a bit of my father in Rampo. I mean, my father used to recite poetry at inappropriate

John Mortimer QC20:28

moments totally unconnected. I mean, uh when I was about four my father used to say to me, Is execution done on corridor? you know and being four years old I really didn't know the answer to that.

Presenter20:37

And

John Mortimer QC20:38

And uh And then he used to recite from King John, he used to say, When I strike my foot upon the ground, rush forth and bind the boy and we had a firm of solicitors called Rush Forth and Bind the Boy between us. And I remember my father shouting at one solicitor and saying,

John Mortimer QC20:53

The devil damn thee black, thou cream faced loon

John Mortimer QC20:57

So he would do all that, so that reciting of poetry comes from my father.

John Mortimer QC21:02

And then Rumpo wears my father's clothes, which were sort of Winston Churchill set, you know, with a winged collar with a bow tie and cigar ash down the waistcoat and a gold watch chain and striped trousers.

John Mortimer QC21:14

But he's a more down market barrister than my father,'cause he does crime.

John Mortimer QC21:18

And then there are a number of old barristers he was founded on. And then he uh he says the sort of things that I would wish to say, but if I say them

John Mortimer QC21:27

They sound rather trendy and left wing, but if Old Rumpole says them they're quite acceptable. I remember starting a case at the Earl Bailey, and it was a case about a lot of muggers.

John Mortimer QC21:36

And there was an old barrister sitting next to me, and he said

John Mortimer QC21:40

He said, Well, personally, he said, I'm an anarchist.

John Mortimer QC21:42

But I don't think that even darling old Jean Jacques Rousseau would have approved of this lot. So from that I got the way that Rumpole always calls everybody darling, you know, judges. The only people he doesn't call darling is his wife.

John Mortimer QC21:55

And uh

John Mortimer QC21:56

So he emerged. Cause the embarrassing thing about Rampo now

Presenter21:58

Yeah.

John Mortimer QC22:01

is that every fat middle aged barrister imagines that he's the original of Rumpo. And you go into Elvino's in Fleet Street and there are about ten Rumpoles sitting round behaving like Rumpole, it's become deeply embarrassing.

Presenter22:11

How many series have there been now?

John Mortimer QC22:13

Well we've done two series of six and one long one about Rumpo retiring and going to America.

Presenter22:20

How many books?

John Mortimer QC22:21

and uh really three books.

Presenter22:24

Well, there's a lot more mileage left in him yet, I'm sure. W are you going to write some more?

John Mortimer QC22:28

Oh, yes, I hope to. I think it's time he wrote his memoirs,'cause he's knocking on a bit. So I'm going to write his memoirs, and I certainly hope to write more. And what is very amazing and gratifying, he's he's really rather successful in America.

John Mortimer QC22:42

And there is a Rumpole Society in California. Oh, that's gratifying. It's marvellous. And they meet at Pomeroy's Wine Bar, otherwise known as Two Thousand and Thirty Four Sunset Boulevard, you know, which is very good.

Presenter22:45

Good.

Presenter22:53

And while we're talking about television, of course, you adapted Bride's Head Revisited for the box.

Presenter23:00

A lot of screen time. What was it? Fifteen hours, wasn't it, John?

John Mortimer QC23:03

I I don't know. It seemed to go on most of the year.

Presenter23:06

Yeah.

Presenter23:07

How long did it take you?

John Mortimer QC23:08

mister Evelyn Ward thought of the idea, so writing the series was really quite easy. If I had people to think of my ideas, I would find writing a great deal easier.

John Mortimer QC23:17

But I enjoyed it very much. I mean, I think I disagree with mister Waugh about most subjects. I mean, I'm an atheist and he's a Catholic and

John Mortimer QC23:25

I'm an old fashioned Socialist, and he's a Hyde Tory.

John Mortimer QC23:28

But uh I did find we had a lot in common and I loved writing about the the religious part of the book.

Presenter23:33

Particularly.

Presenter23:35

Record number six.

John Mortimer QC23:36

Well, this is uh the Shepherd's Boy song at the beginning of Act Three of Tosca.

John Mortimer QC23:42

And I've really chosen it because I think however horrible things may be, and whatever sort of

John Mortimer QC23:48

Betrayals and executions and cruelties are going on. There's always something nice in the next valley.

John Mortimer QC23:54

And I think that I shall sit on this island and imagine that there's a little shepherd boy and Italy and Frascati wine and everything going on over the hill.

Presenter25:04

The Shepherd Boy at the opening of the third act of Puccini's Tosca, and he's sung by David Seller.

Presenter25:11

Your latest enterprise, John, an autobiography, Clinging to the Wreckage. Can you explain the title?

John Mortimer QC25:17

Yes, I was sitting in the Garrick Club, as is my wont, and a rather strange looking gentleman with a sort of very piercing blue eye and a beard came and sat

John Mortimer QC25:28

Next to me at lunch,

John Mortimer QC25:29

And uh he said, What do you do when your boat hits a force ten gale in the Channel?

John Mortimer QC25:35

What do you do to your female crew? So I said, I don't know what you do to your female crew And he said you double your fist, hit her on the chin and stun her.

John Mortimer QC25:41

So so why do you do that?

John Mortimer QC25:43

And he said, Well, she's much less likely to be washed overboard if you've stunned her.

John Mortimer QC25:47

And so I said, Well, your sport of yachting must be very dangerous And uh so he said well my boat capsizes every weekend.

John Mortimer QC25:55

And if you can swim, you invariably drown, because you try and swim ashore and you can't, so you drown. So he said, I've never learnt to swim, so I cling to the wreckage, and they send a helicopter out for me. And I thought that was very sound advice. And so I thought I'd call my book Clinging to the Wreckage.

Presenter26:10

Now in writing the book, did you enjoy that opportunity to look back? You were being paid to be nostalgic.

John Mortimer QC26:18

Yes. I mean, I don't find the book any different from writing rumpole or writing plays or or or whatever, because I think that everything you write really is a part of your life.

John Mortimer QC26:29

And I live in a perpetual process of living and trying to translate it.

John Mortimer QC26:35

back to an audience in

John Mortimer QC26:37

in what might be called art, so that really the book is no different to me from writing anything else.

Speaker 426:43

Mm-hmm.

John Mortimer QC26:44

But I came to enjoy it.

John Mortimer QC26:46

Once I'd solved the problems which which were very difficult. It's very difficult to write about yourself.

John Mortimer QC26:51

I mean to write about yourself as a character.

John Mortimer QC26:54

Because either you're very modest about yourself, which is a kind of showing off, you know.

John Mortimer QC26:59

Or else you show off and you've got you've got to hit a a medium line between those two things.

Presenter27:03

You're a very productive man, as a writer. You're also very much a family man. You have children, you enjoy your home, your garden. How do you organize yourself? How do you get through so much?

John Mortimer QC27:14

Well, I I do get up very early. I I find if you get up at about five o'clock in the morning very few other people do. What time do you go to bed? I don't go to bed very late. I mean I usually go to bed before midnight. But I I do try and get up very early and work from about if I'm writing from about five o'clock in the morning till about ten o'clock in the morning or eleven o'clock. And you can really do a day's work. And if I'm in court I do that too. I sometimes get up at four.

John Mortimer QC27:39

Like being a farmer, really. I mean, you get up when the cars get up.

Presenter27:44

Right. Uh we've got number seven.

John Mortimer QC27:47

I have to have some verdie.

John Mortimer QC27:49

And I suppose the sort of central theme of Verdi is

John Mortimer QC27:53

a father's love for a daughter, which is something that I've experienced, and so I've chosen Rigoletto, and Rigoletto singing about his daughter Look after this little tender flower.

Speaker 428:07

For me.

Speaker 428:26

I

Speaker 428:39

God is wondering.

Speaker 428:46

Sweet with

Presenter29:09

A short excerpt from Verdi's Regoleto, Piero Capucili as Regoleto and Iliana Kotrubash as Gilda his daughter.

Presenter29:19

How would you make out as a castaway, Donna? Are you good at looking after yourself?

John Mortimer QC29:23

I'm quite a good cook.

John Mortimer QC29:25

And I could grow things. I'm quite a good gardener. I I don't know how good I should be as a builder of huts. I should be absolutely hopeless as a builder of boats. Would you try to escape? I mean, if you could make a raft? Well, I think I'd cling to the wreckage. I think I'm a survivor.

Presenter29:40

I think I'm a Survivor.

John Mortimer QC29:42

I mean, I think that that's what I am. I think whatever. No, I don't think I would trust myself to the water. I think I'd sit there and wait for the helicopter.

Presenter29:43

You know,

Presenter29:50

I think you would be well advised.

John Mortimer QC29:51

BANG

Presenter29:52

Let's have your last breakout.

John Mortimer QC29:54

I spend a lot of time debating with myself what my favorite opera is.

John Mortimer QC29:58

and I've decided that it's Don Giovanni.

John Mortimer QC30:02

And I think that that works.

John Mortimer QC30:04

is perhaps the beginning of uh of modern art and Don Giovanni is the first modern man. I mean, he says, I am what I am and I'm not going to give any excuses for it and I'm not going to repent.

John Mortimer QC30:16

And at the end of the opera, when he's asked to repent, he doesn't, and he goes down to hell, and that's who he is.

John Mortimer QC30:22

And I think that uh

John Mortimer QC30:24

I can sit there in the evenings and be what I am, alone and listen to this remarkable and tremendously exciting music.

Presenter31:34

Raimondo as Mozart's Don Giovanni. If you could take only one disc of the eight you've played us, which would it be?

John Mortimer QC31:41

Well, it would have to be Mozart, and I think it would have to be the most beautiful of all that music, which is Suave Sia Ilvento from Cosifantutti.

Presenter31:51

And one luxury to take to the island with you, one thing of of no practical use at all.

John Mortimer QC31:57

Well, I mean, I thought of champagne, but you can't have enough of that, so

John Mortimer QC32:01

I think I'd have to have a bath.

John Mortimer QC32:03

Really, because I can only think of plots in the bath, so I just have to have a bath with some sort of solar heating.

Presenter32:10

That's all right, yes, and we'll fill it with champagne.

John Mortimer QC32:13

Oh, a bath full of champagne would be wonderful.

Presenter32:16

And one book apart from the Bible in Shakespeare.

John Mortimer QC32:18

Well, I've thought about that, and I'm very pleased to have the Bible and Shakespeare.

John Mortimer QC32:22

I think that I'd choose mister Rumpole's favourite book.

John Mortimer QC32:26

which is the Oxford Book of English Verse, the Quiller Cooch edition. You certainly don't want anything up to date. And I would learn my way slowly and steadily through the Oxford Book of English Verse.

Presenter32:30

The album

Presenter32:37

Right. And thank you, John Mortimer, for letting us hear your Desert Island discs.

John Mortimer QC32:42

Well, thank you. It's been a very, very great pleasure.

Presenter32:44

Thank you.

John Mortimer QC32:44

Goodbye, everyone.

Speaker 332:52

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