Lyall Watson

Speaker 20:00

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

Speaker 20:05

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

Presenter0:30

Our castaway this week was described in The Times as the eccentric biologist.

Presenter0:35

He is also an archaeologist and an anthropologist and a man who is truly fascinated by the supernatural.

Presenter0:42

He's the author of some unusual and enormously successful books, and one of the world's greatest authorities on Wales. It's Lyle Watson.

Presenter0:51

Doctor Watson, you're an inveterate traveller. Have those travels taken you to any desert island? I was cast away on one once. You were? Uh yes, it wasn't deliberate.

Lyall Watson0:58

Mm-hmm.

Presenter1:01

Got tied up with a cyclone, an unseasonal cyclone, in the the Banda Sea.

Presenter1:06

which lies east of Bali, and uh I and two crewmen on a small prow, an Indonesian sailboat.

Presenter1:14

We're stripped, the mast and rigging just fled.

Presenter1:17

and after two days and nights at sea we were washed up on the shore of a a little volcanic island.

Presenter1:23

Not really a desert island, I I must be honest, there were people there in that little village.

Lyall Watson1:26

That's a little bit.

Presenter1:28

That we had to spend nine months there before we could get away. Nine months? Yes.

Lyall Watson1:31

Yeah.

Presenter1:32

If you had been on your own and it had been a desert island or deserted island, could you endure loneliness, you think? Oh, without a doubt. I am a very solitary creature. I need long periods of time on my own.

Presenter1:45

And if I'm not forced to be cast away, I cast myself away. I I lock myself up in a remote place and and literally for weeks on end I don't talk to anybody. How important to you is music?

Presenter1:57

It is important, but not in the usual way. I have no formal training in music, I play no instrument, and I don't carry music with me when I travel.

Presenter2:06

And when I settle down anywhere it's not the first thing I think of buying, but I have discovered that music in situ, in its natural place, is very important to me.

Presenter2:16

African drums in Africa, Balinese gamelan in Bali, a Japanese koto, an Andean flute, a church organ.

Presenter2:24

all have the capacity to move me to tears in their place. But you're going to come now to the first record you've chosen, which is music of that sort. It is very much. I was born in Africa. My roots are in Africa. It's a very important place to me. I keep going back. It's like going back to the well.

Presenter2:41

So on my island I'd like to have something of Africa with me and

Presenter2:45

The piece I have chosen is a very

Presenter2:48

Typical piece of African music in that it's insistent and repetitive.

Presenter2:52

But if you listen carefully to it, you find it has a very subtle change of pattern within the repetition. It's a collection of ivory trumpets, forty in all, ranging from six inches long to six feet in length, blown by a group of people called the Alur in northern Uganda.

Presenter3:10

It sounds, when you hear it first time, chaotic. It's perhaps the nearest thing to the Rolling Stones ever to come out of Africa.

Speaker 43:25

Yeah.

Presenter4:13

The Aguara trumpets of the Alua people of northern Uganda. Now you're from South Africa.

Presenter4:19

Yes, I was born there, and spent my first years there. Of Scottish stock, I presume. Yes, some distance back, about six generations away from Scotland. Were you brought up in town or country?

Presenter4:30

A little of both. My father was an architect and uh itinerant. We travelled a lot.

Presenter4:35

Now, natural history was one of your very early interests, I believe? I was highly precocious and started reading at the age of about three. I had read the works of Goldsworthy before I went to school.

Presenter4:47

But one of the most important things that happened to me at the age of seven or eight was I was given a a copy of Roberts's Birds of South Africa, which is the standard text on the birds of the area.

Presenter4:57

By the time I was eight, a year later, I knew every single one of the 900 species in there. Really? You tracked them all down. You'd see them. I hadn't seen them in the field, I knew them by sight.

Lyall Watson5:02

I hadn't seen them in the field.

Presenter5:05

Then I set out to look for them, and collecting of this kind became a passion for me.

Presenter5:10

You studied at two South African universities. What subject?

Presenter5:14

All the natural history subjects they had on their lists, botany, zoology, geology, geography and I added to it things I thought would be useful, like psychology. And marine biology, I I believe was a matter of. Yes, later I uh went on to do a master's degree in marine biology. I was particularly interested in dolphins.

Lyall Watson5:26

Yes, later I.

Presenter5:32

I always have been. They move me.

Presenter5:35

I wanted to know how they worked and began work then on them.

Presenter5:38

Then to London.

Presenter5:39

Was that to take your PhD?

Presenter5:42

Yes, I I went via Germany and Holland. I worked for a while with Konrad Lorenz of Animal Behavior fame.

Presenter5:48

studied anthropology in Holland and then finally decided I had to have the right credentials. I wanted to work with monkeys, with mammals.

Presenter5:56

And the only person at that time who was expert in mammalian behaviour was Desmond Morris. At the London Zool? Yes, he was curator of mammals then. A wonderfully lively man. It was a beautiful time. Those were his pre naked ape days. He was still interested in hairy apes, but he was graduating. And he was my supervisor. I was his first student.

Lyall Watson6:02

It has

Presenter6:15

And as part of our study programme he would take me and several others off to do things like watching all-in wrestling matches.

Presenter6:21

And we'd buy the seats in the front row and then turn the chairs round and watch the crowd.

Presenter6:27

That was where man watching began. Were your personal finances satisfactory, or did you have to do some work on the side to get you through? Oh, I was a penniless student and as an overseas student I had no grants and none available to me.

Presenter6:40

I had to find a part-time job, and uh I took whatever it was going. My first job was washing dishes at the Ellescourt Motor Show. Then I graduated to a a large hotel in the West End, which shall be nameless, where I became a cook. Cook I had no qualifications to be such, but uh they paid eight and ninepence, so I said I was a cook. That was more than washing up. That was four times as much. What did you specialise in cooking? Well, we started off doing mechanical things, but we had a wonderful chef there who taught everything from the word girl. Graduated from salads to soups, from soups to meats, meats to fish, and finally, in my third year there, I um was working as third assistant to the souffle chef, and uh there was a crisis one night. He was doing a special burgundy souffle, and some idiot with a trolley bumped the oven, and the entire thing collapsed. Oh no and the poor man had a heart attack and died on the kitchen floor. This is in the middle of the evening meal.

Presenter7:34

The chef Charles came running over and wanted to know what was going on, saw the man dead on the ground, and pointed to the second assistant and said, Take over.

Presenter7:43

The man said, I can't, I'm not ready. I said, I am, I'll do it So I became chief of the souffle department and for another year that was what I did. I worked in the zoo by day and I made souffles by night.

Lyall Watson7:52

Yeah.

Presenter7:55

What was the subject of your thesis?

Presenter7:58

I was interested in communication and uh I worked on monkey facial expressions. I speak forty different kinds of monkey fluently. Really? And uh in the London Zoo now, twenty five years later.

Presenter8:10

There are still male monkeys. There's a a particular mandrill who hates my guts.

Lyall Watson8:16

They have a lot of memory.

Presenter8:17

I hadn't seen him for ten years. Why does he hate you?

Presenter8:21

I made sneaky love to his wife once a week. I'd go and make the right faces at her just to see if I could do it if they worked. And they did. We had a little affair going on the side, and he didn't like that.

Presenter8:32

Still doesn't.

Presenter8:33

Back in Johannesburg you took over the direction of the Johannesburg Zoo, I believe.

Presenter8:39

I had no intention of going back to South Africa. I had some political problems as a student while I was there.

Presenter8:45

But this was an offer I couldn't refuse. It was a big zoo.

Presenter8:49

A hundred acres, an old zoo, but they had the money to rebuild it.

Presenter8:53

And

Presenter8:54

At that time I was one of the few South Africans who had the right kind of qualifications. I had grown up in a zoo here in London.

Presenter9:02

So I went back and we did rebuild the zoo. It's now one of the biggest and most modern in the world.

Presenter9:08

But that turned out to be a difficult time, too, because politics intruded again. Absurd things happened. A man came one day to the Zoo. I just built a new lion area big cats.

Presenter9:20

Anyway one day this man came in and said uh

Presenter9:22

You can't do this, you know, you're breaking the law.

Presenter9:25

I dropped it in my

Presenter9:26

He said, How? He said, Well, you can't have black people and white people watching the same lands.

Presenter9:31

You're joking. What do you want, separate lions?

Presenter9:34

He said yes, he was quite serious.

Presenter9:37

That's what I can't do. I spent my lion money uh

Presenter9:40

But do you have any other ideas?

Presenter9:41

He said, Well, let's have separate viewing platforms.

Presenter9:45

I said, Well, that's a good idea, but it's the same problem, I don't have the money. He said, Well, let's have separate days then.

Presenter9:52

I said, All right, it's the law of the land. But how are you going to divide seven days equally? He said, Oh, it's no problem. He said, We'll have the blacks on Thursday afternoons.

Presenter10:00

So I got my two biggest keepers, both of whom were black, and we threw him out and I was arrested the next morning. How long did they keep you? Oh, on and off for a long while.

Presenter10:09

And uh

Presenter10:10

Then I got out and went to the Seychelles. Let's have another record. What's your second one?

Presenter10:16

I would like to have on my island some voices, so I've chosen a motet by Thomas Tylas.

Presenter10:23

It was composed, it is thought, for the fortieth birthday of Elizabeth I. in fifteen seventy three. So it's a forty part motet, forty voices, eight choirs of five people, and it's a lovely sound.

Presenter11:37

The Thomas Tallis Forty Part Motet Spermin Allium by the Clerks of Oxenford.

Presenter11:43

You came and worked for the B B C for a while.

Presenter11:45

The first thing I did when I came back from Africa was to uh see if I could find my way back into the mainstream. And there was an an advertisement in The New Scientist one week. A reporter wanted B B C, which I replied to, and uh found myself recruited to Tomorrow's World. This is when Raymond Baxter was still doing it.

Presenter12:05

And James Burke and I joined the same day.

Presenter12:08

And uh I spent a year with Tomorrow's World. Did you enjoy that? Very much indeed. It was a live programme.

Presenter12:16

Went out every week and uh every week was different.

Presenter12:19

But I got a little tired in the end of talking straight to camera, saying something that I hadn't written myself.

Presenter12:25

So I went into research and production later and uh

Presenter12:29

Finally went into filmmaking, left the BBC to go off on my own.

Presenter12:33

I was freelance for a while, made films in Underwood Archaeology in Greece and Turkey. And then set up my own life science consultancy called Biologic of London. And we offered

Presenter12:47

the only complete design service in the zoo business. We would lay out, design, stock a zoo and train the keepers and then move on and do something like that somewhere else. And you led some expeditions up the Amazon, for example. Yes, I uh became involved with an expedition vessel which I'm still involved with.

Presenter13:07

and every year for two or three months we go off to a place that I choose.

Presenter13:11

the Amazon or Indonesia or the islands of Melanesia or the Antarctic.

Presenter13:15

Uh we take a group of scientists and a group of paying passengers.

Presenter13:19

And just play it as it happens. This is how I've come to see more, probably more living species of whales and dolphins than anybody else in the world. For the last fifteen years you've been travelling virtually all the time.

Presenter13:32

I have. I like to. I I get edgy if I'm not moving. I love leaving places rather than going to them.

Presenter13:39

I find my limit is three months anywhere.

Presenter13:42

And uh if I find something that offers the opportunities I need, I I'm e very easily tempted. Where haven't you been?

Presenter13:51

I haven't been to China. I uh

Presenter13:54

Would have gone when it was difficult to get there. Now it's easier to go I have less inclination to do so.

Presenter14:00

Let's have some more music.

Presenter14:02

I'd like to have some modern jazz, something cheerful. I particularly like subtle, intricate jazz, the modern jazz quartet, Miles Davis.

Presenter14:11

But I've chosen a flute. I have a passion for flutes. I've chosen Herbie Mann not because I think he's the greatest flautist ever, but because this piece particularly means a lot to me.

Presenter14:21

I was at the Newport Jazz Festival in nineteen sixty five.

Presenter14:25

And he played a classic, a piece of good old jazz called Comin' Home Baby.

Presenter14:30

And then he played it again, and the second time they played it he brought Ben Tucker, who was the composer up, to take over the bass, the double bass.

Presenter14:38

And it was magical. I've never heard anything quite like that. There was literally a standing ovation. I've heard it described, but never seen it happen.

Presenter14:45

It happened that year.

Presenter15:47

Herbie Mann and Ben Tucker at the Newport Jazz Festival. Let's talk about your books. Nineteen seventy, the first one, Omnivore. That's one I haven't seen. It's a study of evolution, isn't it?

Presenter16:00

It's a look at evolution through man's mouth. It's a study of human feeding patterns and how they arose and what they've meant to us in the course of evolution.

Presenter16:11

It's still around a little. I'm not.

Presenter16:14

Terribly proud of it. It was my first and it has flaws. Where did you write it?

Presenter16:18

I read that one in the Rift Valley in East Africa, in Kenya.

Presenter16:22

And then three years later we come to your big smash hit, Supernature. How many copies of that have been sold so far worldwide? I've lost track. It must be seven or eight million.

Presenter16:34

It's now in seventeen languages and it it's become a phenomenon. It just goes and goes and goes.

Presenter16:40

It's like a child I once had, of which I'm remotely proud, but I have nothing to do with it any more. What was the motive of the book?

Presenter16:46

I never meant to write it. I was on a Greek island at the time, and uh

Presenter16:51

It was the time of the early seventies when people were interested in astrology and reincarnation.

Presenter16:57

And all the kids who were passing through the Greek islands that summer were talking about it.

Presenter17:02

And I realized that although I'd never studied it myself, I knew more about it than they did. Yes. So I sat down one day and began to write and You knew more about it because certain aspects of the supernatural have a sound scientific basis.

Lyall Watson17:08

New

Presenter17:14

Yes, I'd always been interested in things that didn't fit, things that my science tended to sweep under the carpet.

Presenter17:20

And unconsciously I had been collecting them and uh all I did was try and put them together into a sort of patchwork quilt. Record number four.

Presenter17:30

I should like all kinds of mood music on my island and uh

Presenter17:34

I can think of no better collection of moods than

Presenter17:37

Ravel's setting of Mozorsky's pictures from an exhibition. There's something there for every possible mood. I'd like to choose something rousing as my favourite cut perhaps the great gate of Kiev.

Presenter18:50

Masorgsk is The Great Gate of Kiev, played by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Leonard Bernstein.

Presenter18:57

Well, further explorations into the world of the unexplained and Gifts of Unknown Things. A rather puzzling book because the scientific matter is i is mixed into a story. This was about your shipwreck, really. Yes, that's an account of my own castaway experience. Yes. It is a magical island.

Lyall Watson19:10

Yes, that's a count of mine.

Presenter19:16

I shall never tell anybody his real name.

Presenter19:18

and I shall probably never go back there. But it meant a great deal to me, and I like that book best of all I have ever written, because it is the most personal, and I felt I had earned the right to say what I thought.

Presenter19:30

and lifetide

Presenter19:32

It seems invidious to pick out one incident from a very long book that was one very curious phenomenon which you witnessed yourself of the little girl with the strange power over tennis ball.

Presenter19:45

Little Claudia, yes, she is now a big girl. This was some time ago.

Presenter19:49

But she could, it seemed at the time, and I still think it's what happened.

Presenter19:55

Evert tennis balls. In other words, you could turn them inside out. So you had a

Presenter19:59

A ball which was still pressurized, but which had the fur on the inside and smooth black rubber on the outside.

Presenter20:05

This is physically impossible, it can't be done.

Presenter20:08

Yet I saw the childhood on several occasions.

Presenter20:11

Her father wrote to me, and it was one of the strange things I went to look at, which altered my whole perspective of reality.

Presenter20:17

and brought me instantly more into tune with

Presenter20:20

The Real Mystics of the Day

Presenter20:22

who are not the Gurus in Tibet, but who are nuclear mathematicians and subatomic physicists, who deal in imaginary spaces, in particles that no one has ever seen or ever will see.

Presenter20:36

They know that the world is stranger than most science will allow, that nothing is impossible.

Presenter20:43

We've got to record number five.

Presenter20:46

Again jazz, but this time traditional jazz. I have always been very fond of the early New Orleans jazz. It's my only musical passion, and I'm particularly fond of the blues.

Presenter21:00

And I've chosen a man called Sam Leitnen Hopkins, who is a master of the art. He makes it look so easy, it's effortless, almost casual.

Presenter21:09

And I'd like to hear him or have him on the island with me singing Buddy Brown Blues. Lazy old Buddy Brown would be just right for the island.

Lyall Watson21:24

I'm gonna get up in the morning.

Lyall Watson21:29

Do lang.

Lyall Watson21:31

Buddy Brown

Lyall Watson21:38

I'm gonna get up in the morning and do like Buddy Brown.

Presenter21:48

Lightning Hopkins and Body Brown Blues.

Presenter21:52

For the past ten years you have spent a couple of months every year in observing whales in various parts of the world. And from that work has come a book, Sea Guide to Whales of the World.

Presenter22:04

Here is no speculation, this is a a scientific book.

Presenter22:08

It's a field guide. It's a way to make it possible for all merchant seamen or yachtsmen or people who see whales or dolphins to identify what they're seeing, to put a name to them.

Presenter22:19

It's the result of ten years of field work. I have worked and travelled with a young artist.

Presenter22:24

And we have together seen sixty-seven of the seventy-six species that live.

Presenter22:31

It's a definitive guide. I don't think anybody else can improve on it for for twenty years. What I hope it will do

Presenter22:37

is add to the body of knowledge about whales in a way that'll make it possible for us to go on protecting them. I don't think anyone reading this book or any part of it could fail to become a a strong advocate for conservation.

Presenter22:49

There are some amazing stories about the social concern shown in a whale community.

Presenter22:55

I have seen on several occasions a dolphin carrying a sic calf, keeping it on the surface, enabling it to breathe, where it would otherwise drown.

Presenter23:06

This is behaviour which is natural to them, it carries over also into interspecific contacts.

Presenter23:12

There are several cases of dolphins rescuing humans who are drowning at sea and pushing them ashore.

Presenter23:20

On one occasion I was with uh John Lilly, who was well known for his early dolphin work.

Presenter23:24

He had a a facility in the Virgin Islands.

Presenter23:28

And uh a television crew came down while I was there to do some filming. They'd heard these stories and they said, Look, can we try it out? Does it work?

Presenter23:35

At least it's sure, but I'm not sure if it'll work here.

Presenter23:38

So let's try anyway.

Presenter23:40

So they threw the assistant cameraman into the pool where there was a a single dolphin, a female.

Presenter23:45

And she came over and looked at him and watched him sink and drown.

Presenter23:48

and very gently lifted him to the surface and pushed him to the side of the pool and helped him out.

Presenter23:54

The director, like all film directors, was unhappy with the take and said, Can we do it again?

Presenter24:00

Lily advised against it, but they insisted. He said, All right. So they threw the assistant cameraman in again, and this time the dolphin came over and she beat the hell out of him.

Presenter24:12

Well, you mustn't fool, must you?

Presenter24:14

You're a delegate at the International Commission to try and stop whaling. Already you've succeeded in getting no go areas for whalers. It's the International Whaling Commission. It actually was a whalers' club designed to further whaling.

Presenter24:27

At one time.

Presenter24:29

But uh we, that is the Seychelles whom I represent, joined three years ago.

Presenter24:34

And since then we've been encouraging other people who have an interest in conservation to come into the community on this commission. And that includes China and India and Egypt and

Presenter24:45

We now have enough people on the Commission who are opposed to mindless whaling.

Presenter24:53

that we think we can either stop it altogether very soon or bring it to a negotiated end.

Presenter24:59

In other words, make sure that whaling does stop as soon as possible. Record number six.

Presenter25:05

I should like to have for the uh the quiet evenings some chamber music, and I've chosen something which is modern. It was first performed in nineteen fifty six only. It's uh a piece by Samuel Barber called Summer Music. It's very elegant, very sophisticated, and it's full of woodwinds, which I love.

Speaker 425:27

Yeah.

Presenter26:24

Samuel Barber's Summer Music played by the New York Woodwind Quintet.

Presenter26:29

You've got a new book out, Lightning Bird. Now, this is an African true story.

Presenter26:36

Yes, it's my homage to Africa. I was born there, it's important to me, and yet I've never paid that debt.

Presenter26:42

I didn't actually choose to write this book, I was sort of elected.

Presenter26:45

It's about a young Englishman who at the age of sixteen went to Africa.

Presenter26:49

and just walked out into the bush and back into the nineteenth century. He lived in a cave and lived on bats and lizards for twenty years.

Presenter26:57

He came back very occasionally to civilization to pick up something or to talk to people.

Presenter27:02

and during one of these short visits I met him. We met very briefly on two occasions only.

Presenter27:08

He died in nineteen seventy eight.

Presenter27:11

and uh left me his notes.

Presenter27:16

And I felt obliged to tell his story. He had worked with witch doctors and he knew what he was all about. He became a.

Lyall Watson27:21

Here he came.

Presenter27:24

Spirit Diviner, a priest diviner.

Presenter27:28

He's the only white man I know of, the only white person I know of to been initiated to that level. And the secret of his access to African tradition, to the secrets of Africa.

Presenter27:39

Is that he was epileptic? And this has a certain amount of time. Throughout Africa, people believe that when you are in the throes of an epileptic fit, you are. Possessed by the spirits of the ancestors, you're speaking for the ancestors.

Presenter27:51

You have a project going off at a tangent. You have a project for making a personal Western film. Western films are a great enthusiasm of yours. A passion. I'm a movie freak anyway. I'll watch anything that moves. For me a good day is a day in New York where I can see six movies starting at eight thirty in the morning. I'll watch absolutely any everything.

Presenter28:11

But Westerns particularly. Since the great train robbery in nineteen two or whatever it was, how many Westerns have been made? Thirty thousand.

Presenter28:19

That was those early two reelers.

Speaker 428:20

Oops.

Lyall Watson28:20

Uh

Presenter28:21

And I think I've seen all of them at least once.

Presenter28:24

My great ambition I'll die happy if I can do this is to make my own feature Western. I've written a screenplay. On traditional lands. Absolutely traditional. A classic Western. No Indians, no horses, no women. Just a straightforward, direct confrontation, the classic duel.

Presenter28:42

I think it's time. I think Westerns have been out of fashion for a few years while we went through the Star Trek phase and uh I think it's time to come back to earth and go back to

Presenter28:51

Demith.

Presenter28:52

Number seven.

Presenter28:54

I feel I want to have one major work with me to keep me serious, one completely satisfying musical statement.

Presenter29:01

And uh it has to be Mozart, and I think it has to be a symphony.

Presenter29:06

I've chosen number forty-one in C, the Jupiter, and I'd like to hear now the.

Presenter29:13

The finale, the virtuosity, the counterpoint in this leaves me breathless every time I hear it.

Presenter30:19

The beginning of the last movement of Mozart's Symphony No. forty one in C, the Jupiter Symphony, the English Chamber Orchestra conducted by Daniel Barrenboy.

Presenter30:29

Now I don't have to ask you those usual questions about how well you'd manage on a desert island, because this is something you've already done and managed exceedingly well.

Presenter30:38

How about getting away? Could you build some kind of craft? Yes, I could easily. I wouldn't want to escape immediately. I'd revel in it for a while. I'd like to have, say, nine months there before I started my boat building. Yes. I think that once I'd learnt to master the the challenge of food and drink

Presenter30:56

Schulte would then start the boat. And navigation would be no problem because None at all. I I have sailed single handed across the Atlantic. Uh navigation is not nearly as difficult as people say it is.

Lyall Watson31:00

Yeah.

Presenter31:06

You have a a thirty foot catch in which you've That's the one I sailed in. It's uh long gone. I've had another boat since. You also have a uh a Mississippi River boat, which is a wooden box. Yes, that's my current headache. A hundred and twenty year old wooden.

Lyall Watson31:17

Yes, that's my card.

Presenter31:21

Mississippi paddle wheeler.

Presenter31:23

A crazy thing to buy, but it was so beautiful that uh and it was going relatively cheaply.

Presenter31:28

that I uh bought it and kept in Florida. Mm-hmm.

Lyall Watson31:31

Mm-hmm.

Presenter31:31

Where it's now undergoing.

Presenter31:33

All kinds of trials. It sank last month. Oh no. We'll bring it up again. I do hope it's going to be all right. Let's have your last record. A difficult choice for me, but I decided in the end that I'd like a natural sound.

Presenter31:46

On an island, a tropical island, I'm going to have the crashing of the surf and I'm going to have the raucous calls of seabirds, but no real bird song.

Presenter31:53

So I've chosen a bird song, and the one I like most, which for me spells Africa, is the call of the kukawl. It's one of the cuckoo family.

Presenter32:05

And Birchall's cuckoo, the one I'm choosing, is a bird that you hear in the calm of the evening, producing a mellow, liquid, bubbling sound that is so evocative that I think I'll never tire of it.

Speaker 432:26

That's it.

Presenter32:36

The call of the kukal. If you could take only one disc and not eight, which would it be? It would be the call of the kukal. Right.

Presenter32:44

And one luxury to have with you on the island, one thing of no practical use that you'd like to have.

Presenter32:51

I'm sure you won't let me have it, but what I'd really like to have is a face mask.

Presenter32:55

I've discovered that if you are feeding yourself from the sea

Presenter32:59

You need to be able to see underwater. But that's obviously something very useful. It's not a luxury. So perhaps I could have a film projector with twenty of the best Westerns ever made.

Presenter33:09

Yes, and we'll uh

Presenter33:12

We'll bury that face mask somewhere in in the case with the projection. And one book, apart from the Bible and Shakespeare, which are already on the island. There's one book which I actually have with me all the time, so you may not even have to provide it, and that's Pears Cyclopedia. Oh, the one volume encyclopedia, bound in red. That's the one. Issued anew every year.

Presenter33:34

I religiously buy a new copy every year, mainly because my old one gets worn out.

Presenter33:39

And it's so great to have around because it has something of everything in it. If you are trying to remember who the Illuminati were, or whether Cromwell died before Rembrandt did, or these are the sort of things that worry you in the middle of the night on a Desert Island, and I'd hate not to know. Right. Pear Encyclopedia you shall have. And thank you, Lyle Watson, for letting us hear your Desert Island Disc. I've always wanted to be a castaway.

Presenter34:03

Goodbye, everyone.

Speaker 234:11

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