Gerald Priestland

Speaker 10:00

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

Presenter0:30

This week, our castaway is the author, broadcaster and journalist Gerald Priestland.

Presenter0:36

Gerald, how important is music in your life?

Gerald Priestland0:38

Well, extremely important. I think like a lot of wordy people I find it a great relief to be listening to sounds which don't have to mean anything.

Presenter0:45

You're reputed to play the Chinese trombone. What is that, please?

Gerald Priestland0:50

Well, it is in fact a very ordinary trombone, but made in China. I originally started uh playing the oboe when I was at school, and it was a very bad, creaky sort of instrument, so I switched to the French horn. I sold that instrument to get married on the proceeds, tried to go back to it, found that the price of French horns had escalated out of sight, and ended up with a cheap Chinese trombone. Works well? It works very well. It's a very simple instrument. There's nothing much to go wrong with it.

Gerald Priestland1:19

The flare is another matter.

Gerald Priestland1:21

Uh

Presenter1:21

The f

Presenter1:22

Are you been to some pretty obscure places, if not Desert Island? Do you take discs or tapes with you?

Gerald Priestland1:28

Yes, I I always travel with some music. Eight for your desert island. Well, absolutely impossible. I got down to a short list of about fifty, and then I suddenly realized that the great classics that are close to my heart I do know by heart, and I could walk up and down the beach singing and humming them. So I then picked some perhaps rather quirky, rather more unusual ones with particular meanings. What is the first one? Well, I thought it'd be good to have something to blow away the cobwebs and start the day with a bounce. And as a very bad brass player, I thought I'd go for some very good brass playing, and I would like a sort of fanfare called an Alloman, written by our old friend Anonymous, for the royal brass of James the First.

Presenter2:53

An alamand from A Suite for the Royal Brass Music of King James I., played by the London Gabriele Brasse Ensemble.

Presenter3:03

What part of England do you come from, Gerald?

Gerald Priestland3:05

Well, I was born in West Hertfordshire, in the town of Berkhamstead, whose main historic distinction is to have surrendered the crown of England.

Gerald Priestland3:12

to William the Conqueror once upon a time. You went to boarding school very early. Yes. Well, I was an only child, and I think my parents thought that I was more likely to find company if I went off to boarding school. And there had been a prep school in the family, and that was the one I was sent off to in Northamptonshire. I think it was a fairly damaging thing to have done in the long run, but off I went and was away at boarding schools or colleges from the age of seven to the age of twenty-one.

Presenter3:43

You moved on to Charter House? Yes. Then to New College, Oxford. What did you read?

Gerald Priestland3:49

Well, I got a history scholarship from Charterhouse, in fact three, uh from Charterhouse to uh New College. And when I got there and contemplated going on with sort of things like Stubbs's medieval charters, I I just couldn't do it. So uh I said I had not come to read history. Whatever they'd been told, I had come to read modern greats, philosophy, politics and economics. I'm very glad that I did, because I met another selection of remarkable teachers, and it turned out to be the ideal preparation, I think, for journalism. What was your ambition at that time? Were you thinking of journalism?

Gerald Priestland4:25

I was certainly thinking of writing. I'd always dabbled in sort of school journalism. I'd always run underground magazines. The best way I found to edit an underground magazine was to write it all yourself, you know.

Presenter4:37

Boop.

Gerald Priestland4:37

And then you could be sure the copy was there on time. So when you came down?

Gerald Priestland4:42

When I came down it was the end of nineteen forty eight

Gerald Priestland4:46

And I knew that I wanted by that time to go into journalism. This is very difficult. There was no newsprint around. The demobilised journalists had gone back to their jobs.

Gerald Priestland4:58

And I nearly had to take a job with the

Gerald Priestland5:02

National Coal Board as a research economist. And in the nick of time, the BBC announced that for the first time it was going to take on six graduates as trainees in the news department. And a lot of people put in for it, and luckily I got one. How did you start?

Gerald Priestland5:19

Well, trainee, there was absolutely no training. I mean, one was trained in what I think is probably the best way one was doing it. Sad, exactly so. You were sat at the bottom end of the newsroom and shouted at by the Chief Sub. Writing bulletins. Writing items for the bulletins. Where I first attracted attention was when Chief Subb gave me a bit of agency copy which said The Duke of Kent will not be returning to Harrow this term because of mumps. And I looked at this for a moment and went back up the newsroom to the sort of Holy in Holies and said

Presenter5:25

Doing it.

Gerald Priestland5:52

I do not think the British public needs to know this. And there was a sort of HM Bateman scene, the you know, the trainee sub who thought the royal family didn't matter.

Presenter6:03

Yeah.

Gerald Priestland6:03

But there was a hushed pause.

Gerald Priestland6:06

And after a minute, the chief sub gave me a very interesting little item about Yugoslavia. Instead, and Atri, and I never looked back.

Presenter6:14

Your second record.

Gerald Priestland6:16

Well, one of the nostalgic memories of my schoolboy days was singing in the choir at Charterhouse.

Gerald Priestland6:24

And one Christmas we sang a marvellous fantasia on Christmas Carols by Ray Forem Williams, who himself was an old Carthusian, and it begins with what to me has always been one of the most moving of English folk tunes, The Truth Sent from Above.

Speaker 26:48

Let's move on to God.

Speaker 16:49

Yeah.

Speaker 26:54

Therefore

Speaker 27:10

What does the witch I believe?

Speaker 27:17

Here's the land of God and in a man who create which holy

Speaker 27:27

Uh

Speaker 27:28

Yeah.

Speaker 27:30

Yeah.

Presenter7:40

The Truth Sent from Above, from the Vaughan Williams Fantasier on Christmas Carols, Harvey Allen, the bass baritone with the choir of King's College, Cambridge, and the London Symphony Orchestra directed by Sir David Wilcox.

Presenter7:53

How long did you spend in the newsroom, Gerald?

Gerald Priestland7:56

I think it was about

Gerald Priestland7:58

three or four years in the newsroom. And then I went out of that into a special unit writing um Today in Parliament. Mm-hmm. And uh this was very fascinating. We were up till all hours when the House sat late. Well subbing the stuff down to writing. That's right. Precisely in the days before one had actual recordings of what they were saying.

Presenter8:12

Yeah.

Gerald Priestland8:18

And that taught me a lot, I think, politically.

Gerald Priestland8:23

And after that I was sent out as a reporter in the days when we had these great recording cars.

Gerald Priestland8:29

I think there were second hand hearses with a small grammophone record factory in the back, and they actually cut gramophone records. And when you'd finished, there was a great pile of shavings in the back, which you kicked out of the door, drove the car away, threw a match in these shavings and started

Presenter8:45

So

Gerald Priestland8:45

Uh

Presenter8:45

Swarf, yes.

Gerald Priestland8:47

The thing went off with a bang and a column of smoke like a small atom bomb. It was fun.

Presenter8:54

This was what, this was the mid fifties by now.

Gerald Priestland8:57

Well, 1954, when fortunes really did turn, and I put in for the job of foreign correspondent, and was sent off on trial as one of Thomas Cadet's young men, the great Thomas Cadet, who had been the Times correspondent in Paris before the war, the BBC's correspondent after the war.

Gerald Priestland9:17

He knew a great deal, and he was very cunning in his approach to his young trainees.

Gerald Priestland9:23

He used to make you get up early in the morning, buy all the newspapers, ring him up as he was in bed, and tell him what was in the papers. And he would say, Well, I don't see anything there to trouble me. Would you send London a piece on this, that and the other? I am lunching at the French Foreign Office, and you know what French lunches are. I'll be at about five o'clock or so to do something for Radio Newsreel. Well, this sounds idle, but in fact he was making you learn by doing the job. And after a while he went off on holiday and three French governments fell, and Jien Bien Phu, de Gaulle came marching up the Champs-Élysées.

Gerald Priestland10:02

I was absolutely petrified, but somehow I coped. I was never frightened of anything after that. A lot of action. How long ago in Paris? Oh, that was only a few months, actually.

Gerald Priestland10:12

Because apparently I made the grade and in November 1954

Gerald Priestland10:17

They sent me off to India. My first solo post, thousands of miles away, and being the rather sternly paternal BBC that it was in those days, they said, You can't take your wife and family until you've proved yourself for six months.

Gerald Priestland10:33

So there was my poor wife having our second child in London, and there was I moping in Delhi.

Presenter10:39

You followed Bulganin and Khrushchev on their tour of India, which must have been.

Presenter10:44

Fraught with incident.

Gerald Priestland10:46

That was absolutely incredible. I mean, for one thing, nobody knew much about the balance of power between the two, but after you watch for a bit, you realize that Bulganin, who was supposed to be the senior, was reading all his speeches from prepared texts. Khrushchev was ad living, so it was pretty clear who was really the boss. And Khrushchev had this outrageous approach to

Gerald Priestland11:06

Anything that was meant to impress him. They took him to the Taj Mahal, and explained to him about its wonders and splendours, and he said, To me it means the exploitation of the labour force.

Presenter11:18

Uh

Gerald Priestland11:18

Ben was

Presenter11:18

Where? After India, Washington, wasn't it?

Gerald Priestland11:21

After India it was Washington. Off he went with seventeen crates of Central Province's teak containing all our possessions the world's poorest, the world's richest. It was a real cultural shock.

Gerald Priestland11:33

But the great thing I mean two wonderful things about working in uh

Gerald Priestland11:36

the United States. One is at long last communications worked. You could get about, you could jump in an aeroplane, rent a car, pick up the telephone, call London. Everything worked and you could talk to people. And the press has this sort of right of access. It's almost an anti-constitutional crime to refuse to speak to a reporter.

Gerald Priestland11:58

Everyone is extremely articulate.

Gerald Priestland12:01

And if they don't all tell the truth, at least there are lots of other sources you can check up on. If the Air Force is boasting about its new fighter plane, the Navy will tell you the truth about it, because they've got a rival.

Presenter12:11

Because they've got a rival. Let's have another record. We've got number three.

Gerald Priestland12:16

Well, in India I became absolutely fascinated by Indian music, which is extremely highly organized. Once you get used to the sound of the instruments and you you realize it has things also in common with jazz, this improvisation. I absolutely worshipped a Bengali flute player who now alas is dead called Panaral Ghosh. She plays an enormous tube of bamboo with a few holes in it and bends the sound around.

Gerald Priestland12:42

Anyway, Panel Ghosh Please playing Raga Yaman.

Presenter13:46

Ragha Yaman played by Panilal Ghosh.

Presenter13:50

The BBC didn't let you stagnate after two years in the United States to the Middle East.

Presenter13:56

Yes, I tried. I I went

Gerald Priestland13:57

to Beirut.

Presenter13:58

Yeah.

Presenter13:59

Yeah.

Gerald Priestland13:59

which was really in those days a very pleasant city.

Gerald Priestland14:03

But there was an absolutely nothing happening there.

Gerald Priestland14:06

We were there partly because communications were good, that um well known airport was functioning even in those days brilliantly, one could get a voice through to London okay and the living was pleasant and uh you uh you could, as they say, uh swim in the morning and ski in the afternoon. But really I did none of those things. I

Gerald Priestland14:28

I spent most of my time dashing off to coups d'état in Jordan or Syria or Iran or somewhere like that. So I was seldom with my family, and my dear wife had our fourth child in Beirut. She still has an Arabic birth certificate. I hope it's the right child.

Presenter14:47

Uh

Gerald Priestland14:48

Well, there's no way of telling, as far as I'm concerned.

Presenter14:50

Well, you came back to Alexandropett from from the Middle East,

Gerald Priestland14:53

That's right, yes. I thought it was time I I learnt about this thing called television.

Gerald Priestland14:58

And I went out to Alexander Palace as a sort of foreign news expert. It was a sort of fairy tale place to work from, this wonderful view over London, and a race course in the grounds, so you could have a flutter if you wanted. But the great sensation, of course, was when B B C Two opened.

Gerald Priestland15:17

And the first thing to be seen was going to be a sort of quick news summary, and it was apparently my turn to do it.

Gerald Priestland15:25

So there I was, seated before the camera, in shirt sleeves. We decided we were going to present ourselves as working journalists, you see. So coats off, shirt sleeves, bits of paper all over the table, and a typewriter that didn't work to create a good impression.

Gerald Priestland15:43

And I started chatting about the news, and suddenly I noticed the floor manager was making the go on, go on sign.

Gerald Priestland15:50

And people started crawling up to my desk and pushing little bits of paper over the edge so the camera wouldn't see them, saying, You are the only thing on BBC Two, keep talking.

Gerald Priestland16:01

So for what seemed like hours, I think it was at least an hour, I ad libbed off bits of tape in that studio. The only thing that worked because the electricity supply to West London had broken down while Alexander Palace in North London was still on the air.

Presenter16:16

So you ordered a channel on your own for one hour?

Gerald Priestland16:19

A one-on-one channel, yes, that's right.

Presenter16:20

Or

Presenter16:22

Then what? Another spell in Washington?

Presenter16:25

including some trips to the United States forces in Vietnam.

Presenter16:29

Yes, that's right.

Gerald Priestland16:32

My first time in Washington I'd been an assistant correspondent to those two classic correspondents, Christopher Serple and Douglas Stewart, but this time I was the the bureau chief myself.

Gerald Priestland16:44

I was joined later by another great correspondent, Charles Wheeler.

Gerald Priestland16:49

And we used to take it in turns to be in town or out of town.

Gerald Priestland16:53

And because it seemed to me that much the most important thing that was happening to America in those days was Vietnam, I used to fly out to Vietnam, which is not a country that I ever loved very much. I felt that actually although people complained a lot about the awful things the Americans are doing to the Vietnamese, it was little compared with what the Vietnamese were doing and had been doing for a very long time to each other. And there's a total non-meeting of minds. The Vietnamese and the Americans didn't remotely understand each other. There were very few Americans who spoke French, let alone Vietnamese. So it was a complete sort of they were fighting two different wars for a lot of totally different reasons. There was a great deal of suffering and cruelty. Yes. And it affected me very deeply and led ultimately to a nervous breakdown. Not that the United States itself was very soothing, because at that particular time we were going through the Black Ghetto riots. Martin Luther King was shot dead. I was in Los Angeles in the hotel when Robert Kennedy was killed also. And a general feeling that the world was one long story of violence greatly oppressed me.

Presenter18:11

A very rough passage.

Gerald Priestland18:12

Yeah.

Presenter18:13

Let us have another record before we talk some off.

Gerald Priestland18:16

Well, it wasn't all sort of uh gloom and suffering in the States. Um I did from time to time, as journalists do, wander into a bar or a night spot and um set up one or two of those delightful American cocktails, a Manhattan, a whiskey star, perhaps even a sidecar, and listen to that sort of cocktail music which Americans do so well and at its best is superb, and one in particular

Gerald Priestland18:47

One singer, Peggy Lee, and I'd like her to sing for me, I'm Looking Out the Window.

Speaker 218:53

I'm looking out the window.

Speaker 218:57

I'm waiting at the door.

Speaker 219:01

To see if you'll be coming by

Speaker 219:04

The way you did before

Speaker 219:12

The way

Speaker 219:13

You do.

Speaker 219:15

Before

Presenter19:23

Peggy Lee.

Presenter19:25

So back from the United States to Broadcasting House, a news presenter for quite a long time.

Gerald Priestland19:31

That's right. We we did a sort of son of radio newsreel programme called Newsdesk.

Gerald Priestland19:37

And it was fun. We had a great team on there.

Gerald Priestland19:41

We relaxed a bit. We we tried to call it at one point the news with a human face. Sometimes perhaps we went too far. But we tried to, you know, unstuffify the n the news a bit.

Presenter19:54

Then you took an attachment to the religious affairs department. There was a religious background in your family. I mean, your grandfather was a parson.

Gerald Priestland20:02

Yes, that's right. Yes, he was.

Gerald Priestland20:05

And I I suppose I absorbed some sort of public school Anglicanism at my various boarding schools, which I rejected as I got the age of about fourteen or fifteen. But when I went up to Oxford and met the lady who is now my wife, she took me off to the Presbyterian church and I thought, you know, this is more serious. Good, meaty, scholarly sort of sermons. And I stuck with that form of Christianity for a great many years. And then, as I say, disturbed as I was by the violence in the world, that seemed to be not quite the thing either. And I had this nervous breakdown.

Gerald Priestland20:50

And I suppose if I had a conversion experience it was on on a psychiatrist's couch talking to a gentleman with a strong Central European accent.

Gerald Priestland21:01

But suddenly things came right and began to make sense, and I found religion at the absolute heart of it.

Gerald Priestland21:11

And when Douglas Brown, my predecessor, was about to retire, the religious department said to me,'Would you like to take over from him'? I suddenly realized that I would very much, because, after all I'd been through, either life was absolutely absurd and meaningless

Gerald Priestland21:27

Or God was behind it somewhere. And it seemed to me that He was, and that this was the chance to come to grips with this. So I took the job with enthusiasm. And one of my tired jokes is that half my friends approached me as if I'd announced a sex change operation, and the other half started to tell me things they'd always wanted to say to somebody. Never dared.

Presenter21:50

Your personal religious feelings moved over to being a member of the Society of Friends, a Quaker.

Gerald Priestland21:56

Yes, that's right. This had a great deal to do, I think, with violence and pacifism and so on. But also it's it's wordiness, you see. I spend all the week

Presenter21:57

It's what

Gerald Priestland22:05

talking my head off. The Quakers, as you may know, worship largely in silence, and I thought it would be a very good thing for me to shut up and listen for a bit.

Presenter22:14

Well, getting back to broadcasting, that celebrated series of Saturday morning talks. What do you call them talks? Yours faithfully.

Gerald Priestland22:21

Yes.

Presenter22:21

You had a great success with that, and they lasted a long time.

Gerald Priestland22:25

Yes, that was interesting, too.

Gerald Priestland22:27

I wasn't quite sure what they were going to be when I started up.

Gerald Priestland22:31

And then I found something quite remarkable happening when I'd been a foreign correspondent in, say, Washington.

Gerald Priestland22:37

I'd be lucky to get half a dozen letters from listeners a year.

Gerald Priestland22:41

I started doing the religious correspondence job.

Gerald Priestland22:45

And you start getting a dozen a day?

Gerald Priestland22:48

and I realized there were a lot of people out there who were somehow liberated to hear religious affairs talked about in everyday terms.

Presenter22:58

You embarked on another very ambitious series well, an ambitious series, because yours faithfully really hadn't been ambitious. I'm talking about Prieston's Progress.

Presenter23:08

What were you progressing towards? What was your thought in starting that series?

Gerald Priestland23:13

Well, sitting talking to my friend and producer, Chris Rees, in the religious department one day, he said, you know, I think one thing this department's doing wrong we're broadcasting on the assumption that people know what the Christian faith is all about.

Gerald Priestland23:29

that we can use terms like the Trinity and Salvation and they will mean something.

Gerald Priestland23:34

To a heck of a lot of people nowadays they don't.

Gerald Priestland23:38

Let's wade into the Christian religion asking questions. Let's go and talk to a lot of people and say

Gerald Priestland23:45

Now what happened on the cross?

Gerald Priestland23:48

What is the Trinity? How can three be one, one be three?

Gerald Priestland23:53

And that's what we did. We drove up and down the country frantically for some weeks and talked to a hundred and two people it was.

Gerald Priestland24:02

About an hour each.

Gerald Priestland24:04

collected an enormous amount of material, went away, digested it, edited it.

Gerald Priestland24:09

Put it all together, and the response was tremendous. Once again it was this opening of doors and windows and trying to speak freely and frankly about these things. And we got about twenty thousand letters. Twenty thousand letters. And, you know, the book sold well too, and is still selling. Record number five we've got to.

Gerald Priestland24:31

Well, I think many music lovers who who revere the greats, like Beethoven and Mozart and Brahms, as I do, nevertheless have a sort of personal friend among composers who mightn't be absolutely in the first rank. Well, mine is

Gerald Priestland24:47

Sibelius, whom I learnt to love very much at school.

Gerald Priestland24:52

Now many people think that he wrote seven symphonies. He didn't, he wrote eight. And what I want to hear is the opening of number naught, the astonishing Coulevaux symphony.

Presenter26:00

An excerpt from the Cula Vaux Symphony of Sebelius, the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra conducted by Pavo Berglun.

Presenter26:08

Although you've left the BBC, you're you're busier than ever as a freelance. You've been writing books. Well, you've always been writing books, haven't you?

Gerald Priestland26:15

I've done a dozen now, yes. Mhm. I did one on fish and chips. I can seriously claim to be the author of by far the best book on fish and chips, because it is the only book on fish and chips.

Gerald Priestland26:27

I did it when I came back from America. I wanted to sort of re-acclimatise myself. So I went up and down England eating fish and chips and talking to fish fryers. Fascinating.

Presenter26:37

Let's have another record. We're we're rather behind with our record.

Gerald Priestland26:40

Well, I think now I must uh bring in a religious note.

Gerald Priestland26:47

And one of my joys in music is the discovery that that Bach wrote more than two hundred of his church cantatas, and I only know about twenty five.

Gerald Priestland26:57

And I'd very much like to hear the opening of one of them, the cantata number one hundred and seventy, which begins with a beautiful sort of cradle song, Fernique Terue, which says to me, All shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.

Speaker 227:44

Good praise.

Presenter28:11

Janet Baker with The Academy of Saint Martin and the Fields, directed by Neville Mariner, Bach Cantata No. 170.

Presenter28:19

Gerald, one book you've written with your wife, Sylvia, West of Hale River. You have a family enthusiasm for the west of Cornwall.

Gerald Priestland28:26

Yes, when we came back from America I wanted my children not just to sink into the big city of London where we live, but see something of the English countryside. I had always loved Cornwall. My parents always took me there on summer holidays.

Gerald Priestland28:41

And uh first of all we rented a cottage on the cliffs at a place called Zena, which is a very mysterious place. And eventually the lease ran out and we bought an abandoned Methodist Sunday school at a place called Carfuri, which sounds like Son of Paul Dark or something. And it makes a good address for me now, the old Sunday school, Carfuri.

Speaker 229:03

Yeah.

Gerald Priestland29:06

and we go down there quite a lot, and one of my daughters learnt to love the area so much she's now, I suppose I have to say, a cow person down there. She she runs a herd of a hundred black and white cows with the aid of a computer.

Presenter29:19

What do your other children do? Anybody in broadcasting?

Gerald Priestland29:22

Nobody's in broadcasting at all. Uh we've got an artist who takes after her mother. We've got a teacher which I suppose is my grandfather's trade. And we've got a um well, he for a time he ran very nice little garage in Bristol, but he's now gone to the London School of Economics, and I fear is going to be a sociologist, which I've always regarded as a form of journalism in an academic hood.

Presenter29:48

Bringing your story up to date, you've just completed a series of television programmes for another channel.

Gerald Priestland29:52

Television programmes.

Gerald Priestland29:55

Uh

Presenter29:55

Yeah.

Gerald Priestland29:55

Uh Ha ha ha. Yes, that's right. Yes, Priestland Right and Wrong, which is also a best-selling book. This is an attempt to come to grips with problems of morality in various fields of life, including the church itself, and the mass media, and farming, and medicine, and politics, and so on. A series of filmed essays which have been quite experimental in in nature and it's been fascinating to make them, though I must say that actually radio remains my favourite medium.

Presenter30:32

Record number seven.

Gerald Priestland30:34

Well, funny you should mention that, because it's a piece by Coubrin the Great, which is actually the theme music for the television series. It's called Les Barricade Mysterieuse, and what these mysterious barricades are, you have to figure out for yourself.

Presenter31:53

Couperin's The Mysterious Barricades played on the harpsichord by A. M. Van der Wiele.

Presenter32:00

Have you ever been on a desert island? You once told me that there is a reasonably palatable drink you can make from palm leaves. Well, if we got the right palm, do we have palmara palm? We can arrange them. We can arrange anything.

Gerald Priestland32:13

Well, that's absolutely splendid. If you climb up palmyra palm and bend over the stalk at the top, and cut off the sort of fly, it then oozes a liquid which instantly ferments. It's called palm toddy. And that would keep me very happy indeed. What do you think you'd

Presenter32:29

Uh Do, uh, as a castaway, I mean, when not too much under the influence of palm toddy. Could you look after yourself? Could you rig up a shelter?

Gerald Priestland32:37

I think so. I mean, I was a Boy Scout and I was a naval cadet. I've watched how people in South India do make huts with plaited palm leaves. I think I could cope with that side of it fairly well. You've been a naval cadet. Does that mean you know about navigation? Well, can I have an Admiralty chart and a compass? No.

Presenter32:57

No.

Gerald Priestland32:58

I feared not. Uh you see, it's that sort of navigation it's not the sort of peeking at the stars type of navigation that I could do. I think I'd get lost if I did set out in a boat.

Presenter33:10

Record number eight.

Gerald Priestland33:11

Well, let's have a bit of fun. I mean, we're going to get get a bit gloomy on this island, I am by myself. So to cheer me up, I would like Elsa Popping and her Pixi Land Band. Now Elsa Popping and her Pixiland Band is actually two crazy French engineers who record the instruments upside down, back to front, play them at all the wrong speeds, and the result is marvellous. Pelle de Cristal.

Presenter33:22

Matt Nelson was.

Speaker 233:42

I'm not sure. Oh.

Speaker 233:45

Mm-hmm.

Presenter34:03

Pearls of crystal recorded somewhere in France by

Presenter34:06

Elsa Poppin and her Pixi Land Band.

Presenter34:11

If you could take only one disc out of the eight you played us.

Gerald Priestland34:14

I think I'd have to be serious and take the Bach, partly because I know there's another marvellous cantata on the other side. And one luxury to take with you any one object that's of no practical use.

Gerald Priestland34:25

Oh, dear, no practical use. I was going to ask for a solar powered air conditioner after my experience of the tropics. Is that a luxury, or is it too you?

Presenter34:35

No, I think that. It's a luxury. You could manage without it. Phew, thank goodness for that. And one book. You have the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare already there.

Gerald Priestland34:44

I have to be serious again here, and say the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, not only because it's nourishing, because you have to read it out aloud, and I could stride up and down the beach trying to get the wreck of the Deutschland right.

Presenter34:56

The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, and thank you, Gerald Priestland, for letting us hear your Desert Island discs. I look forward to being rescued. Goodbye, everyone.

Speaker 135:12

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

Speaker 235:44

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