Brian Redhead

Speaker 30:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty 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 six, and the presenter was Michael Parkinson.

Presenter0:29

Our castaway today is the journalist and broadcaster Brian Redhead.

Presenter0:34

Brian, you've been a journalist all your life and it occurs to me that journalists, in fact, know from a very, very early age what they want to do, that they don't come into the job by accident. Would that be true, Violet?

Brian Redhead0:44

Oops. Yeah.

Presenter0:44

Oh yeah.

Brian Redhead0:45

Ever since the age of eight, I read a story in The Hotspur, remember The Hotspur about a man called Scoop Mallory, Ace Reporter, and I vowed there and then that I was going to be a journalist. And at the age of ten, I must have been being interviewed for the grammar school, you know, in the scholarship days. It was the first year of the war. And we had the interview for some reason on Weatherby Station in Cumberland in the waiting room, which was open. Just me and the headmaster, Ebenezer Rhys Thomas. And he said, What are you going to be when you grow up, Brian? And I said, A reporter, a newspaper reporter. And he looked very pained.

Brian Redhead1:16

What what was it do you think about the job that attracted you? Was it the glamour of the job? The nosiness. I mean incorrigible gossip, and that's all journalism is, isn't it? It's kind of structured gossip that you get paid for. And I've always been nosy, always wanted to know what was going on.

Brian Redhead1:30

When you start as a journalist, you remember this, when you do your first bit going to the, you know, the courts and the things you wouldn't go to as a sort of proper human being, you realize it's the life for you. You know so much, you feel so cocky, you go around and saying, but I knew about that because I saw him sent to prison. Let's have a first choice of record, Brown, please. Right, the Benny Goodman trio playing Body and Soul. This will remind you, me, of school dances. Now, I used to lead the school dance band, and in Penrith we were evacuated, and there was a slender girl and a plump girl who we used to call Body and Soul, and I used to grin at them and play this.

Presenter3:04

Benny Goodman Trio and Body and Soul.

Presenter3:06

Brian, what kind of a background did you you come from? What do your parents do? Yeah.

Brian Redhead3:10

My father was a silk screen printer, I think, in his earliest days, but he and his brother had an advertising agency in Newcastle-Mon-Tyne. And I know he used to say that one of the first jobs he had was to go and post bills for George and Alfred Black, who started in Newcastle. And he went into Chopwell in County Durham in 1926 during the general strike, and they wouldn't let him in, because they said Chopwell is the first Soviet in Britain. So he said, well, take me to the Commissar. And it was Will Lawther.

Brian Redhead3:36

You're the the only child, I've never seen it. Yes, I was the only child. Were you a bright child?

Brian Redhead3:40

Yeah.

Presenter3:41

Yeah.

Brian Redhead3:41

Yeah

Presenter3:41

Why'd you say it sadly?

Brian Redhead3:43

Well, I mean it all sounds cocky, but yes, I mean I I could pass exam

Presenter3:45

Mm.

Brian Redhead3:46

I'm stunned.

Presenter3:46

What about music in in all this background of yours? Was it a very musical family or what?

Brian Redhead3:51

Uh

Presenter3:52

Yeah.

Brian Redhead3:52

Well, my father wasn't, though he liked music. My mother liked music very much. My mother's brother, who died not so very long ago, I always say of him that he worked in the town hall for 40 years, lived in the same house for 50 years, and sang in the cathedral in Newcastle for 60 years. And there was that great tradition in the family of singing, but I couldn't sing. And so when I went to the grammar school and it was evacuated from Newcastle to Penrith, the great thing was the school was very keen on music. And if you showed any interest at all, not aptitude, just interest, you got the chance, and that's how I came to learn the clarinet. And I was taught by a boy called Jimmy Lickley, which is a great name for a clarinet teacher. But why clarinet particularly?

Presenter4:08

Yeah. Uh

Brian Redhead4:30

I think because I'd once seen Harry Roy at the Newcastle Empire.

Brian Redhead4:35

And you made your radio debut at playing clarinet, didn't you, at the age of 11? Yes, on Children's Hour. In fact, if we play the second record now, that is it, because the first thing I ever played in public, and almost the last incident, was I played the Mozart Clarinet Trio in E-flat when I was 12 in the Wordsworth Hall in Penrith. And I was so small, my feet wouldn't touch the floor when I sat on the channel. I was terrified. And there were two rather in the sort of upper de camp sixth formers playing the viola and the piano. But truth to tell, I was better than them. This one is Jack Brimer's recording.

Presenter6:07

I have to report that that piece of music has left Brian Redhead awash in nostalgia. You really enjoyed that, didn't you?

Brian Redhead6:12

Oh, it was lovely. Then I played it on Children's Eye, you see. And I remember going home in the trolley bus from the old studio they had in Newcastle and thinking, I wonder if the people on this bus realize that there's a famous musician among them.

Presenter6:14

Zoof

Presenter6:24

A star.

Presenter6:26

Before you went to university you went in the army. The debted national service caught up with you. Do you enjoy it?

Brian Redhead6:31

Fine.

Presenter6:32

Uh

Brian Redhead6:32

Did very

Presenter6:32

Very much.

Brian Redhead6:32

Well I went first in the Fenham Barracks in Newcastle so I could go home in the trolley bus which was comfortable and then I went to the Southern Command Drama Company as a sort of stage manager and actor and we toured all the cathedral towns of the south of England, none of which I've ever seen. So I saw all those and played in I can't remember the play we played, it was awful. And then I got posted to Singapore, to an army education centre in Singapore and I worked part-time for Radio Malaya. I used to say this is Sergeant Brian Redhead, introducing the records that you have chosen. And then I used to play things I'd chosen. You're a diss jockey, were you? Yep. Oh, wonderful.

Presenter7:05

Galai

Presenter7:08

You have to play nothing but

Brian Redhead7:09

Uh

Presenter7:09

Uh

Brian Redhead7:09

Uka

Presenter7:09

Yeah.

Brian Redhead7:09

Yeah.

Presenter7:09

That was a marvellous two years because most people I suppose who did national service regarded it as being a total waste of time. In your case, of course, it wasn't. It was career enhancing in a way.

Brian Redhead7:18

Well, yeah, I wouldn't have thought of it in those terms, but I've very much have been a person who lives in the present, always. And that's why I didn't think, oh, dear me, I'm wasting my time in the army and I should be going to university. I just thought, if you're in the army and they're paying, you might as well enjoy it. And then I went I got a bit bored and I went absent without leave to Australia and toured around all over Darwin, Alice Springs, Adelaide. Then I got arrested and I was brought back and I was court-martialled for being absent, but I defended myself and got off.

Brian Redhead7:46

That sounds like a novel, actually. It might well be yet.

Presenter7:48

Yeah.

Presenter7:49

When you came then out of the army equipped with all these adventures, did you then go to university or do you start in journalism at that point?

Brian Redhead7:57

I was trying to go to Cambridge and I had a place, but there was such chaos, if you remember, then, because they'd altered the time of national service so much. They had too many people trying to get in at the same time, and my college said, Would you mind waiting? and I didn't mind at all, and I went off and worked for a paper called the Whitley Bay Seaside Chronicle and then for the Newcastle Evening Chronicle.

Presenter8:14

What was it

Brian Redhead8:15

Whitley based seaside chronicle. I sound like a

Presenter8:16

Don't

Brian Redhead8:17

Oh, it was a great, it was a great, great newspaper. What did you do on it? The first week I was on it, I remember the other reporters all had flu and I wrote practically all of it. But we had a good and eccentric editor, a lovely old-fashioned journalist who was always full of new theories to create new shorthands and devoted most of his time to that. We had an old, hard-drinking reporter called Jimmy Lackenby, who really taught me how you go about the job properly. We'd have three of us young ones, one called Neville Jackson, who's now, I think, with Tin T's, a news editor.

Presenter8:18

I listened.

Brian Redhead8:45

Very pretty girl called Audrey Elder and me. And we've got a lovely life. I just I got two pound nine a week.

Brian Redhead8:53

But it's exciting to see your own stuff in print, even if it is just about a court case. And if you start on a little local, you can't get anything wrong, because the people you're writing about you meet on the pavement. So you've really got to be accurate. And it's as good a training as any. And also, of course, in those days I mean, they don't do it now. You either get industrial tribunals or people having nervous breakdowns. But in those days, if I may use the correct word, you could get severely bollocked for anything you got wrong.

Presenter9:17

Yeah.

Presenter9:19

And then of course after University on to Manchester. Before we go to Manchester let's uh let's have a record.

Brian Redhead9:23

Well this is the one bit of music I was never allowed to play in public and which I could never play. And I tried very hard. There's something about Brahms that even though you know all the notes and you think you've got it right, you always finish up at cross purposes with the other people who are playing. So here properly played the slow movement of the Brahms clarinet quintet and the clarinetist is a bloke called Jacques Lancelot, Frenchman, he makes a beautiful sound.

Presenter10:41

Brown, how important was it to you in your career as a journalist to get a job in The Guardian? Then the Manchester Guardian, of course.

Brian Redhead10:48

Yeah.

Presenter10:48

Yeah.

Brian Redhead10:48

Well, it goes on but I didn't believe it. I mean we all applied, all the bright little lads running round Cambridge at the time, well we all applied and I got it and I couldn't believe my luck. And the only reason I think I got it was because I'd already had some concrete experience on newspapers and I dreamed about for days what would it be like to work on the Great Manchester Guardian. I remember the first day going into the reporter's room and I was introduced round and a very distinguished man in the corner with that kind of moustache people have who take gentlemen's relish was introduced to me as Norman Shrapnel. And I'd read him and I'd worship him. I was terrified. To be quite honest, for the first six months I shook every time I wrote anything in case it wasn't good enough.

Presenter11:25

It was a very special school of journalism, wasn't it?

Brian Redhead11:29

It was Like no other I mean you always say that about the golden age of being there, but I don't think there has ever been or will be now, because the new technology seems to be destroying English prose, there will never be a paper where people cared so deeply about the way in which they wrote something.

Presenter11:45

And of course it lost an awful lot, I thought, too, when it became The Guardian and not Manchester Guardian. I wonder if you'd agree with that to start with, and if you if you did, could you define what it was that it lost?

Brian Redhead11:56

changed, to be fair, and it is obviously now a much more comprehensive newspaper than ever it was as the Manchester Guardian. Manchester Guardian only covered those things that it wanted to cover. It didn't cover everything that ought to be covered to be a complete newspaper. But what it lost was some special kind of

Presenter12:05

Mm-hmm.

Brian Redhead12:13

Near academic thing. It could be a bit prissy. We used to have a great joke when I became a leader writer, for instance, that if you couldn't think of anything to say at the end of a leader you were writing, all you said was, but the situation at the Peak Park Planning Board is acute. And that would serve for all purposes. So it did have its own self-parody, but it was intellectually very rigorous, I think. Did you want to edit The Guardian? Yes, very much. The Manchester Guardian. Yes. Funnily enough, for a long time I never thought I would be considered. And by the time I was being considered and then rejected, it wasn't The Manchester Guardian anymore. So in a sense, the happiest days I had with The Guardian were the years I had as northern editor when The Guardian had become The Guardian and the editor was in London and I was in charge of the Manchester end of it. And that was.

Presenter12:56

Yeah.

Brian Redhead13:00

Almost, you know, a bit like being C.P. Scott, but without the terrible responsibility.

Presenter13:04

You edited, of course, the sister newspaper, the profitable end of the organization, about the Manchester Evening News, for about six years, didn't you? Did you enjoy the process of being an editor?

Presenter13:14

Yeah.

Brian Redhead13:14

Yes, at first. The first year was super because I changed it. I changed it the first Monday I was there. I mean, I decided that it had been set in its ways for quite a long time. It had a very secure readership, or so it seemed, and I would have a go and produce the evening paper I wanted. So I changed the masthead, the typography, the layout of pages, the sort of weight we gave to stories, increased the comment in the paper, added a city section, did all the things that anybody else would want to do. The readers were outraged at first, but they grew to like it, and the circulation held, and the profits, not because of me, obviously, but because of the general management approach to it, the profit doubled. So we did that. Then we moved it to a new building. That was the most fascinating weekend I've ever spent. We were doing the football final on the Saturday afternoon. We had this amazing firm of removal people who specialized in moving newspapers. And as we finished setting the football, the liner-type machines came out of the window and went on trolleys along Cross Street like Daleks. And the lads who were doing all the work were Aussies on their way to the Munich Beer Festival. And they were all asleep. They were so tired. But you just smacked them and they picked up and carried two huge filing cabinets each under their arms and tramped down the streets. Quite astonishing exercise. And we were in press on time on the Monday. Let's have another choice of record. Well, I think this is very Manchester, although it's a Leningrad orchestra. But when I was at the news, I used to go to Halley all the time, Sunday concert and Thursday concerts. And I used to look forward to Arvid Janssens coming and conducting a Tchaikovsky symphony because he made a noise with the orchestra that nobody else made. Sadly, I can't find a record by Janssens, but he was a conductor of the Leningrad Philharmonic. So here is the Leningrad Philharmonic, not conducted by him, playing that marvelous bit towards the end of Tchaikovsky's fourth symphony, where he has to stop the orchestra twice. And Janssens used to do it by clenching his fists, and it used to make your heart stop.

Presenter16:02

I suppose looking back Brown there's one moment in your life when your entire career could have changed and that's when you were invited down to London to join the Tonight team.

Presenter16:10

Now, Tonight at that time was indisputably the best programme of its kind on on television. Anybody who appeared in it became instantly a star and a and a household face and name. What happened with your career there?

Brian Redhead16:24

I had always done, at least, I had done since about 1958 or 9. I'd done television in Manchester. I did a programme called Something to Read, which was a book programme. We'd do it live immediately after Andy Pandy. For years, I couldn't hear the Andy Pandy tune without feeling sick. And then I'd done quite a successful programme called Points North. I think you came on. I did it with you, that's right.

Presenter16:45

Yeah.

Brian Redhead16:46

Television debut, as they say. So I got asked to go and do Tonight. Now, Tonight was a great programme, it's true, and there was an incredibly talented bunch of people on it, if you think. I mean, not just Cliff Mitchellmore and Derek Hart and Kenneth Orsop and Slim Hewitt and Wicker and Fife Robertson are extraordinary. And it was overstuffed. There wasn't anything to do. I used to reckon I did a two and a half minute day and I got paid two pounds a second. Now, as I was used to working about a 16-hour day, I was bored stiff.

Presenter17:08

Uh

Brian Redhead17:12

So after a year, I signed a three-year contract, and after a year I said, please, I would like to depart, and I went back to the Guardian.

Presenter17:17

Was there also a sense too, of course, where you were perhaps the sort of n brash northerner coming into this sort of little uh well established group? Yeah.

Brian Redhead17:24

They had a golden age mentality already by then, they were looking back. And of course, tact is not one of my virtues.

Presenter17:26

Already

Brian Redhead17:31

So I bounced in and said, The programme's all right, it'd be better if you did A, B and C. And that didn't go down very well.

Brian Redhead17:37

Did the experience sour you at all? No, I don't think so. I'm difficult to suppress. I was very excited living in London. I'd not lived in London before, you see, and we had a house on Ham Common and arrived with two children and and then we had twins while we were in London. So there was heaps going on in my family life. And it was lovely, of course. I had lots of time at home because I really wasn't very hard worked at all. But I was bored.

Presenter17:59

Do you think you might have enjoyed I mean, you've become famous, but you've not had that kind of instant recognition fame that's prevented you doing your job as a journalist. I mean, d do you see the problems involved in being the celebrity journalist?

Brian Redhead18:10

I have tried very hard not to become a celebrity. John Timpson is like that too. John, you know, is a marvellously self-effacing bloke. And it seems to me that it does damaging. If you're particularly on television, if you're not careful, you begin to behave like a fella looking in the mirror all the time. And you start doing impressions of yourself and you finish up not knowing who you are. Now, I've always thought that's dangerous. And the great thing about radio is you can't get corrupted like that. You see, radio is like work. It's proper work. It's like being a journalist. It is being a journalist. So I think there's a lot to be said for sticking to that. Let's have a new choice of record. Well, now, I'm not a singer at all. I mean, I can't sing in tune.

Presenter18:28

And you finish on

Brian Redhead18:47

But my eldest son can, indeed all my children can, and therefore I began to get interested in singing when I had children. And the first concert at Stephen's School this is Cheelyhume School and Warehousemans, you know, Manster where all my kids went, the first thing I remember hearing them perform was the Foray Requiem. So here's the Kidier from the Foray Requiem, sung by the King's College, Cambridge choir and David Wilcox conducting and making a splendid Anglican noise.

Speaker 419:15

They want us there.

Speaker 419:24

Let's teach you the day.

Speaker 419:29

All we can do.

Speaker 419:36

It's a very good idea.

Presenter20:11

Round, let's now talk about today and your involvement in it. I mean, it's not so much a programme, it's part of the British way of life, isn't it? It's an institution. How did it it come about that you joined?

Brian Redhead20:21

Yeah. The institution you're talking about, John Timpson. Well, I left is the polite word. I actually got fired as editor of the Manchester Evening News, and I decided there and then at 45 that I would become a freelance. I funked it really in my early 30s when I'd gone to the Tonight programme. I could have done it then, and I went back into, as it were, newspaper management and editing and things. So I decided to become a freelance. But you have to eat. And the first three months I was freelancing, I had a lovely life. I went to Miami, I remember, to give a lecture, and I did up after three months, and I'd spent exactly three times what I'd earned. So I thought, this is not sensible. I better get something a little more regular. And today it asked me, and I thought, I don't want to get up at that hour of the morning. But I went to see them, and there were a couple of very nice blokes that I met. And I was persuaded instantly by them. Then I met John, and I thought, right, I'll have a go at it. And I only signed on for three months at first because I didn't know whether I would find getting up in the morning so awful that I wouldn't be articulate, wouldn't be able to speak at all. In fact, I find it effortless. I'd like getting up early in the morning. And I've now done it, what, over ten years? And I shall go on doing it as long as they ask me. Why?

Presenter21:23

I should go on.

Brian Redhead21:27

Well, it's the nicest kind of journalism. The best journalism is daily journalism. Weekly things come round too quickly. You don't seem to be ready for it before it's upon you. A daily journalism has a lovely, steady routine and you've got to keep yourself up to date because you automatically top yourself up every morning.

Brian Redhead21:44

Everybody who matters, that's impolite. Most of the people in the country who seem to be interested in things and take decisions about things appear to listen to the Today programme. So you feel there's a constituency there, an audience of following the same people there every day. You know that if you've said something stupid or you've gone over the top, they'll say, What in earth's got into him this morning and forgive you and you can make amends the next morning. And it is it's a marvellous job. I think it fits me like a glove. I mean, I say that not meaning that I think I do it well or anything, but I'm happy doing it. I sit there gurgling with happiness and thinking, right, I will now tell the nation what I think about the budget.

Presenter22:19

What about that relationship that you have, though, with the public? It's it seems to me that there's a much more, generally speaking, direct relationship through radio to the listener than there is, say, in television to the viewer.

Brian Redhead22:28

Uh

Presenter22:29

Yeah.

Brian Redhead22:29

Well

Presenter22:29

Yeah.

Brian Redhead22:29

Radio 4 is the best channel of the spoken word in the world. And it's not because of people like you and me that contributed to it. We're just lucky to, you know, privileged to have the opportunity. It's because it seems to have an audience more interested in its output, more engaged in what it does than any other channel. Everywhere else is, you know, amusing, decorative background music, all right, fills in the hour and so on. But there's something about the audience in Radio 4 that makes it worth working for. When my younger son was killed in a car accident, you could not believe the letters. I had 2,000 letters. And we used to sit, I mean, you know, shattered family, we used to sit round the kitchen table reading them. And the other kids were saying, if they feel like this about you, Dad, you've got to stay in that job. Now, that is very moving. And it's, you know, the letters were a source of great comfort and strength at a really, very difficult time.

Brian Redhead23:20

Another choice of record, please, bruh.

Brian Redhead23:23

I've always liked jazz singers, women jazz singers. I once was waiting for the lift in the Algonquin in New York and it opened and Ella Fitzgerald stepped out and I I was me, I was dumbstruck. And as she was followed by Oscar Peterson and Joe Pass, you can imagine how I felt. I like her, I like Billie Holiday, but I think the greatest of them all is Sarah Vaughan. And I found a track on one of my favourite records and the track is More Than You Know and it's Sarah Vaughan and Oscar Peterson.

Speaker 423:50

We are

Speaker 423:53

Man of my

Brian Redhead23:54

Yeah.

Speaker 423:58

I'll string along

Speaker 424:04

You need me so more than you've ever

Speaker 424:12

More than you will ever know

Presenter24:18

Sir Borne and Oscar Peterson.

Presenter24:21

Brian, although you work down here in in London, uh three or four days of the week now on the Today programme, you're based firmly in the north. You've always had your roots up there and kept them up there. Why is that?

Brian Redhead24:29

Yeah.

Brian Redhead24:30

Well, I feel at home up there very simply. I we tried we had three years in London, then went back north, and we wondered whether to move further south again when I was working on today, but then it seemed all wrong, so we stayed where we were. I like living in the Pennines particularly. It seems to me that's the real division between north and south physically. The north is the bit that's commanded by the Pennines, and the south is the rest. And there's something about those strange treeless hills, you know, that are so bleak at two thousand feet, that I like very much. I love driving just across into Buxton from where I live.

Brian Redhead25:00

I'm going to hear Stephan Grappelli at the Buxton Opera House quite soon. And to come out of that at night, come out of that little theatre at eleven o'clock at night, and come across those hills, if the moon is up, is marvellous.

Presenter25:10

What about the other divisions of a t

Brian Redhead25:12

Well, what you have to remember is that if you are in gainful employment in the north of England, you can actually lead a fuller life than you can in the south. I mean, if you're in gainful employment somewhere in Greater Manchester, you've got better music, instant theatres all around you, better football, better cricket, better schools, and very easily to get to them. I always feel sorry people in the southeast who have to spend so much time and so much money travelling. But if you're out of work, and of course you're much more likely to be out of work in the north, if you live in Liverpool or Hartlepool or wherever, then it seems to me things are very difficult, and we've not faced up to that at all as a nation. You see, in Sweden, when they close their shipyards, they've only got 3% unemployment, and Volvo and Saab instantly set up factories where the shipyard workers are, but we close shipyards and nobody's rushing there with new work, and there's far too much unemployment.

Presenter26:02

Will the politicians solve it, do you think? I ask you this question because you meet them daily. You talk to them, you move in their circles. I don't see.

Brian Redhead26:09

at the moment the political will anywhere to restore full employment. And I would regard that personally as number one priority of all policies. But that it can be done, I do not doubt. There are right wing answers and left wing answers to it. Whether we have the political will to do it is another matter.

Presenter26:24

Miller chose a recognition.

Brian Redhead26:26

Oh, ha ha steal yourself.

Brian Redhead26:29

Harrison Bertwistle, composer from Accrington. As you know, Manchester had.

Brian Redhead26:34

A better crop of modern composers than any other town in the country in the post-war period. Harry Birtwistle was one of them, Peter Maxwell Davis, and people like that. Harry wrote this thing, I imagine that I've had the record for 10 or 12 years, and he's now got this opera Orpheus, and I see this as really early work for that opera. It's called Nenia the Death of Orpheus. It's sung by Jane Manning, who is the most remarkable soprano. She can hit notes without a jump at them, I mean, from a standing position. Matrix, Alan Hacker, are three bass clarinets.

Brian Redhead27:05

Imagine having read Midsummer Night's Dream, sitting in your desert island, and hearing this.

Speaker 427:17

Team

Speaker 427:20

Hunted chill plays.

Speaker 427:30

Move Chen is your father Chen.

Speaker 427:42

Joe!

Speaker 427:48

Some Sotom.

Speaker 427:56

Yeah.

Brian Redhead28:00

I love that high note in the ch

Presenter28:01

He says sort of.

Presenter28:04

Brian, you've had a lifetime uh in journalism and you've got many more years left, one one hopes.

Brian Redhead28:10

What plans do you have now? Well, I would just like to go on doing what I'm doing, please, sir. I mean, I love doing today, and until they tell me to shut up and they've had enough of me, I shall go on doing it. I like doing the kind of things I'm allowed to do on Radio 4. I do a quarterly report on employment called Workforce. I do a word in Edgar still, now age 21, would you believe? I am busy at the moment, as you may know, on a series about the Bible called The Good Book, which I've enjoyed at making. I haven't finished yet, but I've enjoyed making it hugely. I'm hoping to do something on Islam, because I would like to understand Islamic things. And one of the great men I've interviewed during the Bible series was an Islamic scholar who was a most holy man. I would like in 89 to do something on the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution.

Brian Redhead28:53

It's high time somebody did something good on Coleridge. I've really got quite a lot of thoughts.

Presenter28:57

That sort of final choice of record.

Brian Redhead28:59

Well, I think still that the greatest piece of music ever written in the sense that it's the piece of music which reaches out to kind of infinity.

Brian Redhead29:08

if not indeed to eternity, is the Beethoven Quartet Opus a hundred and thirty one. I have an old and much scratched recording by the Fine Arts Quartet, but I still think they get to the heart of it perhaps better than anyone else.

Presenter30:23

Brown, we've now finally reached your desert island. Now, would you be any good on this island? Hopeless. I am the non do it yourself man.

Presenter30:30

What about people to talk to? I mean that occurs to me knowing you as I do that that would be a dreadful problem for you.

Brian Redhead30:36

You mean if I were silent you'd know I was dead, that's right. Um well I talk to myself a lot. You do. As you can imagine. Yes, I do.'Cause when I'm alone in the flat in London I talk all the time. I'll get arrested one day.

Presenter30:46

Now what about records? We've got one record from the eight to pick, one that you'd like to keep if the other seven were washed away.

Brian Redhead30:52

Well, in theory it ought to be the Beethoven in the sense that I do think that is the most important music ever written. But I think probably for company the Brahms clarinet quintet.

Brian Redhead31:02

And the book, the one book you're you see, this solves the problem of who to talk to.

Speaker 431:04

Yeah.

Presenter31:05

Yeah.

Brian Redhead31:08

I'm one of the the many, I imagine, who are delighted that the Bible is already there, because obviously you can work hard on that.

Brian Redhead31:14

I've been reading or using Peake's commentary on the Bible while I've been working on these Bible programmes. And I don't know if you know Peake's commentary, it's a great fat sort of encyclopedia of Bible studies by amazingly clever people, H. H. Rowley and F. F. Bruce, and people like that. And I would feel that they were good companions. So I think the thing to do is to take that and have the Bible, then you can read a bit of the Bible, read what one of those said, disagree with him, go back to the Bible, and you could really have a dialogue going. And what about the luxury object?

Brian Redhead31:44

Did think of a

Brian Redhead31:45

Cardboard cut out of John Timpson, but I tell you what I would really like. If I were to ring Mark Tully in Delhi and he had a word with Rajiv Gandhi, I would like the Taj Mahal, because I think it's wasted where it is. It's the most beautiful building in the world. Imagine if you had it on a desert island to yourself. You could sit in it and read the Bible in Peek's Commentary. When you turned up your toes, eventually you could be laid out in it. I mean, you could lay yourself out in it, because it is a mausoleum. And in a thousand years, people would come and they would say, How did that funny little bloke build that thing all by himself?

Presenter32:18

Brahmrathe, thank you very much indeed.

Speaker 332:27

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