Peter Fluck & Roger Law

Speaker 30:00

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 seven, and the presenter was Michael Parkinson.

Presenter0:29

There are many people who would be delighted to hear the news that our two guests today were to be marooned on a desert island. Indeed, some would gladly volunteer to arrange the matter. Then again, there'd been many people greatly saddened by the news, because it'd mean the end of their favourite television programme. Spitting Image is the programme, vulgar and crude to some, to others the funniest programme on the box by a mile. The originators of Spitting Image are Peter Fluck and Roger Law.

Presenter0:55

Gentlemen, first of all, let's let's establish

Presenter0:58

What you look like, because you're well known, but you're not instantly recognisable to the general public. So let me ask you to do to yourselves what you do to others, which is to invent a sort of caricature of yourselves. Roger, can I ask you, if you were going to do as a spitting image, Peter there, what would Peter look like? Peter would be very easy, I'm afraid, to say. He looks rather like an emaciated prune, a sort of blonde version of Barry Norman. And uh you add the ears and the long nose and there you have it.

Presenter1:25

Peter? Well, I think that after that, I mean I think Roger could only be portrayed as a rather bloated version of Bluto from Popeye, but with large red staring eyes, rather like traffic lights. Let's now talk about this desert island. I mean, you've worked together for a long, long time now. Would you in fact get along? No, I think what we've got to do, we've got to split the island by the high tide. So when the high tide comes in, we get some part of the day where we're separate.

Peter Fluck1:41

There are others.

Presenter1:48

Why?

Presenter1:50

Well, we do work very successfully together and we manage to irritate each other very successfully. And I think the thought of being stuck on a desert island with just Roger, or just stuck there with him, is absolutely unbearable. We do demand two islands. You do, his and his. Yes, his and his. Now what about musical tastes then? Because here you've you've got eight records to take with you on this desert island. Do you have similar musical tastes?

Peter Fluck2:01

Dude, we're doing

Peter Fluck2:05

The hey.

Presenter2:14

No, I wouldn't say that. I mean, I I like quite a lot of classical music, particularly of a rather melancholy kind that suits me.

Presenter2:19

I like uh quite a lot of rock music and and some jazz. And and Roger, what about you? I don't really like music actually. When we worked in Cambridge for all those years, music was banned.

Presenter2:30

Why? Because you do your best work to talk, not music. All right. Now are we agreed on the first record?

Presenter2:37

Yes, the first record is Jimmy Yancey playing The Rocks. This is a record we remember.

Presenter2:42

very well from our art school days, where this sort of um early jazz piano suited the lifestyle of the time.

Presenter3:50

That's the marvellous Jimmy Yancey and the Rocks.

Presenter3:54

Gentlemen, it seems that spinning image now is a is a huge industry. You're coming no longer regarded as a a kind of love child of your imagination. I mean, it's how many people do you employ now?

Presenter4:05

Well, we have a workshop which is filled with people with the varying skills that we need. The whole place is rather like a sausage factory. It's very difficult to keep it organised because if you're not careful, the sausages will start coming out without skins on. Yes. When we're doing the series for this country, we employ about 20 to 25 people in the workshop. That's skilled people and in administration. And of course, it's a very expensive business, too, isn't it? I mean, how much does each show cost? Well, I think it's somewhere in the region of 200,000 for each programme, and that really includes every last roll of seller tape. Is this what you actually wanted to do? I mean, have you reached the peak of your ambition? Well, what we wanted to do originally was a half an hour satirical political show, which was patently not wanted. People queued up to turn it off.

Peter Fluck4:41

Well what we want you to do

Presenter4:50

By the time we got a team together that could actually make a program, it was very much a team thing, and that's what it is. It's very frustrating'cause it's no one's programme, it's everybody's programme.

Presenter5:00

Where do you take it from this point though? I mean, other other offshoots. I mean, what about, for instance, uh sort of feature movies and things like that? I mean, is it possible? Yes, there is a feature film in the offing. I mean, we're in a state of change because the production side uh

Peter Fluck5:07

Yes, there

Presenter5:13

In Central was all supplied, and now we have become a production company. And what about overseas markets? I mean, does this kind of humour, which is much beloved in this country, does it transfer to other markets, particularly America? Well, we're not really sure yet. We have done an hours programme for America, which we're told was quite well received. But we're very conscious of the fact that American humour is different from ours, and that they look at their leaders in a different way. They like their leaders to be heroes, and don't necessarily like them to be satirised.

Speaker 45:40

To be satirical.

Presenter5:42

So he said, Well

Presenter5:43

What do you say to that?

Speaker 45:45

Uh

Presenter5:47

Right. What about the next choice of records?

Presenter5:50

Well, Lorraine Ellison stayed with me baby, where we enjoyed ourselves in the sixties, obviously because we were young.

Peter Fluck5:56

Where did you go?

Peter Fluck6:03

When things went wrong they were

Peter Fluck6:08

Who did you run to And find a shoulder to lay your head upon Baby who was not there?

Presenter6:24

As Lorraine Ellison and Stay With Me Baby.

Presenter6:27

Can I ask you both now about your your background? You you both came from the same part of the county, didn't you? Roger. Yes, I come from the Fens. And you, Peter? I come from Cambridge itself. So were your backgrounds very similar?

Presenter6:39

No, quite dissimilar actually. I'm really rather like Leslie Titmuss in John Morton's Paradise Postponed. My my parents were both in service. My father was a gardener. My mother was in service. I think the only difference is it's quite obvious I'm not going to become a cabinet minister. What about you, Roger? Well my father was a sort of working class early Thatcherite. He was completely addicted to work.

Peter Fluck6:55

Well my father

Presenter7:01

Actually that's unfair. He was a very nice man too. What was his job? He was a builder, and he built contract buildings very, very fast indeed.

Presenter7:08

And I was always looking at a way not to have to work on Law Brothers, and that's why I escaped to our school. Was there in any of your background any suggestion of art? I mean, anybody in your family who were clever at drawing or painting or whatever? No, in my family it was something that the door was shut very firmly on. But as I went through grammar school and failed quite patently every subject they put in front of me, it was noticed that I did come top in the art classes. So hence art school and a career as a commercial artist. And what about your school days, Roy? Well if you can only write in capital letters.

Peter Fluck7:39

Well I'm f

Presenter7:42

I mean, it doesn't leave an awful lot. The secondary modern school I went to

Presenter7:46

I didn't take much notice of. I think the last thing they said to me was, um, Well, wherever you go, Roger, we hope you learn some manners, and as you can see, I have. I thought you ate that school.

Peter Fluck7:53

Yeah.

Peter Fluck7:54

I thought you

Presenter7:57

So in those days in secondary school, it was clear to you, was it, that art was going to be your ambition, was going to be your ambition, it was uh a way out. You could get to art school in those days, and I can't really understand why you can't now.

Peter Fluck8:02

No, it's Maryam.

Presenter8:09

With no O levels. You just went in with a batch of drawings.

Presenter8:13

And if they thought they could do something with you, they took you on. Things have changed very much actually because now it is very difficult to get into art school without enough qualifications. We can in fact

Presenter8:22

teach in art schools, but we couldn't get into one as a student.

Presenter8:26

That's rather absurd, isn't it? It is absurd. And this is where you first met then, is it? We met at Cambridge Art School.

Peter Fluck8:30

We met

Presenter8:32

And when you first met, did you become friends immediately? I suppose so, yes. Not having much of an eye to the future, we did careless things in those days.

Presenter8:44

Let's have another choice of music. Uh the next one is one that I like very much. It's um Cassal's playing Bach's Cello Suite, number six. It's a piece of music I've always liked very and there's a particular section in the middle that always makes me think of Bruegel Pictures or those dancing peasants having a great time drinking wonderful beer.

Presenter10:02

That was Bach's cello suite, number six in D major, played by Pablo Casals.

Presenter10:07

Going back to this uh time at art school in in Cambridge, were there any particular people there who influenced you? When you look back, you think, Yes, that was a key sort of figure in my development as an artist? Well yes, we I mean when we went there, it was a fine art course.

Peter Fluck10:17

Yeah.

Presenter10:20

And we had a wonderful time live to our own plant drawing in a traditional art school way. But I had in the middle of the... It was a school that was still run in the way that they'd been run in about nineteen twenty. But we both wanted to be commercial artists. And I think that when Paul Hogarth arrived, and also a new principal called Alec Heath, who was one of the designers that came out of the camouflage unit in the war.

Peter Fluck10:25

It was a school

Peter Fluck10:29

Yeah, team.

Presenter10:41

you could actually see there was a way to earn a living.

Presenter10:48

One sort of knowledge of illustration at that time was really restricted to drawings in the Radio Times. Yes. And this man turned up and he showed us books he'd done on travels round the world. He'd been behind the Iron Curtain, done drawings of China and Russia, doing drawings of ordinary people. Fantastic book on South Africa.

Peter Fluck11:01

Rush

Presenter11:06

And suddenly there was a man who was doing something you never knew was possible.

Presenter11:10

He also had a a vast collection of uh books which he introduced us to.

Presenter11:15

And personally speaking that's where I saw the first really strong caricatures. Can you remember who it was, whose work? It was work done by French artists Turn of a Century in a magazine I can never pronounce called La Sierra de Beux. The Butterdish. The Butterdish. The Gravy Train. And what appealed to you about the caricature?

Presenter11:32

Well it was meant, it was beautifully done, it served a purpose. Rude. And very rude. And from what one could work out later, was successful.

Peter Fluck11:37

And very rude.

Presenter11:42

That the public liked it. Now, what about other influences at the time? Because here you are, you're in Cambridge at a university city. Did the university life at all impinge upon you? Well, Heath, the principal, brought in university lecturers for art history, and gradually we got more enmeshed with the university. We both worked on Granto, the Cambridge University magazine. And we rented our first business from Peter Cook called East Anglian Artists. That's right. Well, we rented the premises, the business was ours. But Cambridge was a very good place to be as an art student because at that time the university students still had to wear gowns.

Presenter12:15

So all you had to do was to steal a gown, which wasn't difficult, and that would give you immediate entry to any lecture you wanted to go to. We didn't understand them, but we used to go to them.

Presenter12:25

You were also waiters there, weren't you at Trinity for a while? Yeah we made history at Trinity because uh we were known as black and white, the waiters, and uh we used to get in there and get out quickly because it was very boring. If they were talking you'd spill the soup down in there so that you could actually get it on the table. And uh they wrote a pamphlet about who will rid of these gypsies at our necks and Trinity became uh self-service.

Peter Fluck12:27

We made history.

Presenter12:47

Normal work. Right, another choice of record.

Presenter12:51

Well this is Please Mrs. Henry by Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan's been with us I mean he's roughly the same age. I love this record because it always reminds me of the trouble we had with landladies in the early days, both in Cambridge and in London.

Peter Fluck13:05

Now don't cry me lady or I'll fill up your shoe. I'm a sweet bourbon daddy and tonight I am blue. I'm a thousand years old, I'm a generous mom. I'm T-bone and punctured, I've been known to be calm. Please, Mrs. Henry, Mrs. Henry, please, please, Mrs. Henry, Mrs. Henry, please. I'm down on my knees and I ain't gotta die.

Presenter13:36

Bob Dylan and Please misses Henry.

Presenter13:39

Come and I'll talk about uh

Presenter13:41

After Cambridge, you went to London and it was swinging sixties, all that was was happening. Did you take it by storm? No, not at all. You left art school.

Presenter13:50

and went to London. I went to London without any prospect of any work at all, stayed with friends. In fact I stayed in the same house that Roger was staying in.

Presenter13:58

And you just sort of tried to launch yourself as a freelance illustrator, which was really very pleasurable. We got work.

Presenter14:05

You could go out to restaurants, actually buy clothes. Everything was possible. Everything was very nice indeed. I think the sixties was a period when.

Presenter14:13

People worked very hard to spend the money that had been earned in the fifties. Were there again though people in London at that time who became your patrons, who helped you particularly? Peter Cook did. I mean I was very fortunate. I did a strip cartoon called Almost the End and I can tell you it was. David asked to quickly put a halt to it.

Presenter14:31

And I also worked for the establishment nightclub. I used to do fourteen feet of drawing a week.

Presenter14:36

with sort of vicious bits of gossip supplied by Tom Dryberg, who was another supporter.

Peter Fluck14:41

Yeah.

Presenter14:52

And one on unemployment in West Hartlepool. That's of course how your name came to the front, first of all, through Journal of the Times, Observer and various other magazines and things like that. Can I jump forward now to the point where the models came into your lives? How did they in fact happen? What was the starting point? Peter's right. I mean, the experience of illustrators after the war was very much small black and white drawings. By the time we got to London, things were opening up.

Presenter15:19

And people really didn't have experience of doing double colour spreads and stuff.

Peter Fluck15:23

But it was

Presenter15:25

First glossy magazines were coming out with colour pages and they're beautifully printed. And glossy taught us to work as as artists, as journalists, and the only work you ever got was uh drawn from memory, court scenes.

Peter Fluck15:26

Yes, yes.

Peter Fluck15:30

And plus Paul Harry.

Presenter15:38

Or I did a giant Chinese gambling club.

Presenter15:41

because they'd had four photographers down there and had their cameras smashed. But you never got the choice job the photographers did. And it occurred to me that the only people that really appreciated good drawing not that we could draw that well anyway were other illustrators and the only way we could crack it

Peter Fluck15:54

And the only way we

Presenter15:56

would be to uh

Presenter15:58

join the club, as it were, and use photography, and so the three-dimensional caricature.

Presenter16:03

came in in that sense. No one in their right mind is going to ask you to do a three-dimensional character of Lord Hailsham and use it the size of a postage stamp. They're going to give it a cover or a spray. And and doing the models meant that you worked with a photographer. So all the problems you'd have in a drawing of which direction the light was coming from are making it convincing.

Peter Fluck16:11

I got a

Peter Fluck16:13

And

Presenter16:23

Getting the perspective right. We're all solved by the camera lens. Do you remember any specific ones, the the favourite ones that you created in those days? Because they were plasticine models at the time. They were indeed, yeah.

Peter Fluck16:33

They were indeed young.

Presenter16:34

Do you remember any any ones that stand out in your man?

Presenter16:36

Well the one that stands out in my mind is the first one I ever did, which wasn't in fact published. It was a a caricature of Edward Heath.

Presenter16:43

As a black.

Presenter16:45

It was making reference to some immigration laws at the time. And Roger, what about you? Well, the one I think I liked the most was I pushed a caricature of Rupert Murdoch as a Mac Flasher.

Presenter16:56

With a rolled-up copy of The Sun.

Presenter16:59

And um this was not used until uh Harry Evans, the then editor of the Sunday Times, fell out with Murdoch for some reason and demanded to know where it was. And eighteen months later it was used. Which is a lovely uh it's a lovely thing really because it just shows if you do self-censor, then you're not going to get it published anyway. No, this is what brought you together, wasn't it, in in the sort of middle seventies in uh in the partnership that we see today. Well it was really again it was really Murdoch who brought us together. Was it?

Peter Fluck17:24

Yeah.

Presenter17:25

Roger was working at the Sunny Times.

Presenter17:27

It was taken over by Murdoch.

Presenter17:29

and he realized, like everybody else, that things would be different.

Presenter17:33

And uh perhaps this was in seventy four.

Presenter17:36

It'd be a good time to get out. I was doing a similar kind of work to Roger. I was working for The Economist and

Presenter17:42

and other magazines.

Presenter17:44

And it just seemed very logical to put ourselves together as a partnership.

Presenter17:48

Another choice of record, please.

Presenter17:50

Well I'm going to miss my wife on this island. I'm very fond of her and I'm very proud of her. She was a founder member of the Quilters Guild, a quilt maker. She's taught a lot of people to quilt.

Presenter17:58

And amongst those people the Somani Soweto sisters, and I'd like a track from The Indestructible Pete of Soweto.

Peter Fluck18:10

Jolo Le Le Ni Buje.

Peter Fluck18:14

Jono la nois

Peter Fluck18:19

Julo la le

Peter Fluck18:24

Tulo la legs.

Peter Fluck18:29

Jolo La Lebuche.

Presenter18:32

There's a track from the indestructible beat of Soweto.

Presenter18:37

Gentlemen, we're now at this point in in your career where it's all bubbling up towards spitting image. Uh how in fact did it start? I mean did one of you have an idea one day, sit down and say, Let's do this on television or what? No, we were very happy we'd been doing books. We did Christmas Carol, Treasure Island.

Presenter18:52

And Murdoch rears his ugly head again, because it became very clear the kind of intelligent profiles that you'd get.

Presenter18:58

Susan Crosland's for Sunday Times are no longer there for you to caricature. And you get these insane requests to do um

Presenter19:06

you know, comedians you'd never heard of.

Presenter19:08

And uh then they would be rejected because they were too unpleasant. So we realized the writing was on the wall and we had to do something. And also the the the process we were using was getting more and more difficult to actually support yourself working in that way because basically what we're doing was doing a cover or one illustration together, taking one fee for it and then giving a third of that fee to a photographer. So it was very hard. The things took a long time to make anyway.

Presenter19:34

And it was getting more and more difficult, and as Rogers has said, the the kind of work

Presenter19:38

that made it enjoyable and and gave it a purpose was disappearing. Magazines were turning far more towards their advertisers in content. Well another aspect of it was that we used to make the the still models, the plasticine models for print. As soon as we had a transparency you'd destroy the model if you needed to reuse the materials. It was something we accepted as part of the process, but people who came to see us or saw the work were always rather shocked.

Peter Fluck19:59

The unique

Presenter20:07

By that part of it. And we're always saying, well, can't you find a way of making this work permanent?

Peter Fluck20:08

There

Presenter20:12

And we certainly didn't want to sort of preserve them in bronze or exhibit them in galleries when they're not they're not about that at all. The work isn't about that. It's for a large audience, not a small audience. And then I think a seriously disturbed man called Martin Lambin got in touch with us with an idea he had for a a T V programme using puppets for the purpose of political satire. And the rest is history. And the rest is history. All we had to do then was to find out how to make puppets.

Peter Fluck20:37

In my old

Presenter20:41

Well we'll talk about that in a moment. But what about the the initial reaction to the show? I mean uh to start with it was quite a brave show for a television company to put on, wasn't there? Well I think the initial reaction was shock.

Presenter20:52

from the public an even more shock on our part because it started we think it started very badly indeed. It started in a very amateurish way, which is inevitable because

Presenter21:02

It was only after the first programme that everybody concerned suddenly realized they did not know what they were doing. One of the interesting things from my point of view is that John Lloyd, the producer of the programme,

Peter Fluck21:08

One of the aims

Presenter21:13

We'd always worked for middle class newspapers and magazines and

Presenter21:17

Lloyd's a great popularizer. So you had this

Presenter21:20

absolute belting from The Guardian and The Observer and the papers we you know, we thought would like it. And suddenly there's the Sun and papers like that, who decided to like it. It was a hell of a shock to the system.

Presenter21:33

That's another choice of record. Well the next choice of record i is mine and it's Marla's first symphony. I've chosen this really because I know it irritates Roger immensely. But it also reminds me of a very good friend I had in when I was living in Essex who uh

Presenter21:48

told me everything but little I know about Marla over several pints of beer in a very pleasant pub.

Presenter22:54

That was Marla's Symphony No. One played by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

Presenter22:58

Gonna visit Sir George Schulte.

Presenter23:00

Gentlemen, can we now move into your factory down in in Limehouse where all these incredible

Presenter23:05

spinning images are made. It's a very long process, isn't it? It's what about ten mechanical processes you have to go through before you actually come out of this. So there's there's drawing, there's modelling, there's mold making, there's making the thing out of the mold and there's turning that into a puppet.

Presenter23:21

And how much conflict is there involved in doing all this, in in in bringing the collaboration of all these different talents to the one purpose of getting the show on screen?

Presenter23:31

Well the people who work for us are trained to make the puppets. That's the reason they're there. They've they've learnt the skills that we've we've passed on and they've added a a great many. I'd like to think that people enjoy what they do. And there isn't a great deal of conflict in the workshop about what is done. There usually isn't time in. See when we're doing the programmes for for this country, there's never enough time to do anything in the way we'd really like it to. It's it is a production line where the uh the caricatures are coming off at a regular rate. Apart from the people themselves who who might pretend to be offended because that they're caricatured on uh on spitting image, I suppose that they're

Presenter24:08

The most reaction you must get from in quotes ordinary people about what's shown on the screen is your attitude toward the royals. I mean it seemed to me that uh the press th if there's a story about it that that's the the o offensive area according to them. Well I don't think we actually attack the royal family as personalities. I mean what we go for is people's attitude to the royal family.

Presenter24:29

And we do the royal family very much as an ordinary group of people. We say, Okay, the Duke of Edinburgh likes driving carriages.

Presenter24:36

The Queen's a very sweet, reasonable lady who tries to hold the whole thing together. And Charles talks to plants. Yes, indeed. Well there's a slight confusion between you what you feel personally and what you do professionally. I mean Reagan's a complete nightmare, but he's a a great sort of uh strike on the programme.

Peter Fluck24:42

Yes, you know.

Speaker 424:43

Yeah.

Peter Fluck24:43

Yeah.

Presenter24:53

And what about politicians? How do you find their reactions, generally speaking? Are they hurt or are they proud that you've chosen them?

Presenter25:00

Well I think what's happened is that if you're not caricatured on Spittin' Image, then you haven't made it.

Presenter25:08

Which is a rather double-ish thing as far as we're concerned. I mean, if you do a caricature and you mean it.

Presenter25:13

then in a way you like to think that

Presenter25:16

The point goes home. That you've wounded. Yes. But for Edwina Curry to actually get in touch with and say she'd be delighted to appear with it. To appear with the puppet. You realize you've failed miserably. Yes. And do you think that the programme itself, do you think it has a purpose beyond an entertainment? In other words, do you think that the Spinning Image changes public perception of an issue or a purpose? It doesn't change anything. I think the things I've enjoyed most.

Peter Fluck25:41

It doesn't

Presenter25:45

When something really horrible happens, like the attack on Libya, and you can do topicals that are exactly like a political cartoon that makes a very strong point.

Presenter25:55

And those points are stronger in fact, we know are stronger than you could possibly do in print. We get a lot of positive reaction when circumstances enable you to do that sort of thing. But it's a release, like laughter, but it doesn't change anything. From my point of view, one thing I enjoy very much about the programme is that

Presenter26:11

Well we've done about forty-two programmes now for this country, and so the caricatures have been seen a great deal by a lot of people and I think some people are now beginning to get confused between the caricature and the real person.

Presenter26:24

Let's have a another choice of record. Well, Peter's a very practical person and I'm sure he's going to find a way of fermenting something or other.

Presenter26:31

So I need a song for that, and I also need a song to play after he's finished the Marlowe.

Presenter26:36

So it's the Pogue's waxy star book.

Peter Fluck26:41

That's my old to Euro one, go to go away racist Sas Euro one to my old, a hundred prices I went up to Kaiser Street, Jewish money landers My word gave me a couple of buffalo ran some suspenders While you have high lady and shirt And everybody does not so we shut down on the bozer

Presenter27:10

That was the Pogues and Max's Dargle.

Presenter27:13

What about the friendship as it's developed over the years? Has it been strengthened or strained by the success that you've had? Well, it's alright, it's when the bruises disappear. Doing a programme like this has meant a lot of stress. And of course, we've had ups and downs. But now we've managed to do 42 programmes. I don't think that we've suffered any lasting damage as a relationship. And what about the future now? I mean, what about the plans for the future? What are you going to do? Well, we do have varying plans for the future. I mean, involving perhaps films or a permanent exhibition, perhaps. The mainstay of the programme really is the fact that we can produce likenesses of well-known people, which has a very wide appeal. And that's the part which we can spread into other ventures. We've also collected a lot of very talented people from the writers through the people in the workshop.

Peter Fluck27:50

I can

Presenter28:05

And we can diversify with them. And there are people there far more tired than we are.

Presenter28:09

Well it's a very supportive team as well because when the writers or the producer ask very near the last minute

Presenter28:16

For a special prop or a special puppet you think, Oh god, how on earth am I going to do that? It's utterly impossible, but I can't say that.

Presenter28:23

And lo and behold, somebody in the workshop solves it for you.

Presenter28:26

Final choice of record. What shall it be? Well, this will be a song from Kurt Weil's Thropany Opera. It's associated in our minds with the work of George Gross, who Bert Orbrecht worked with in Germany in the thirties. It's something we've al both been very fond of.

Speaker 328:43

Many harm davira.

Peter Fluck28:49

And Lumpeges Hotel with Verschoon Street. Und man fragment, we won't be sondra daring. Und man fragt, we won't be sondra darin.

Peter Fluck29:08

Und manned siege michreden auster Tugemorgen.

Peter Fluck29:13

Und man Sagt, Die Hat Teringe wont?

Peter Fluck29:18

Und das shift midachegen und mid virt canon wir pe flagen den mas.

Presenter29:37

The song from the Threpanny Opera, sung by Lottie Lenya.

Presenter29:41

Right, gentlemen, you're you're now on your on your desert island, and you're allowed

Presenter29:46

The one record each. Imagine that uh six have been washed away by some tidal wave and you've got one record each. Which would it be, Roger?

Presenter29:55

We're obviously going to be on the island a long time, and I've never taken much notice of music, so I think I'll choose the Cassals, the bark, that Peter chose.

Presenter30:03

And Peter, what about you? Well, I think I'll choose Lorraine and Ellison to stay with me, baby. There's got to be a reason for getting up in the morning.

Presenter30:09

Now what about the the book? Assume that you've got the Bible and you've got the works of Shakespeare on the on the island. Roger, what s what would your book be? The book I'd choose would be Louis Bunuel's My Last Breath.

Peter Fluck30:17

Yeah.

Presenter30:21

Uh topography.

Presenter30:22

Which helped me to grow old gracefully, I think. And Peter, what about you? Well, I'll choose what I think is a wonderful book by an Italian author called Italo Calvino, called Our Ancestors, which is a collection of three sort of fairy stories, really, which are so beautifully written that they seem to work on a different level each time you read them. And now what about the luxury object, Inanimate? Ah. Ah, ah. Now we've got joint luxuries. You have? Yes. Uh-huh. Well, the first luxury is something which we would dearly love to have. We would like Margaret Thatcher's resignation speech. Do you like it in vellum or what? We would like it as a recording, actually.

Peter Fluck30:47

You have.

Speaker 431:00

To all the British people.

Speaker 431:02

However so they may have voted, may I say this

Speaker 431:07

Now the election is lost.

Speaker 431:09

I realize that where there was love I increased spending on conventional defence, where there was pardon,

Speaker 431:18

I threw away the keys. Where there was faith?

Speaker 431:22

I thought of selling off the Church of England.

Speaker 431:25

And where there was joy, we now only have Jimmy Tarbak.

Presenter31:32

Roger. Well, as you gathered from this programme, we're deeply steeped in Western culture. And I think we should take a JCB so that we can completely ruin the environment. Build a runway, get rid of the trees. Well, I think that there's a great deal of work we could do to this island. It's virgin territory. We could, I think, with a bit of effort, turn it into a really nice tourist attraction. So you've been able to get away from motorways, a runway, a hotel, beach chalets. But you're not allowed any guests on the island. They'll come when we've finished it. Roger Law, Peter Fluck. Thank you very much indeed. Thank you. Thank you.

Peter Fluck31:52

So you've been

Speaker 332:13

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

Peter Fluck32:45

Yeah.