Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A playwright best known for his Liverpudlian dramas 'Boys from the Black Stuff' and 'GBH'.
On the island
Eight records
I taped all of Duke Ellington's work on 120 minutes of tape, and for eight, nine, ten hours a day, I would just play Duke Ellington all the time.
One of those great pleasures of my childhood because we used every Sunday my uncle George and my auntie Betty used to come to our house… my uncle George was a tremendous fan of Guy Mitchell and he used to bring his records and it was happy days.
Janis Ian's song at seventeen is really, I think, the truthful personification of what it's like to be seventeen.
Coming from Liverpool and being of almost the same age as the Beatles… it's still a wonderfully warm and powerful song.
Costello is for me the songwriter of his generation and this is a particularly splendid example of how gifted he is with lyrics and with melody.
If I'm alone on a desert island, I will need something to laugh at apart from myself. And this I think is outrageously funny.
Shelter from the StormFavourite
It's more or less about my wife and my family and uh my few friends. And it's Bob Dylan who if I had any heroes left would still be one. And it's everything I think about the side of my life that not everybody sees.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:58And Liverpool is home, where you live and work, and which you hate leaving, is that right?
Yeah, it it's I I don't want to give the impression that I'm running around town flaunting myself. You know, I go to Marks and Spencer's and I go to the theater when there's something worth seeing. But basically Liverpool is a hideaway and the hideaway is our home.
Presenter asks
5:19Where does this intense love of family come from?
I think from my own family inevitably. Uh it's it's a slightly long story that my my mother was the last of thirteen and my father was the last of ten… my mother and father absolutely loved and adored each other almost to to the exclusion of every of everyone else except me.
Presenter asks
7:02Apparently even as a small child you were much possessed by death. What was that all about?
Well, I think it I'd like to blame the Catholic Church, but it happened at such an age that I don't think I can blame them because they never got hold of me till I was five. I think it was probably my mother suffered as m as people probably know I do from terminal hypochondria.
The keepsakes
The luxury
because my nails now grow extraordinarily fast and they grow peculiarly dead. I don't want to be conscious of that. And I also feel that if I am going to make a go of it on this island, I might have to dig and things and I don't want to be like Howard Hughes.
Presenter asks
7:42You volunteered for a vasectomy, and wrote a play about it. That's quite a brave thing for a hypochondriac to do, isn't it?
Well, it wasn't it was it was just really basically because um we'd had three children in in four years… I just we got ours done on the rates. Liverpool Council at the time… were given um vasectomies away free to people who paid the rates. So I went to the rates office to get the the examination to have and there and then I knew I had a comedy on my hands.
Presenter asks
17:45You've maintained that you're not a political writer, yet every piece seems to arouse political wrath. How can you say you're not political?
I certainly wasn't political. I I think I've been politicised to a degree by the present government and politicised to a degree by living in Liverpool. But I don't feel I'm political. I know I wasn't I never voted till I was thirty eight.
Presenter asks
25:54So why do you fear madness so much?
I'm sure it's within me. And I d I dread the prospect of of not being aware and in control. The life I've led has been such a wonderful life… I don't want that to go.
“I used to be in the downstairs converted toilet trying to write, and my dad's cement mixer'd be outside the window, and every so often he'd shout through the noise, 'Er, I'm not bothering you, am I, lad?'”
“Yes, I'm a little miracle.”
“I am an outcast hiding, creeping, running from the past.”
“I'm not tribal. I don't belong. I don't join anything.”
“Some of the best lines I've ever written, I never wrote.”