Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A humorous writer and the new editor of Punch.
On the island
Eight records
Emmett Miller and his Georgia Crackers
Well, the first one is a bizarre record.
Concerto for Two Violins in D minor, BWV 1043Favourite
David Oistrakh and Igor Oistrakh
I drove all the way across the Midwest, with almost bizarre music coming out, and the Bach double violin concerto kept coming back time and again.
Well, since we were talking about the American culture, I'll pull one straight out of the centre of that culture.
I've chosen Mel Brooks, who is a very funny man ... a piece from that will help me through the bad times.
Fräulein Annie wohnt schon lang nicht hier
I really couldn't tell you too much about, because it's full of sentimental and nostalgic touchstones for me.
Piano Sonata No. 29 in B-flat major, Op. 106 "Hammerklavier"
I go to someone who is a great master of a great trade, I go to Alfred Brendel. Perhaps the to me certainly the finest interpreter of Beethoven's piano music.
It's probably, I think, the most delicate, the most sophisticated of all the sophisticated stuff Coleporter did.
It's a very funny record, and this particular one is about a a magazine called Tatler that I worked for for a time as a food correspondent.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:35Did you find this a hard job to choose just eight records?
Enormously difficult. Starting off with the idea that I was going to be in one spot for this amount of time and be self-sufficient, which I can't be. There is no way in which I am self-sufficient, certainly not intellectually or musically. I found it extraordinarily difficult to start with the idea that I had eight records and that was it.
Presenter asks
5:11What was your ambition? What did you want to be?
I think I always wanted to write. Perforce I always wanted to write simply because it seemed to be the only thing that I was any good at, the only thing for which I had any real interest.
Presenter asks
6:59What was the first thing you sold?
The first thing I sold was to Punch. In fact, in nineteen sixty one, uh I went to America and America was extraordinary. I I didn't realize that I wanted to be a humorist until I went there ... everything from the advertising to the media to the people that one met at parties to the whole physical scope of the place seemed to me set up for comedy and satire.
The keepsakes
The luxury
I can't write longhand, and I certainly can't write all I want to write with a stick in the sand, so I'd take a typewriter.
Presenter asks
What was [Punch's] original intention?
Its original intention was to be very caustic, very tough, very critical of the political and social scene of early Victorian England, and it was that for a long time. It was only later that its image of being a bland Middle class. Magazine developed.
Presenter asks
19:13What plans do you have in mind [for Punch]? What reforms are you going to undertake?
It's very difficult to go about boosting circulation consciously ... What I inherited from my predecessor, Bill Davis, is a very good, very successful magazine. It will change. Only so far as any magazine must reflect the particular predispositions of the editor, so it will change to be more like me.
“I didn't realize that I wanted to be a humorist until I went there, and everything I'd always loved America is one of the reasons that I went there in the first place. I was steeped in the culture.”
“Seriously, Roy, there is an element of hack in all uh journalists. They they they do it because they enjoy doing it and they enjoy paying the rent with the results of what they do.”
“I think that I'm really a careful enough critic of what I do not ever to it sounds a bit smug, but not ever to have put out anything that I was actually ashamed of.”