Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Writer whose debut novel 'Saturday Night and Sunday Morning' captured post-war working class life.
On the island
Eight records
Bobby Darin singing Mac the Knife, one is a bit of a tribute to Brecht and uh I sort of talk to it the moment I heard it, you know, Polly Peachman, all the eighteenth century shenanigans, Hogarthian, je uh Fielding's novels and so on. It all seemed to blend in to me with that music and that attitude of Bobby Darin when he was um singing it.
Paul Robeson, you know, one heard his uh his voice via records in other houses booming out on to the street. And Old Man River always very much impressed me because it was about someone who was deprived, felt themselves a slave, and yet at the same time optimism glowed through the whole thing.
The Battle of Agincourt (from Henry V)
I think when I in my teens towards the end of the war, I went to see King Henry the Fifth and listened to all her speeches, and at first it seemed like a foreign language. Then when I came to the battle scene with a tremendous flight of arrows, the poor man's weapon killing the flower of modern chivalry, seemed to me wonderful. So I went to see it as often as I could.
Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra
And every morning I got a bust to the uh control tower and especially on a fine spring morning, I just felt as if somehow my life was about to take off. I was going somewhere. And I heard this lovely music, uh, Seventeen Come Sunday. I was seventeen. And it filled my brain with the thought that I really was going somewhere and I didn't know where, but it didn't matter.
Ça IraFavourite
Well, I've chosen Edith Piaf singing Le Sariat. I believe that those people who go in for excess profiteering at the expense of the poor these people should go to the lantern. They deserve to be strung up under the lamppost. And she is perfectly wonderful. In when she leads the starving Parisian women to the palace of Versailles and she climbs up onto the gates. And she sings this most rousing song, you know, to the gallows for the aristocrats, because they're causing all the misery. To me that's a wonderful song.
Well, the film Saturday Night and Sunday Morning was a a wonderful film because Carol Rice made it. I wrote the script, but Carol gave me a great deal of help, because I thought I'd never written one before. And Johnny Dankworth wrote the music, and I think that. Listening and seeing the opening of Saturday night and Sunday morning when all the workers are streaming out of the factory to Johnny Dankwood's music and Carol's direction, you know, it was such a wonderful uplifting atmosphere because we were all young. And we all had this terrific enthusiasm, and maybe that's why it's still remembered.
Prelude in D-flat major, Op. 28, No. 15, 'Raindrop'
We go back, I think, to Majorca. Okay, so we were there for quite a few winters. But the winters in Majorca weren't very good, as as Chopin's experience showed when he went there with Georges Sand in in the early nineteenth century. And they do say that he wrote the raindrop prelude there. Which I think is very likely because during the winter it rains a great deal, contrary to what people think.
Where'er You Walk (from Semele)
Well, uh Where Air You Walk from Handeled Semele. And this one I'd think I'd like uh Where Air You Walk just as a kind of what tribute to my uh wife, Ruth Fainlight.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:06Do you feel that you've given up another life because you've chosen to write?
Well, I'd read so many life stories of writers who had cracked up after the first novel or died young. And I thought to myself, Well, I don't want to do that. I'm in in it for life. Of course, when I say that, it doesn't mean that you you can't live. Of course you can live. You have to live... But generally speaking, what you should do is watch out that you don't get overwhelmed by life.
Presenter asks
1:47Can you describe to me the sense of fulfilment that writing brings you? What do you feel when you write?
Well, you know, it's very difficult to say because... I remember one on one occasion in the 60s I went to Russia and a Soviet journalist said to me, why and for whom do you write? And I said, I write because I want to live or because I don't want to die... I just wrote because I had to write, you see.
Presenter asks
5:50Were you close to your parents?
Well, physically we had to be, but and that was all right. Not terribly close. You know, my my father couldn't read all right, so there was a kind of discrepancy between ourselves. He was very idiosyncratic and unpredictable.
The keepsakes
The book
Air Publication 1234: The RAF Manual of Navigation
Air Ministry
The one book I might choose would be The Air Publication One Two Three Four, which was the R A F Manual of Navigation put out for air crew during the war and which I studied then. It would keep my brain active and sharp. It would it would keep me going for years, so I would be all right.
The luxury
A solar-powered communications receiver
The luxury would be a communications receiver powered by the sun. and I would sling an arrow up the nearest palm tree, and I could listen then as my rescuers got closer and closer.
Presenter asks
9:47Why was it at that time that you think you couldn't engage with what it was that mainstream education needed from you?
I didn't even know what it needed actually. I had this idea of going to a grammar school w was very important to me, but I couldn't do it. I knew I was reading in order to escape. It was a very good uh way of uh cutting off from the world. So it was really an escape, primarily and essentially it was an escape.
Presenter asks
12:38Were you aware, as you worked away day to day clocking in and clocking off with all of these people, that you were different from all of these people?
I have a s suspicion, you know, that every single person in England, at any rate, thinks they are different from anyone else. And I was no exception. But perhaps it there was a little bit more intensity in mine than theirs. I don't know. Thank God England is like that. All people know they're different, and that's terrific.
Presenter asks
22:04Did it matter to you that [Saturday Night and Sunday Morning] was a huge success, or did it matter more that it simply had been published and you were properly a writer?
I've been sending novels out. I wrote about six or seven novels before that was published. I've been sending them out for a decade nearly. And they were being rejected. Then Saturday night and Sunday morning came along and I knew there was something there. I knew that that ought to be published more than any of the others. And then when it was published I had a certain amount of iron in the soul regarding publishers and what they knew.
“I write because I want to live or because I don't want to die.”
“The drudgery of the day to day, if it was pure drudgery, meant that you you became two people. You were the you were the drudge and you were the person with the empty mind who could produce pictures from your mind.”
“I never needed faith in myself. I know that's uh a bit silly to say, but I didn't. I I knew that some day, however long it took, I was going to be able to make my living as a writer.”