Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A gardener and television presenter, best known for 'Ground Force' and 'Gardener's World', and also a chat show host, columnist, and novelist.
On the island
Eight records
The Lark AscendingFavourite
Pinchas Zukerman, English Chamber Orchestra, Daniel Barenboim
Well the first one I suppose is very evocative of the great outdoors and when I hear it, it's one of those pieces of music of high emotion. Uh you can listen to it in a car, you can listen to it in a room, anywhere you like at any time and it will transport you to a high field and a clear blue sky
It really shows back this one a bit to childhood and up to date. To childhood, it's the band of the Royal Marines playing Sunset. And my dad, of whom I was very, very fond, bought a dancette gramophone. He had two LPs. The first LP was Mendelssohn's Finkels Cave and the second LP was the band of the Royal Marines and he used to love Sunset. And so it reminds me very much of him.
Richard Burton and the Original Broadway Cast
I love the human voice. It's become over the years what I work with, as well as my grandfather's spade. It's the tool of my trade. I've been given rather a reedy one, which is not very kind. But one of the best speaking voices I think ever that makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end is Richard Burton. And in Camelot, when he was in the stage show, he has that wonderful bit at the very end where he talks about Camelot, and it is that dream, it is the thing you had as a boy, which was the world is really wonderful.
Benjamin Rayson, Teri Ralston, Beth Fowler, Gene Varrone and Barbara Lang
He wrote a musical called Little Night Music and it has a song in it called Remember. It was about the time I was courting with a view to getting married and I did eventually get married to the girl I was courting. And there's a line in this song, Remember. They're all remembering that ribbled youth they had and what they did. There's a line in it about a a bed with a canopy in red needing repair. And on our honeymoon night I looked up and I saw a canopy in red needing repair.
Pat Metheny with Toots Thielemans
I got to know a lot of music that I wouldn't otherwise have have got to know and watched a lot of musicians and leaned on George Shearing's piano when he played wonderful stuff like that. And there's one piece of music that kind of sums all that period up for me... this one piece has always stuck with me by a guy called Pat Mutheny with a harmonica player called Toots Tielmans and it's called Always and Forever.
Weep You No More Sad Fountains
I generally speaking the problem when her novels are made into films is that you lose her voice. But there was that wonderful Emma Thompson screenplay for Sense and Sensibility, which worked a treat and the music for it by Patrick Doyle is delightful.
London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, Richard Hickox
I've had a lot of years as a choir boy when I was young. I had a very passable treble... I'm a quiet churchman, don't make a big noise about it, but I do love good church music and Hubert Parry's I Was Glad's the most wonderfully stirring piece of church music.
Um it's the song of the blackbird, simple as that. Of an evening at the end of a day, when you sit out in your garden and you hear this little chap on the chimney top, you know that all's right with the world.
In conversation
Presenter asks
6:27What would you have if you could really have your ideal garden?
I'd have an old house. My house isn't old. It's seventies, early seventies. We've built on bits here and there. I'd love a historic house, I guess, with a garden around it which um was sympathetic to it in terms of its period. Perhaps Georgian.
Presenter asks
13:18Did your father write you off as well?
No, he didn't, bless his heart. He he listened very carefully. He was a very quiet man. There are two kinds of Yorkshireman, I think the kind of broad brush, meat and two veg, two fingers up in the air type, and the the quiet Yorkshireman, and my dad was the the latter variety.
Presenter asks
14:54What do you remember about your time as a student at Kew?
I was a student there for three years and got my diploma. Then I became supervisor of staff training, which was organising and running basic gardening skills courses for the members of staff. And I became a civil servant and signed the Official Secrets Act and was given for my trouble, terribly proud of it, a glossy black briefcase with ER stamped on it in gold and a very large key which said on it Royal Botanic Gardens. And an amazing office. And an office which was part of George III's dining room, I think, originally. And a bike. That was the best thing because you could cycle round Kew.
The keepsakes
The book
P. G. Wodehouse
I love the comic writing of P. G. Woodhouse. I think he's the funniest writer in the English language. I like the Jeeves and Worcester novels, but my real passion are the the Blandings novels with Lord Emsworth. I want to be Lord Emsworth when I grow up and lean over a pigsty and scratch the back of the Empress of Blandings, you know, with it with a stick. Lord Emsworth was sorted. So the Blandings novels of P. G. Woodhouse.
The luxury
As you've noticed, I paint those watercolours on ground force pretty abysmally. If I could have a good box of watercolours in a watercolour pad I might get better with time to concentrate, so I'll take some watercolour paints and a pad.
Presenter asks
17:49When did the call come from television?
Oh, I was doing bits for radio. Then Greenfly invaded Margate... and I was asked to go and do a bit on the Today programme on radio about what should people do with all these invading Greenfly... and I got a call that afternoon in the office at Amateur Gardening from a television programme called Nationwide.
Presenter asks
32:39What have you achieved that you really wanted to achieve?
I feel very passionate about custodianship of countryside and landscape... if you go up in a plane, you look down at Britain, it is a patchwork quilt. And if you look after your square, and everybody else looked after their square, then the big quilt would be in good nick. And I feel a missionary zeal about that.
“I enjoy my own company very much, in that I do need peace and quiet now and again. But equally I'm very gregarious. I'm a you know, great family man and a group of very close friends that I've had for many years, without whom I would be very lonely. But I like the ability to switch from rabid, gregarious company to solitude and silence.”
“I remember somebody saying once, I don't know anybody who's been improved by fame and uh certainly I know an awful lot who've been spoiled by it. I don't intend to go that way. That would be the ultimate failure.”
“I've always thought passionately more than anything else that gardening is for everybody. Snobbering gardening irritates the pants off me. I I hate it when people try and make it some kind of exclusive pursuit for those with rather smart gardens.”