Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Children's author who co-created classics like Peepo, Each Peach Pear Plum, and The Jolly Postman with his late wife.
On the island
Eight records
With my high starch collar and my high topped shoes and my hair piled high upon my head I went to lose a jolly hour on the trolley and lost my heart instead.
I grew up in the Midlands, as far away from the sea as you could get, but I've always loved the sea.
Vanessa, my present wife, loves Dylan and it's taken me a few years to get into Dylan, but I do really think he's wonderful
This is a spare, simple voice and guitar song. Tragic really, but wonderful.
I've picked a song called Come Sing and Dance, despite the fact that it's a religious song, because I'm not religious, but it's so ecstatic that I forgive it its religious flavour.
I Didn't Know What Time It Was
There's a whole lot of songs written in the 30s and 40s by people like Cole Porter or the Gershwins, but particularly Rogers and Heart that I love.
Closing TimeFavourite
It's about singing and dancing in a in a dive and it's about it's a song... It's funny and it's sad. And it's sexy and it's wonderfully musical
This is music to strut to. It's also I think daydreaming music.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:06Do you think that's generally the case [that the best and worst times of life occur before twelve], or do you think you had a particularly dramatic childhood?
I don't think I had a dramatic childhood... my own childhood increasingly comes up in front of me and I want to write about it. The power and drama of things that happen to you, say before twelve, registers and goes down deep and stays there, I think.
Presenter asks
1:47Working in collaboration [with your late wife Janet], is that more satisfying than working alone?
Collaborating with Janet was just wonderful because it was like a cottage industry. We made the book, words, pictures, and we were obsessed with the entire book, the paper, the printing, the binding, everything... But the real fun, the greatest fun is when the ink is still wet on the paper.
Presenter asks
4:32When your dad was around, what was your relationship with him like?
I regret it in a way. I because he died when I was seventeen, the kind of memory of him faded too quickly, really... So he was really invisible. He was shadowy.
The keepsakes
Presenter asks
6:13When did you find out you were adopted?
I was playing in the street with a gang of kids and this girl said to me, Your mother's not your mother... So I went home and spoke to my mother and she... confessed. But even then she couldn't tell me the truth, so what she told me was that my parents had been killed in an aeroplane crash.
Presenter asks
24:15How did you feel [after your wife Janet died of breast cancer]? How on earth did you feel that you could write again?
For months and months I just drifted around and... the usual... despairing, empty, hollow, tragic thing... The way I got out of it was instinctive... I thought that I would try and make a little book about Janet... Just the making of that book... got me out of the tunnel, the part way out.
“The power and drama of things that happen to you, say before twelve, registers and goes down deep and stays there, I think.”
“If they hadn't adopted me, I'd have been in an institution. And the best institution in the world is worse than almost the worst family.”
“I knew I wanted to be a writer, and my image of the writer was a man in a white suit who strolled down to the harbour side in Nice or Cannes or somewhere, and had an aperitif and sat there at about eleven o'clock.”