Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A broadcaster who was one of the first high-profile women in TV news.
On the island
Eight records
It Don't Mean a Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)
I visualise myself on this desert island needing to have a sort of music while you work in the morning to get me out of bed if there is such a thing as a bed and to do a bit of exercise and dancing on the beach and I think this is the disc that I shall be doing that to.
Concerto for Two Violins and Strings in D minor, BWV 1043
Yehudi Menuhin and David Oistrakh
I first heard when I was thirteen ... I was bowled over. I had never heard it before, I'd never heard anything like it before. And I've loved it ever since.
The Dawn Chorus
to remind me of the dawn chorus, and I hope there's going to be a cuckoo in there, because my almost my earliest memory is waking up to the most tumultuous bird song
It's a wonderful recording of his His song which his poetry really which plays really well today
it reminds me of going to Spain for the first time, and feeling that Mediterranean heat and smelling those smells, and listening to a gipsy in a little square in Cordoba playing the guitar many years ago.
It's a slightly melancholic song, but it's about looking back to happy places.
You Can Call Me AlFavourite
this is to remind me of all the many, many holidays the girls and I had. when we drove literally all over Europe
This is to remind me of France, which I have loved all my life since I went there on my own when I was sixteen.
In conversation
Presenter asks
2:20Do you miss the daily rumble of news in your life?
I don't miss being on the news at all, and I didn't miss it the day I left.
Presenter asks
2:43What about all the attention that you must have had throughout the years?
Well, I found that, particularly when I joined ITN, very intrusive. I mean, I can remember going shopping and being followed by cameramen. and suddenly thinking, I haven't got anywhere to hide. That wherever I go, I'm being looked at. And that was a very, very unsettling time. It took me a long time to get used to.
Presenter asks
6:57Tell me about that experience [teaching in Long Kesh]. It must surely have been one that shaped you.
I was working for the Open University and I was living in Northern Ireland. And a friend of mine who worked at Belfast University said there is no education being provided in Longkesh. Would some of us volunteer to act as teachers and to offer ourselves to go in there to teach? So I volunteered, and I was given compound seventeen. I was twenty seven. Compound seventeen was full of interned members of the Provisional IRA. You were driven round the prison in an army lorry. You were dispatched into the compound, the door was locked behind you, and are left there for an hour and a half. And I said to these men on my first day, 'Well, you've asked for a teacher what do you want to talk about'? and they said 'Politics, miss.' So we had some amazing conversations about politics, about who they were, where they were coming from, whether their philosophy was going to lead them somewhere.
The keepsakes
The book
Staying Alive: Real Poems for Unreal Times
Neil Astley
I think A, I can learn them off by heart to make sure I don't get Alzheimer's. And also I think they'll sustain me emotionally while I'm there.
Presenter asks
16:54Why did your father keep moving on from parish to parish?
Because he was a l but as I said before, he was a lost soul. He had a pattern of behaviour in parishes where he would quarrel with the organist, sack the Mothers' Union, close the Sunday school, and then say my mission in this parish is over. But he was irate and angry and unresolved. and emotionally lost and didn't have a friend. He never made friend.
Presenter asks
17:36How was your relationship with [your father]?
Troublesome, because he was brought up in a very Edwardian era, where to praise children Was a very bad thing because it ruined them. So I don't remember getting any praise from him at all, and quite the opposite. He would uh you know say You're playing hockey again, you great glumping thing. And I don't think he meant to be like that, but he just couldn't somehow cope with the idea that just being relaxed with his children was the best way to be.
Presenter asks
28:49Can you remember finding out that [your husband, Mark Boxer] was seriously ill?
I do. It was extraordinary. He had been to New York in February. And he came back saying, I think I've got flu. Um within a week they said he's got a brain tumour. And He had weeks of radiotherapy and he just got worse and worse and by July he was dead.
“I want to retire completely from obligation. I feel like I've been weighed down by responsibility. I feel like I've been head girl all my life.”
“I think being ridiculously truthful is a fault, because sometimes there are things one shouldn't say, and I've always admired that English ability to dissemble.”
“I think looks played a very important part. And I was beautiful, and I can see that when I look back at those photographs, and I think, why didn't I know I was beautiful? Because I didn't.”
“I'm very happy to be solitary and in my own company, but I wouldn't say I was completely happy alone. I think one of the difficulties of being famous is that the wrong men feel able to approach you, and the right men wouldn't dream of approaching you, because they'd think she'd never look at me, whereas I probably would.”