Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Journalist who runs the Problems page in a major women's magazine and a Problems Phone In for a radio station.
On the island
Eight records
Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Herbert von Karajan
Albanone, the organ music of Albanoni, which I think is enormously evocative, very sad, very beautiful music.
I was raised on three male voices, Paul Robeson, Josh White, and Sharley Appin, and this has particular significance for me, because my father used to sing, and my father thought that Paul Robeson was, I think, the next best thing to God, without disrespect to either of them.
I saw a very beautiful cartoon film of the composer Eric Sati, and I liked the music so much that I went looking for it, and I found a setting of it, and this is one of his short pieces, originally written for the piano, and now reset for a small chamber orchestra.
I think one of the most beautiful modern love songs I know, written by two women, called Heart Like a Wheel, sung by Linda Ronstadt.
Choir of the Russian Orthodox Church
This is some of the most beautiful religious music I know. It's part of the Easter Mass from the Russian Orthodox Church.
Amazing GraceFavourite
This is the voice which God is going to grant me if He fulfils my dreams for just one day in my life. This is Aretha Franklin singing Amazing Grace in the church of which her father is pastor, in Southern California.
We've got me going out to buy a record by a band called Weather Report, and a tune on that album turns out to be Birdland, which I liked very much, and it was vaguely familiar, but I couldn't think how. And then to my intense embarrassment I realized that I've only been played off the air with it every Wednesday for the last three years.
Joe Walsh, Glenn Frey and Don Henley
Wit... and the world is awful short of it. But I was sent the album. I didn't go out and buy it. I was playing around with it and I heard the lyric of this and I just began to laugh, because it is a perfect description of me and a very special man in my life.
In conversation
Presenter asks
3:32What went wrong with [your acting career]?
Well, I either wasn't tough enough or I wasn't talented enough, but I know that I wasn't organized enough. I now look back at it, and my toes turn pale blue with sheer funk when I think of how innocent and disorganised I was.
Presenter asks
6:02What brought you back [from America]?
I had a minor illness which was mistreated and became a major illness, and I got very thin and very frail, and I had a very sweet doctor who insisted that I gave up and came home, so I did.
Presenter asks
7:20How did [working on the editorial staff of a sex magazine] come about?
Because I worked before that on a research project into secondary school education for the non-academic child, and at the end of it I felt I had accomplished miracles and they would actually take me and train me and make me something, being by now the ripe old age of twenty-seven. Instead of which they asked me to come back next year as mister So and so's secretary and I said no and quit and went home to read the Times. In the Times personal column I found an advertisement which read... 'Wanted attractive articulate native English speaking women aged eighteen to thirty, sociological, psychological, or medical background for appearances American radio and television'… And that was For'em, and that's how I got there.
The keepsakes
The book
Agnes Smedley
I had great difficulty over this, because I can't conceive of a world which is narrowed to one book. But having thought, I would take Daughter of the Earth by an American writer called Agnes [Smedley].
Presenter asks
13:09What changes in emphasis did you decide to make [when taking over the problems page]?
Well, first of all, Evelyn Holm was a pen name and Anna Rayburn isn't. Secondly, I wanted to make it much more direct, and I wanted to deal with what people gave me to deal with. I didn't want to retire behind the 'My dear you've made your bed and you must lie on it and God will give you your reward in heaven' line. I actually wanted to say, Look, this is what I think, for what it's worth. You must do what you must do. There are these avenues of help open to you.
Presenter asks
15:51Is [the mail you receive] a great deal of moaning without meaning?
Yes, there are. I mean, I have made myself terribly unpopular by saying before that I do divide people roughly into two major groups. Those are the people who really do want to do something... What matters is that they really want to change their lives. The second group are those that I call privately the whiners. And they really write to let off steam, or they ring to let off steam. They have no intention of listening to anything that you say. If you wrested their problem from their nerveless fingers, they'd miss it like mad and want another one immediately.
“I came to London on my seventeenth birthday thinking that Sir Laurence Olivier was going to trip over my feet and say ah but it didn't happen, you see.”
“The underpinning of all agony columns, whether spoken or written, is anxiety. And the baseline in written terms is very much to do with relationship. It's relationship to yourself, it's relationship to your boss, your husband, your child, your mother-in-law, your best friend, whoever it is.”
“I planned and planned and planned until I was twenty five or twenty six years old. This was going to happen and that was going to happen. None of it has been what I expected.”