Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A journalist and broadcaster, a respected commentator who edited The New Statesman and The Listener and contributed to The World Tonight and Newsnight.
On the island
Eight records
Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67
Queen's Hall Orchestra, conducted by Henry Wood
My first record is Beethoven's Fifth, which because I'm a child of the war really sort of punctuated my childhood. It was the call sign, I think, for the European service, didder didder, which I think was V sign or V for victory, which was in Morse code, and so it had a double thing. But we did have very few records at home, and this one we did have wasn't a musical household, but it was sort of considered patriotic to have it going on.
Second record is really about my school days a bit. It's Zadok the Priest, and it's from the coronation, I think.
Speech at the Anti-Suez Rally, Trafalgar Square, 4 November 1956
My next choices are now in Bevan, making a speech at the great anti Surreys Rally in Trafalgar Square on, I think, November the fourth, nineteen fifty six. I wasn't, of course, there. I was on a troop ship ploughing through the the Mediterranean, but I've heard it since, and it's, I think, a marvellous piece of uh matador oratry, and it still makes me smile.
Eddie Roll, Grover Dale and the Jets
I believe quite how drab Britain was even in the mid-50s, that the age of austerity went on for a long time. And one of the things that most cheered me up was sort of hearing records of American musicals that came across from Broadway. And I remember when I first heard the one from Westside Story, I really felt that there was a new world out there, and perhaps it whetted my appetite for America.
This is something I think that I heard when I first went to America in 1960, and it was that extraordinary Harvard academic, Tom Lehrer, who had a wonderful kind of line in really sending things up. And it cheered me up, because I'd always thought the Americans were a bit earnest, but then I suddenly found there were people almost as reverent as I was.
Brindisi (from La Traviata)Favourite
Frank Lopardo, Angela Gheorghiu, Orchestra and Chorus of the Royal Opera House
I didn't really know anything about opera till I got married. I'd never been near, and my wife and indeed her mother were very keen opera goers, and I really sort of slightly fell for it. They wouldn't claim I'm an opera buff even today, but it did open a new dimension for me.
is another American record and it goes by sort of harking back to my years in America which I've spent quite a lot of my life there one way or another sometimes on flying visits sometimes as in the 1960s for one year and then for three years and it's Joan Baez singing We Shall Overcome which I shall always associate with that ghastly Democratic Convention at Chicago in 1968.
The Day Thou Gavest, Lord, Is Ended
Choir of St Paul's Cathedral, directed by John Scott, accompanied by Christopher Dernley
My last record, and perhaps in my more melancholy moments I might play it on the Desert Island, is um a hymn. I spent a lot of my ho life, my early life anyway, was spent with hymns. It's the Day Thou Gavest, Lord is Ended.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:31Is [the opportunity for irreverence] one of the reasons you chose journalism?
Yes, I think what journalism gives you is the priceless gift of independence and also the opportunity for irreverence.
Presenter asks
2:10How did you manage to penetrate the inner sanctums of the right [to write Rab Butler's biography]?
Rav was extremely kind to me, and I did know him when I was sort of writing a weekly column… But I think my real education came from Ian MacLeod. When I started out writing a political column, I wrote to Ian MacLeod and I said… Might I come and see you? Because I am really know nothing whatever about the Conservative Party and I'd like to learn better. And he wrote back me a sweet note in his own hand… And a kind of friendship was based on that… And he was my introduction, as it were, to people like Reggie Maudling and Edward Boyle and that generation of Conservatives.
Presenter asks
3:54What has been your major motivation in your career? Is it the story, the writing, or the money?
It's never been the money. No, no, it's certainly never been the money… I think, frankly, it's been the writing. I think I take more pleasure in a well-written piece than I do in anything else. I mean, I get very excited by a good story, but I'm not an investigative journalist, and I've never claimed to be that. I think a piece that is elegantly and persuasively written is what I'm probably most attracted to.
The keepsakes
The book
The Dictionary of National Biography
Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee
To have if I was allowed, and you may say it, but I'll tell you why I think I should be allowed, is to have the Dictionary of National Biography. Now it's true that the main thing is in about fourteen volumes or more, but there is this compact one which also brings you a magnifying glass, which I might find useful for catching the sun or something and giving out signals. ... Well, I'll use it just for keeping it for reading. But I think that might keep me amused for a bit. You know, this is a way of great red rise and all that.
The luxury
I've got a horror of creepy crawlies. I've got a horror of bugs and this kind of thing. I remember when I was in the army that I was allowed to have, when we were at Suez, camp bed officers for the use of. And I think I'd much prefer that to sleeping on the ground or even in any kind of trench or anything like that.
Presenter asks
7:09What was it like as a child to sit in the congregation and see your father preaching in the pulpit?
Well, I think it does cause problems. They were mostly caused, I think, by visiting preachers who would come and they'd sort of stand up in the pulpit and they'd say, you know, the love of God, the compassion of Christ and all the rest of it. Then they'd come back to lunch in the vicarage and some man's name would come up who was sort of fellow cleric and they'd say, That man would boil potatoes in a widow's tears. This kind of thing. The lack of charity across the vicarage table compared with what you listen to in the pulpit. I never really managed to solve that, the level of that contrast.
Presenter asks
8:40Where was the political influence in your boyhood?
Yes, um they were Liberal Tories… I think honestly it came from school. That when I was at school one of the boys in the same dormitory was called Charles Straitshey and his father was Minister of Food in the Attlee government and he was frankly treated appallingly and teased and bullied and all the rest of it and I thought you know this was totally unfair and unjust and I became quite a friend of Charles's and it converted me from being which I think I'd been an orthodox little boy, sort of pictures of Churchill in my bedroom this kind of thing to suddenly deciding about the age of 14 that I didn't want to shop on that side of the street anymore and I wanted to go on to the sunnier side of the street the left-hand side.
Presenter asks
23:55Do you see [editing The New Statesman] as the high point of your career?
I think it was the toughest job I ever had, and I think I got most satisfaction out of it. Um to run a kind of small, in those days I hope efficient outfit was um oddly satisfying. I think I was getting a bit bored with simply writing articles.
“what journalism gives you is the priceless gift of independence and also the opportunity for irreverence.”
“I think a piece that is elegantly and persuasively written is what I'm probably most attracted to.”
“Glories like glowworms from far off shine bright, but looked at near have neither heat nor light.”