Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Best known as the quiz master of University Challenge for 25 years, also a writer and television presenter.
On the island
Eight records
Make Me a Palette on the Floor
Ottilie Patterson with Chris Barber's Jazz Band
I don't think that has any particular family historical connotations in our relationship, no, but I'm delighted she's chosen.
Jacqueline Mayro and Karen Moore with Ethel Merman
Gypsy when I was this is before I met her actually, but it's always been a favourite man. I was a a student in New York in fifty eight to nine when Gypsy was new.
Soave sia il vento (from Così fan tutte)Favourite
Glyndebourne Festival Chorus and Orchestra
Well she would have chosen that because in fact but it's certainly my favourite opera. I think it's near the top of her favourites. But actually it was a production at Glenborn that I think first really hooked us both on opera about ten or fifteen years ago.
Joan Sutherland and Luciano Pavarotti
Well, I dread to think that she might have chosen it for this reason. The words do mean my sighs shall come to upon the breezes. Let's leave it at that. Who knows?
And in fact the songs are so sad that my wife banished it from the house. She knew I loved it, but she in fact wouldn't have the record'cause it made her so sad. But knowing that I loved it, she's a very sweetly chosen one.
It's my favorite aria I think in the opera. I think for me it's probably the single most moving opera there is, and that's the single most moving aria for me.
Oh well that's a particular favourite of mine. Fr from back at university days... It's also rather good for Desert Island,'cause it's full of good tips about how to look after yourself on a Desert Island.
Joan Sutherland, John Aldis Choir and the London Philharmonic Orchestra
Remembering the finale is just the most incredibly stirring piece of music, and she must have put it in to cheer me up on bad days.
In conversation
Presenter asks
3:06How far back can you trace your family?
A long way, yes. They came over soon after the Normans. They came in about twelve hundred. I reckon they waited till it had settled down a bit and the serious fighting was over and then they went to Yorkshire
Presenter asks
5:52Why did you give up acting?
I'd never before been in more than two performances and it was always so exciting the first night and then the second performance was, you know, relaxed a bit. And I couldn't believe the paralysing boredom that descended upon me on the third, fourth and fifth nights whenever anyone else was speaking on the stage... And I realized this was not the profession for me.
Presenter asks
10:18How do you recollect the sixties?
I think that one's the memory of anything is so tremendously subjective, isn't it? That to us I thought it was a time when we were in our sort of round thirty and... That's an exciting time. I mean, certainly I felt, we felt that things were very exciting... People like us, all the same age at that time, could if they turned a particular corner suddenly make it in an amazing way.
The keepsakes
The book
Laurence Sterne
that it's a book which is absolutely enraging to read in a hurry just once because it's so full of mad loose ends and odd digressions. ... I think read Wonderful on the Desert Island, because of all those loose ends, you could begin to dream the digressions would lead one off into whole new areas of fantasy.
The luxury
I love carpentry. Indeed I like making objects almost as much as I like writing books, but um that somehow ends up diverted into books and I really would I couldn't wait to get cracking on the driftwood.
Presenter asks
How did University Challenge enter your life?
Well, we have an old mutual friend you and I called Barry Heads who was instructed by Cecil Bernstein in nineteen sixty two to find a new face for this quiz game... So he wrote out to about fifteen people, journalists and actors... If you want to be on television, ring this number. So I hurriedly did. And we all went on audition. And I happened to win it, but it was just then for a summer job, it seemed.
Presenter asks
21:44Did doing the television series [The Christians] change your life at all?
it changed my life, strange enough, for the next ten years in that it turned me off doing big scale television because it had just been so exhausting. I'd done nothing but fly around the world seven days a week for four years. And I thought this is not for me, and I went to the other extreme and wrote books that only sold one hundred and seventy-five copies. It didn't in religious terms. I was started as an agnostic and ended as an agnostic, but a perfectly friendly agnostic.
“I couldn't believe the paralysing boredom that descended upon me on the third, fourth and fifth nights whenever anyone else was speaking on the stage. It was fine when I was speaking, but uh the gaps between seemed to me to get longer and longer. And I realized this was not the profession for me.”
“We had a feeling in those days that you really ought to watch almost anything that came on in television in case it was going to be very good, because so much of it was good. Now television has taken its place like everything else, just one of the things you might happen to see.”
“It's been like having a sort of rich um godfather or something who's given me some money for very little time, spent a year, and I've spent the rest of the time writing unprofitable books.”