Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A humorous travel writer whose books about Britain, particularly Notes from a Small Island, made him a favourite in the UK.
On the island
Eight records
Concerto in F for Piano and Orchestra
Garrick Ohlsson, San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas
I love Gershwin. Um he seems to me you know the great quintessential musical maestro of the twentieth century in America.
(Sittin' On) The Dock of the BayFavourite
I think it's just a really, really lovely song. It's so simple, and yet I don't think there's a person on the planet who doesn't like this song.
When I was quite a young man, I my first car was a little M G midget, and I bought this car and I was immensely proud of it and I was out waxing it one warm summer evening in Des Moines and had an eight track tape deck in it and was listening to this album and this particular song and it was just one of those moments when life seemed really good.
Really very, very funny guy, an academic, American academic who wrote very funny songs in the fifties. And what I remember about this is is being quite small, and listening to my parents listening to an album of Tom Lauren songs and laughing uh very hard while I was up in bed trying to get to sleep and just um you know regretting that I wasn't big enough to go down and join them.
And I chose this because it was a really sad song. It's about divorce. And and I chose it for sort of sort of the opposite reasons because um when I heard this song I I just it made me feel immensely lucky that I've not been in this position before and and um never expect to be put in this position.
St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Leonard Slatkin
Which is appropriate to me because um one of my biggest projects in the last few years was I tried to hike the Appalachian Trail.
is um Archie Roach, who's an Australian, and I know I know almost nothing about him, but that's part of what I I like. Australia is the next book I'm going to do. I'm about to go out to Australia to start doing the research. And one of the things that fascinates me about Australia is that when I go there, there are all these things that are happening there that I've never heard about. And Archie Roach musically seemed like that to me.
Violin Concerto No. 1 in G minor, Op. 26: II. Adagio
Anne-Sophie Mutter, Berlin Philharmonic, conducted by Herbert von Karajan
which I chose because somebody who really knows music suggested it and I thought it'd make me sound a little classier.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:35You've been pigeonholed as a travel writer. Perhaps that's not what you are. You're a humorous writer, are you, who happens to get his material from people and places?
Well, the point of of you know, disowning myself as a travel rider is simply that I mean, there are a lot of very, very wonderful, real travel riders out there, and I don't pretend to be that kind of a rider. What I I you know, I don't go off and and ride camels across deserts and and go through a great deal of [hardship] … mostly I'm a guy that, you know, I I d I don't do deserts, I do motels
Presenter asks
9:02What was it that was worthwhile [about 1950s America] that you were mourning the passing of?
Well, I just think there was just uh in the fifties when I was growing up, there was a greater simplicity to life. I mean, America really had it right in the fifties, and I think we've moved beyond that now. I had it right in the sense that it was an era of great prosperity and comfort and an era of real possibility. I mean, there was just a sense of moving forward, opportunity for all, all that kind of thing, things, the sort of things that nations strive for.
Presenter asks
12:56Was [Iowa] really so desperate, you know, as well as being so large?
The keepsakes
The book
Bill Bryson
Well, if it doesn't seem too vain, I think what I'd like to do would be to take The Lost Continent with me, my own book, because ... it's you know, one of the things you do when you when you write is ... I wish I'd done that differently. I wish I had a a chance to do that all over again. ... I'm gonna sub myself. I think now, you know, the the idea of having that kind of leisure and time ... And e even if no one ever read it, you know, if if it perished with me out there, I would still it would be so satisfying to be able to take something that you've done and ha have had to live with for a number of years and be able to do it all over again and and try to get it right this time.
The luxury
I think probably the only ball game that you can do on your own and it's immensely soothing and satisfying just to shoot baskets, just to, you know, throw a ball out and try and get it through a circular hole.
You know, well, desperate only in the sense if you have aspirations or ambitions to see a wider world. It's it's pretty desperate. In terms of of just a a comfortable, safe, clean, wholesome place to grow up, it couldn't be better. I mean, it was a really wonderful place. Iowans are the nicest people on earth. They really are.
Presenter asks
17:03Why didn't you approve of [Rupert] Murdoch's actions [during the Wapping dispute]?
Well, it was I mean f personally it was very painful for us. We were put into this terrible position where we were having to cross picket lines. And we weren't only crossing the picket lines that were manned by th the likes of Vince, these people that had terrified us, but also, you know, the cast out into the street had been people who'd worked in the canteen, who people, the librarians, the secretaries, all of the people from unions that were not particularly balshy. And certainly a on a day-to-day personal level these people were our friends. And and a lot of people, braver people than I, you know, left and wouldn't wouldn't do it. Um y you know, I I I I didn't. I I regret that I didn't, but I had baby and mortgage and all that and like most other people I just sort of did it and and left as soon as I could afford to
Presenter asks
27:06Are you less happy [back in America] than you were here [in Britain]?
Yeah, and um it was much, much harder than I had expected it to be. We got there and I can remember very, very clearly waking up in this house in New Hampshire that's we had just bought and waking up looking out the window the first morning that we had slept there and and thinking, Oh God, what have we done? Because for me it just felt like a terrible mistake. It was a really it was a catastrophe. It was not what I wanted to do. And what it felt like to me was exactly like moving back in with your parents in middle age.
“The only thing I can compare it to is the experience of when you, you know, fall in love with your wife or partner. You know, like with my wife I think she's she's lovely and and attractive and delightful and a very interesting person and all that, but but I love her because she's her, you know. I mean, it goes beyond that. And and I felt rather that way about Britain. There was just something about it that suited me. And I've never stopped feeling that way.”
“I'm one of these people that when I try to tell a story, I keep interrupting myself and say, No, no, it was it was a Wednesday and it and it was Lancashire, it wasn't Yorkshire and you know, one of those hopeless storytellers. What surprised me was the discovery that how many people assumed writer journalists assumed that it was impossible for a sub-editor to write as well, as if this were a skill that was beyond them, which I thought was a little bit condescending.”
“I think one of the things I've learned in the process of doing this is that some of the earlier books I thought were just too the humor was too relentless. That it's not sustainable over the length of a book. That you need a little serious relief from time to time. That it it just becomes jokes begin to pall. People don't want to laugh nonstop for two hundred and eighty pages or whatever.”