Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A pollster and chairman of MORI, who leads a market research company that gauges public opinion on politics, consumer goods and more.
On the island
Eight records
London Philharmonic Choir and Orchestra, conducted by Bryden Thomson
The first record really should be the theme music for this program, because it's from an O'Shaughnessy poem, The Music Makers.
During that high school days and into university, we had a wonderful, wonderful social environment. I had my first dinner jacket when I was thirteen and started going to dances, and uh we danced the night away and the the record that is most in my mind of that period is uh Stan Kenton's orchestra and particularly this most danceable of music called Intermission Riff.
Symphony No. 9 in E Minor, Op. 95, 'From the New World' (Second Movement)
Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Herbert von Karajan
Record number three is really the transition record, Dvorak's New World Symphony. Here's a European going to the United States, as de Tocqueville did in 1836 to 1840, writing Democracy in America, a book that had a tremendous impact on me.
Requiem in D Minor, K. 626: Sanctus
Symphonic Choir and Orchestra of the Gulbenkian Foundation of Lisbon, conducted by Michel Corboz
I had sung with the choir in high school and with the choral group in university. And then I'd laid out for a while and I saw in the Evening Standard that the St. Bartholomew's Hospital Choir was doing Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. And I thought, I've always wanted to sing that. And the following year they said, well, we're going to do Mozart's Requiem. And it's just the most wonderful choral music.
Missa Solemnis in D Major, Op. 123: Agnus Dei
Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists, conducted by John Eliot Gardiner
Well, record number five is a Beethoven. It's the Missa Solemnis, and to me it's the greatest choral work that was ever written.
Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Rafael Kubelík
Well, record number six is probably the thing that uh I cannot listen to, at least the overture. without coming up all goosebumps and possibly tears, and that's the overture to Wagner's Lohengrin.
Parsifal: Act I (Chalice Scene)
Orchestra and Chorus of the Vienna State Opera, conducted by Sir Georg Solti
Well, record number seven stays with Faulkner. I was tempted, as of course all Wagnerians are, to have all my eight records Wagner, but uh it's Wagner's Parceval, and the chalice scene at the end of the first act is probably the high point of the operatic experience in my life.
Symphony No. 3 in C Minor, Op. 78, 'Organ Symphony' (Finale)Favourite
Orchestre du Capitole de Toulouse, conducted by Michel Plasson
Well, the last record is the finale of the Sans Organ Symphony. To me it is the ending of all endings, and so uh the organ symphony will have to be my finale.
In conversation
Presenter asks
2:36Have you ever sacked any of your clients because they wanted you to massage or manipulate the information?
Just two. Robert Maxwell and Sir James Goldsmith, and they both wanted to use us for their own ends. In the case of Robert Maxwell it was that he wanted to see the results of the surveys that he was commissioning before he would allow them to be published. And if he didn't like the results, he was going to bury them. And I said, Well, that's your prerogative as publisher, mister Maxwell but my terms and conditions of contract say that if they haven't been published within seven days of the intended publication date that I'm free to give them away. … And that's how Sir James Goldsmith was sacked … He wanted me to change the wording of the question, to ask a conditional if he kind of a question that would boost his ratings. And we said thank you very much, but uh no thank you.
Presenter asks
5:45How did [your father's death] happen?
Well, he had a heart attack. He had a history of heart disease. … And that being an only child threw us right into a change in our very middle class, my mother playing golf in the morning and bridge in the afternoon with her circle and taking part in charity work and the like into needing to work and my jeopardy in my university and I had to undertake three jobs while I was at university to work my way through university.
Presenter asks
The keepsakes
The book
National Maritime Museum
The National Maritime Museum at Greenwich has the greatest collection of globes in the world. all sorts of globes terrestrial globes, celestial globes. It's a book for admiring, absorbing, for reading again and again. It would teach me history, geography, cartography, astronomy, politics, art. a metallurgy, a bit of languages, philosophy, and above all patience.
The luxury
a pair of celestial and terrestrial globes
to accompany the book, I'd like a pair of celestial and terrestrial globes, so that I could at night watch the stars and study them, and the terrestrial globe would give me thought about where I would visit and what I would do in all of those other islands that I wouldn't be able to be on, and indeed the continents and cities that I would value seeing either again or for the first time.
How do you maintain objectivity [when working for a political party]? How come you don't go native?
It's very difficult not to go native. You have a natural sympathy for your client, but I very, very early on, when I first set up Mori, said we are not anyone's advocate. We are providing information to our clients. So I can work on both sides.
Presenter asks
22:53What went wrong [in the 1992 general election]?
Well, let me correct it first, and that's that none of the polls said that Neil Kinnock was going to win. All of them said it was going to be a hung parliament. And what went wrong? It was a combination of things. There was perhaps 30 to 40 percent accounted for by late swing. … But the principal thing is that the 1992 election was really guided by the 1981 census. And the surveys upon which we based our quotas were based on analysis of the composition by social class of this country. … We got the clothes wrong, basically, and I think that was the majority.
Presenter asks
33:29Would you survive [on a desert island] with that low boredom threshold of yours?
Oh, no, no, no, no, no. I'd certainly make it. I'd love to have a scuba mask and snorkel because I'd be cataloging the fish that were there and the coral and the reef and mapping the thing. I don't know how big this desert island is going to be, but there's going to be flora and fauna available for me to catalog and to count and to put in their boxes and to cross-analyze. And I'm pretty excited about it, actually.
“In my professional career I have no other raison d'être [than representing British public opinion as objectively and systematically as it's possible to do].”
“Every election day. Oh, what a terrible time. Nobody shoots craps with their lives and careers the way we do.”
“What we are is not innocent bystanders, but conveyors of information, objectively and systematically derived from the British electorate themselves.”