Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Television comedy writer from Liverpool.
On the island
Eight records
I find this very stirring, and it gives me a great determination.
The thing I find about this music is it totally unwinds me. And I make decisions when I've heard this music. It just relaxes me, and it has pleasant memories too of [someone].
Violin Concerto in D majorFavourite
It's not exactly my favorite piece of music. That is, I like other pieces of music better. But it means more to me than any other music.
I love this because no matter how I feel, it makes me feel happy. It's... exhilarating, and best of all I love playing this when I'm driving along the Bayswater Road.
This one, of course, is the music that I used in Butterflies... And it's just a beautiful piece of music.
A a little piece I found by accident and when I was writing solo I wanted desperately to have opera over the titles.
It's a record which in my big house... is played often. And on the lawn on a summer's day, this is the kind of sound that comes from the house. It also reminds me of my dog when I'm walking in the park with him...
When my father went to sea my mother used to play this... and she used to actually stand, like they do in these lovely big films... with tears in her eyes... And it reminds me very much of when I was very tiny and didn't know what it was all about but was automatically gathering something very good from it.
In conversation
Presenter asks
3:21Were you a bright child? Were you good at school?
No. I was um honestly I was thick at school. I could write a composition which was the only thing I could manage. But, um, arithmetic, as we called it, and all those awful things, I just could not cope. I tended to dream a lot.
Presenter asks
5:33Did your family encourage you [to write]?
In a way they did. Nobody actually sort of patted me on the head and said, You you go ahead, you do this thing, but I was aware that my father was quite a poetic man, and indeed wrote poetry, but he did it secretly. And um my my grandfather was an art critic and so he had to write a lot and... So, you know, it was an accepted thing rather than an encouraged thing.
Presenter asks
6:20What was your first job?
The first thing I did, I went into a baby linen shop, a very tiny one, um, quite near to where I lived, and I earned what we called ten bob a week, and I just sold babies' bonnets and cotton reels and that sort of thing.
Presenter asks
The keepsakes
The book
John Bartlett
I think I'd like the book of quotations, probably the Bartlett one, or any good book of quotations, because it's the book I go back to always, and I think it will be the thing I'd need.
The luxury
There's a certain shampoo I use. It's French and uh effective, and actually I cannot bear my hair not being washed in this shampoo, so I want please lots of that.
Why did you adopt the nom de plume Carla Lane?
I adopted that long ago. Um, in the days, the early days of radio... because I was in Liverpool, I didn't want everybody to know precisely who I was. So because I I suppose I wanted to exaggerate, if not lie a little, in some of the things I said... And so I suddenly was faced on the phone one day with this business of do you want to be Romana Barrack? as it was, and I thought, No, I don't. So Carla Lane sort of fell out.
Presenter asks
18:55Why did your writing partner Myra Taylor decide not to go on?
I don't think it was as much that she didn't want to go on. I think that the pressures of the whole thing and her particular temperament didn't get on with the kind of thing we had to do. I mean, the friendship between she and I is still she's my dearest friend. So it was a sad thing, but she just was honest. She said, I've finished. I've really nothing more to say.
Presenter asks
35:00How good a castaway are you going to be in a practical sense?
Well, of course I have a huge problem because I'm a vegetarian and a practising one in every way, so I won't be able to go out and hunt little creatures and roast them and things like that... It's the loneliness which will cripple me.
“I really do not like my own company, so it's going to be a very dreadful experience.”
“What I wanted to be was a gipsy. I wanted to go and live in a caravan and be a gipsy.”
“I can't actually sit down and write a comedy if I'm laughing about it. If I'm feeling rather miserable and despondent about the story, then I think probably I can write it in a funnier way.”
“If I don't do that, to me it's sort of like being pregnant and not having the baby. You know what I mean, there's no point in writing a script if you're just going to abandon it at the most important time.”