Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Bearded botanist and television presenter, known for his BBC nature series.
On the island
Eight records
The Better LandFavourite
I used to sing this with my granny in her latter years, and on Sundays, we used to sit together and sing this, and I'd sing one half and she'd sing the other.
Ibert's Divertissement and the last part, those wonderful piano cadenzas.
Children's singing games (mixed nursery school)
Mixed nursery school of two and three year olds
please just children's voices… fabulous
only if I can have the record sleeve as well, because it happened to have my favorite picture on the front, Hieronymus Bosch's Garden of Delights
if I can have the dawn chorus just to remind me of what Britain's like
I can play the final part of Coppelia and I can dance my heart out to it and then I can sit back and see where I went wrong because my footsteps will be there in the sand.
From the soundtrack of Walt Disney's Fantasia
to give me a visual image
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:44Were you bright at school?
Oh no, terribly dull I think. I liked playing rugby and I liked chasing the girls and I, you know, liked enjoying myself and academia rather seemed to go out the window.
Presenter asks
0:44What did you want to be as a boy?
I'm not quite sure. Um my parents would have liked me to have been a medic and that's later on when they saw I had some scent between my ears. But I I always thought the stage I'd have liked to have gone into the ballet but then I grew too big.
Presenter asks
2:11How did it come about that you were eventually inspired to go after an academic background?
Well, I had been brought up, you know, with academia there, my father being a pharmacist, and I have always felt very sorry that I didn't do as well as I could have done at school. But I got a job in a new technical college in Yule in Surrey. It was just opening, and I was their first lab boy in the biology department. And it was there I met two guys, one called George Fluck, who still works there, and the other Ned Norris, who's now a very high and elevated HMI. And they showed me it was fun to learn. They completely turned me on. They were biologists, so I suppose I became a biologist. Just like that. It really was just like that, because I was lab boy at the tech, and five years later, I was a university lecturer in botany.
The keepsakes
The book
J.R.R. Tolkien
that is the most difficult thing, but I will stick to the Lord of the Rings Tolkien.
The luxury
So that I could get underneath it because I do like getting into a fresh linen sheet at night.
Presenter asks
3:51Are you a musical man?
Well I'm not a musical man. I heard a lot. My father especially was very interested in music and also my brother. So I heard a lot mainly through the radio of course in those days and through an old wind up record player. Perhaps that's why Clara Butt is one of my favourites. But I have a tin ear. I try to learn to play the piano. I try to sing. You know and I wish when whoever is hands out the talents they'd handed me out a tenor voice. It might have been in some ways more satisfying than being able to remember the Latin names of plants. But no, I like music but I don't think I'm a musician.
Presenter asks
12:15Apart from your loved ones, what did you miss most [during your time on desert island expeditions]?
Well basically children. Um I think plants and ballet and children are the thing that switch me on most and children most of all.
Presenter asks
13:28How did television come into your life?
Well I was working on marine pollution before Torrey Canyon went down and there were very very few people working on marine pollution in those days. So of course when Torrey Canyon went down you know the news had to look around and say who can come and talk about it and they found that I was working on it so I was dragged screaming out of my ivory tower and stuck in front of one of these things which is between us and I was discovered and I've never been off since.
“I have a marvellous testimonial which reads Bellamy is a good fellow, maturing well, but he's academically useless.”
“When you have lived on, especially you dive every day, as we were on all these expeditions, you suffer from a thing called coral sores. You get cut and the cut goes… whatever's got the sore on falls off, which is very inconvenient… I found the perfect cure because one day I was diving and I got coral sores very badly. And suddenly I realized that I had jumped the queue at a cleaner station on the reef… all the cleaner fish were coming and cleaning up my sores. Now that night when I came up my sores started to heal up. So everything is some antibiotic in these fish. And since then I've never ever had to inject myself. I just go and get cleaned at the cleaner station. But once you've been part of a natural living system like that, you've got nothing left to live for.”
“I was dragged screaming out of my ivory tower and stuck in front of one of these things which is between us and I was discovered and I've never been off since.”
“I was swimming round and round the pool with the dolphins. And when the trainer blew the whistle, instead of the dolphin coming out, I landed out and ate the fish, you see. But then this wonderful dolphin called Honey, who was a lady dolphin, came out and attempted to mate with me on the side of the pool. And it really was fantastic… we both glowed with passion together.”
“I wanted to stand there at the North Pole and say, today I feel on top of the world… that's the only thing I couldn't say.”