Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Liberal MP for Truro, known as a tough West Country politician and a Cornish comic who stood in for Jimmy Young.
On the island
Eight records
Alan Opie, Climax Male Voice Choir and Camborne Town Band
He's the singer who I went to school with, who's now uh in opera and making a good living out of it. He's singing Twenty Thousand Cornishmen Shall Know the Reason Why, Trelawney.
The Sentry's Song (from Iolanthe)
W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
I thought, given my background, we would um pick the song from all of Gilbert and Sullivan, which refers to everybody being born little conservatives or little liberals.
I pick it because there's no man that's had a greater influence on mightier county than Charles Wesley.
Maple Leaf RagFavourite
I've chosen this purely and selfishly just because I like it.
One of my favorites, uh favorite of youth still maintained, Johnny Cash. It's uh one piece at a time, which is slightly is an engineering song. It's all about how he steals a motor car from his factory one piece at a time.
What else could we have after that other than the theme from the Lloyd George series?
Eddie Cochran and Sharon Sheeley
Well, it's um raw, naked, rock n'roll, which is still my favorite music. This is Eddie Cochrane singing something else.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:06Isn't there a sense in which Cornish people are born outcasts and therefore should welcome being on a desert island?
No, you see, you misunderstand the situation. You see, we Cornish are born in the centre of the civilized world. There's just enough people around to be pleasant. It's when you get up in these great urban areas where you get fed up with people. The Cornish have got the balance just right.
Presenter asks
5:15Why do you say the caravan site had a significant effect on your life?
I was brought up on the caravan site in effect, and it was a weekly renting caravan site, not a residential one. Such is the nature of such institutions that they tend to attract quite a heavy, drifting population. We had two, for example, on the caravan site that were executed for murder. I was the star defense witness. And if my father had been in any other business in Toro, I would have probably lived up the rather prosperous end of the town, as did the rest of the business people. Whereas I didn't. I lived in what probably was the poorest community within the town, and they were my friends. They were the people I spoke to. And made me very aware of a whole series of problems that people faced that weren't always solved by that standard middle-class attitude.
Presenter asks
10:24The keepsakes
The book
Well an almanac of wisdoms if I could get away with it. If not, if I had to pick a specific year, one when Somerset was doing well and Yorkshire badly.
The luxury
thirty foot of inch by quarter high carbon steel
because you give me that on an island and I could just about make anything. Because without any debt at all, I would be obsessed by the thought. So either making life more comfortable while I was there, or trying to get off.
At what moment in your life do you decide that you want to be a politician?
I don't think I ever did in that way. I mean, it's a bit of a joke, I know, but I I've said it before, if you want to get into power, you don't join the Liberal Party. Um and the seat for which I was adopted, I started off, you know, seventeen thousand behind. I just took the view that, um Britain with a stronger strand of liberalism, it was a good thing, and I played my role in that. And somehow or other, I landed up in this great madhouse here at Westminster.
Presenter asks
18:17Did you have any preset notions about what it was going to be like before you came up to London, to the big city, to Parliament?
In many ways, no. I had things I wanted to say. I mean, I had views on industry and views on Cornwall and views on this and that. So I had something to say, and in a peculiar way, I think that's what's important when you arrive at Westminster. If you'd asked me what the difference was between a second and a third reading in a committee stage at that time, I think I would have gone dumb, which is not one of my natural inclinations. The mechanisms of it, I didn't understand at all. My education was engineering, not history or British Constitution. But I assumed there would be a system which one could exploit.
Presenter asks
23:51Of the present lot who are sitting there [in the House of Commons], who are the ones who you admire particularly?
Within my own alliance, Roy Jenkins, I think, is a man of great substance and character. In a funny, perverted, upside-down way, I've got a sneaking admiration of Norman Teppit. I'm appalled by nearly everything he says or does. But there's something about the man in terms of vigour. And I suppose much the same can be said for the current Prime Minister.
“I've always said that I only got elected because I was too naive to realize it was impossible.”
“I don't see why people laugh when you say that. People who work for enterprises give their skills, give their energies, whatever they are, whether they be PhD, whether they be an ability to sweep a floor. And yet it is generally considered irrational in this nation that if you suggest they should have a right to some of the profits of their labour, that is thought in some way to be a revolutionary concept.”
“Quite seriously, if you can think of an amusing way of making a serious point. You can make it far more effectively in that manner than you can if you make it flat.”