Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
2 appearances
British television dramatist known for works such as 'Pennies from Heaven' and 'The Singing Detective'.
On the island
Eight records
Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise
the first record will instantly bring back to me Salem Chapel, and all the riches that followed from Salem Chapel.
Sons of the BraveFavourite
this record will continually bring back to me affection, warmth, and people that I love.
Al Bowlly with Lew Stone and His Band
It's the sort of music I play when I have been depressed or the sort of music I play when I'm working sometimes because it's that kind of easy stuff.
Duke Ellington and His Orchestra
I can never hear Twelfth Street rag without being reminded of some of the great joys of life, and I think on my island I would need to think about not just that thirteen year old, but of all the women of the world.
I would only have to hear this to have the screen immediately erected on the island, and I would sit back and remember all the Bad B movies of my youth.
Ambrose and His Orchestra with Elsie Carlisle
I find it such a plunge, such a sweetly stupid, silly little song that it actually provokes something approaching genuine emotion in me.
Al Bowlly with Lew Stone and His Band
a song that I think is very funny and will make me simper as I'm cowering in whatever hole it is that I end up on this island.
A song, if sung in a particular way, which always pours out of me things that are so deep that you can't express them.
I'm Getting Sentimental Over You
I'm choosing it partly for a sentimental reason in that it was recorded nineteen thirty five, year of my birth. And it's something I've heard on and off, on and off, almost sometimes at the corner of your mind, sometimes when I'm ill I play it. I threaten people that I want to play it at my funeral.
I just thought I would choose one of the uh hymns that we used to bellow out as boys at uh Salem Chapel. I would have I have very mixed feelings about that too, but you know, up the hill on a Sunday twice or sometimes three times the day to the chapel.
My HappinessFavourite
Whenever I'm tempted to say I wish I was very much younger again, I think of being thirteen, sitting in a Sheltered bus stop in Cinderford in the Forest of Dean, watching this young man whistling my happiness. So lugubrious and I think, is that what it's all is that what sex and love? Is that what it's all about?
The title theme of the Singing Detective is Max Harris and his trio, which is actually Peg on my heart. just brings the tensions and difficulties of sitting down at the first episode and wondering what the hell people are going to make of it and then finding that they actually do follow you.
I just love the sound of it and it the gentleness of uh this blues number
Der Freischütz (The Wolf's Glen Scene)
I would like to to um choose a bit from Der Freischutz, the uh the Wolf's Glen, which is grand opera at its most crazy, you know, the uh blast oaks, thunderstorms. Cataracts, owl with red eyes, voices, spirit voices singing about moon milk on the grass, spiders' web with blood o'ercast
Duke Ellington & His Orchestra
I couldn't possibly go on my island without at least one Duke Ellington and I moved in Dico, which is Beautiful.
Has to be Smoke Gets In Your Eyes, which I arbitrarily decided some thirty years ago should be our song, i. e. Margaret, my wife and myself, and my first date with her.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:59How do you feel about loneliness? Could you endure it?
Probably for a while, yes. I I'm not really a very gregarious person. I never have been, except, you know, for brief periods, brief manic periods. And on the whole I've adapted to fairly reclusive circumstances in the past, and I think I I could for a while again.
Presenter asks
1:20How much does music mean to you? Have you any musical skill yourself?
I'm not, as my choice will indicate, a particularly musical person. Music means things in a literary way to me. It it has to be a trigger for some event, some memory, some gathering of impressions from the past. And then I can add those extra layers of meaning to it myself.
Presenter asks
4:33Were there books in the house?
Uh no. Sank his sacred songs and solos. Um there was one uh romance and novel, and there was Red Star and My Weekly, the women's magazines do so. But that that was about the extent of the literature available in the early days.
Presenter asks
The keepsakes
The book
Peter Wright
Because if my happiness doesn't drive me either crazy or into the sea, then a [satellite] helicopter will soon hover overhead and lift me off.
The luxury
I would like to have is a really good train set, winding all the way around the island with stations and signal boxes, everything.
As a schoolboy, what did you want to be?
I'm told that when I was asked when I was seven what did I want to be, I I used to say uh either a great writer or prime minister. So I must have wanted been aware that there were possibilities and so I end up doing neither, but there you are.
Presenter asks
10:28Why did you leave the corporation?
Because uh I was still writing things and I would be called in front of people saying, you know, you realize you mustn't do this and I thought, Oh my goodness, what do what do they mean I can't do this? And I was aware that I would not be not able to write about politics. And so I I I resigned after a year.
Presenter asks
21:12Why have you been over the top so many times?
Um, I don't know whether it's it's over the top or into the middle. Um … The reasons differ in each case. … I think if if you're going to be writing plays that are not just part of the PAP … and you're going to be writing about emotions, beliefs, feelings that are pulled out of you because they're meaningful to you and therefore you presume to others, then it's always possible that this sort of confrontation will will arise.
Presenter asks
0:30Would you welcome this solitary life on the Desert Island?
In any self-respecting history of drama on British television, R. Castaway would emerge as the dominant figure… Dennis, w would you welcome this solitary life, do you think, on the Desert Island? Probably up to Point. I do have a very reclusive temperament which occasionally bursts out. You know, reclusiveness and shyness are not the same thing, fortunately, but I like I always have liked being on my own for long periods.
Presenter asks
1:31How much of a solace or inspiration has music been in your life?
Solice sound an inspiration, but particular kinds of music. Um It can be a chariot, you know, it can take you You can fly with music, and particularly in in dr in if you're writing a a play or something, you can use music on the edge of words, on the edge of the character's mind. And you know that other people are sharing, if not exactly the same emotion, a roughly similar one. It can be no matter how sugary, syncopated, banal, or cheap, it can be extraordinarily powerful.
Presenter asks
8:02Did you ever manage to communicate properly with your father?
He died in ni in nineteen seventy five and I s can still feel you know, I still feel the relationship is going on. you know, I still grieve about it, uh, and him. I am He was an incredibly gentleman. He would start I would be writing, saying. He would come and he would stand in the jamb of the door and lean against say in his forest teena and say, Is that all right, Obat? That used to both please and sometimes if I would try I say, Yes, Dad, I'm just trying to get on with that No, but you're sure you're all right, Obad. Yes, Dad, thanks, thanks very much, you know. And of course if I could only say Well, everyone everyone who grieves says that, if I could only say.
Presenter asks
10:16Was standing as a Labour candidate a serious effort to change the world?
I think I'd written my first book in my last year at Oxford and it was one of those a young man looks at England sort of things and it was called The Glittering Coffin, the glittering coffin being England, as it were. And on the first page of which I said my ambition was to be a Labour Member of Parliament. I didn't actually say my ambition was to be a Labour Cabinet Minister or even Labour Prime Minister, but of course it was. But, you know, so already being political and discreetly modifying the public statement of ambition, like they all do. And yes, I w I do and I still feel that. I still feel that the world needs a change and that England or Britain I should say Needs. a different way of looking at itself.
Presenter asks
15:45How much was the physical condition of Michael Gambon in The Singing Detective a depiction of the reality of your illness?
An understatement of the extremity of when it's at its full peak. It reached its full peak with me finally in nineteen seventy two, and that's when my hands collapsed and and everything sort of went wrong, and it was months at a pitch. Like in episode one of The Singing Detective, because you're one hundred percent psoriatic and you can't move your joints either. And you lose the skin being an important monitoring or an important function of temperature and it just you just lose control of all that and you start to mildly and sometimes not so mildly hallucinate
Presenter asks
23:49Was your experience working in Hollywood a pleasant one?
It was it was awesome. sorts of experiences all rolled up into into one and You do learn a lot and it because it's alien and you feel alien, I or at least I do, and you know, walking along. Those streets where no one walks, as it were and It's easy to be condescending about that place. But it does have tremendous energy and it does make you because there it is ultra capitalism, as it were, it does make you focus on what it is, which little corner of the supermarket they're dealing with.
“I'm not, as my choice will indicate, a particularly musical person. Music means things in a literary way to me. It it has to be a trigger for some event, some memory, some gathering of impressions from the past.”
“I think if if you're going to be writing plays that are not just part of the PAP … and you're going to be writing about emotions, beliefs, feelings that are pulled out of you because they're meaningful to you and therefore you presume to others, then it's always possible that this sort of confrontation will will arise.”
“Religion on television is a thing for sugar and Sunday half hour and a sort of sweet Sunday tea timey sort of thing. Whereas religion to me is it's basic to my response to life now. It's about the pain and the darkness of life as well.”
“When I came out of hospital in March, I thought the whole world was washed, clean, new, shining. It's a marvellous experience to have, you know, to see as though sort of things had been removed from in front of your eyes so that you could actually see what a joyous and gorgeous world that we actually do live in.”
“I think the brass band thing [Sons of the Brave] … it's almost like having to choose between my mother and my father.”
“It can be no matter how sugary, syncopated, banal, or cheap, it can be extraordinarily powerful.”
“In a sense, no teacher ever says to you, scorn your background, of course not. But gradually you start juggling in your mind very conflicting feelings and guilts can very quickly creep in into the gap between. And because you're so young and because you think that passing exams is is is lifeblood of everything, and that in turn means that other values are being, as it were, held up like a flag for you to follow.”
“we're all sovereign, separate human beings and most of the time most of life is telling us we're not.”
“why detective stories are interesting, because they are all clues about assembling. And the point Marlowe began totally sort of out of it and full of hate and scorn and lacerating himself and before he could even start to get better or even contemplate walking away from the bed, he had to readdress himself, and that's what happens in illness.”