Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
An anthropologist best known for his book 'The Naked Ape' and his studies of human and animal behaviour.
On the island
Eight records
Well, my wife gave me a nice birthday surprise. She said, I'm going to take you to see something really special and I was taken off to see this incredible cir well, it isn't really a circus. Cirque de Soleil is a surrealist event. It's a magical magical event. And the music is very strange.
Right, well now we're going right back to my school days because as a rebellious young schoolboy I loved jazz. And in particular I loved a trumpet player called Muggsy Spania. And he fascinated me because he used a muted trumpet. It almost made his trumpet talk.
Well, during this time, one of my acts of rebellion was to learn to play the drums. I wanted to be a drummer. I wanted to be Gene Krupper, who was the most famous drummer at the time. For me, one of the um great occasions which didn't occur till much later, in fact not until nineteen fifty two at Carnegie Hall in New York, was when Cruper for the first time met and did a drum battle with his great rival, his arch rival Buddy Rich, back and forth.
Well, I uh have one very fond memory dating from nineteen sixty four when my wife and I went to see the last performance in London by Marlena Dietrich. And her extraordinary voice, I think, is at its best in Go Away from My Window.
Orchestre de la Suisse Romande
Part of my artistic activity when I was very young, back in 1950, was to make two surrealist films. And a film called Time Flower began with me pursuing a girl across the Wiltshire Downs. But I wanted a very dramatic piece of music to go with this. And what I chose was Prokofiev's Scythian Sweep.
Um talking of going off to strange places, one of the things I've loved uh now that I do enjoy travel a lot is is going to s to different countries. And one of the things that I enjoy when I get there is the local music. And there's one group I discovered who have taken West African music and westernized it without vulgarizing it, and they're called Zapmama.
Well, when we came back to Oxford, our son grew up there and he was at the school just round the corner and he'd come home with his school chums and amongst the school chums was this little boy called Eddie. And Eddie was different from the others in that he he really loved playing air guitar. And he was only a little boy, about eight or nine at the time. And I thought that's an odd thing, you know, at that age. Well, Eddie went on to become Ed O'Brien, one of the guitarists of one of the most successful pop groups in existence, namely Radiohead.
ImagineFavourite
My last record is Imagine, my favorite John Lennon piece. But because everybody plays John Lennon singing Imagine, let's have Imagine sung by Alex Parks.
In conversation
Presenter asks
10:00Why were you a bit of a loner as a boy in 1930s Wiltshire?
Well I think it was World War Two was raging all around me. And when I as a boy looked at adults, I thought when you grow up you kill people. That's what grown ups do, because there was that was what was happening at the time. … My father was dying from war wounds he'd received in the First World War. … And my entire childhood was watching a tough man go into decline. So I got pretty angry, I think, as a boy about what the establishment had done to him. And now I was seeing it all over again.
Presenter asks
10:55Is that why you turned to animals, do you think?
I think I felt that really human beings were pretty awful at that point. I got to like them later on, but at that stage I thought they were pretty awful. … Human beings are monkeys with diseased brains. And so obviously I didn't think too highly of the human species and I turned to other species and I my grandmother had a lake. with some little islands on it, and nobody else was allowed to go there. It was my private domain. … I was watching and studying things and escaping, if you like, from the horrors of World War Two.
Presenter asks
22:47Why looking back were people so shocked by [The Naked Ape]?
Yes, I it it surprised me because I hadn't expected to be Sort of rearguard action for Darwin. You know, I'd expected that by now people had accepted that. Looking back on it now, I think it's just that what was shocking was because people recognized themselves in the naked ape, and the church wasn't very happy with that. And of course, I was reporting on sexual behaviour just as objectively as I would have done if I was studying a fish or bird. And so the Puritanical people weren't happy with that. So I was attacked by the Puritanical and by the devout.
The keepsakes
The book
The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night
Richard Francis Burton
I would want a book that I could go on reading and reading and reading. So I would take A Thousand Nights and a Night, the Richard Burton version.
The luxury
I want to spend all my time on my desert island watching the coral reefs and watching the fish.
Presenter asks
23:52When does [filming the female orgasm] cease to be science and when does it become voyeurism?
I think it's a case of whether a particular pattern of behaviour is important to our species. And nobody can say that sexual behaviour is unimportant because without it we wouldn't be here. And it is a vitally important part of our behaviour. But I'm just as interested in the way in which people cross their legs or fold their arms as I am in the way in which people mate. But I'm not going to leave mating out. I can't leave it out.
Presenter asks
29:53How much longer do you have to create in the way that you do?
Well, I I should never have written that book about aging. I know too much. I know that I've only got about four years of Possible creativity left because when you get into your eighties, it's very difficult to be creative.
“I always uh thought I would die young. Um the males in my ancestry have always died young, and I thought I would be one of them. And so I didn't think I'd got all that much time left, and so I've always been trying to pack it in.”
“It's an amazing phenomenon how the human species, wildly overpopulated, evolving in tiny tribes, now living in huge cities, and yet the vast majority of people are incredibly peaceful and cooperative. That's our nature, by nature.”
“I decided that it would be interesting to look at people the same way I looked at animals. But the point was that with the other animals, I couldn't talk to them. I could only watch them. … and study body language and and visu watch people instead of interviewing them, I will have a new approach to humans which may tell us something new.”