Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Theatre director and co-writer/performer of Beyond the Fringe, also editor and presenter of the BBC arts programme Monitor.
On the island
Eight records
I heard this accent, this voice, this narrative, with this rather beautiful musical accompaniment. I thought that this woman is a is a poetic genius.
Which brings back the war and the image on the news of head-scarfed girls on production lines and the sense of distant dread that I as a child had about the war...
The first three notes of this brings back again a world which has vanished, a civilized, despairing world that thought will civilized life ever restore itself after the desecration and atrocity of what went on between 1939 and 1945.
For me, it brings back again that last part of the war with American forces. Yes, my darling daughter, is the sound of the heroic excitement of America...
There was that period just before. The Nazis took over when it was possible for three Jews and three Germans to work together in Comic Harmony...
Theme from Alice in Wonderland
I did a film of Alice in Wonderland, which I took away all the animal heads and all the sort of cartoon aspects of it, and restored it to what I think Dodgson or Carroll had in mind...
This music of the Beach Boys singing Surfing USA just brings back my first intoxicated excitement with the United States of America.
Goldberg Variations, BWV 988: AriaFavourite
I would like to have a piece of music which I would play in cycle, which itself is a cycle... I'd like to die to the sound of this music.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:35Does your regret [about leaving medicine] run very deep?
I think it's mainly to do with the fact that um I grew up in a world in Cambridge which valued particular forms of intellectual achievement and devalued others, so that when I told the friends of mine that I had at Cambridge that I was leaving medicine, the look of icy disapproval that swept across their face corresponded to the same sense of icy disapproval which swept across the inside of my mind when I found that I had done so.
Presenter asks
2:11Was your father's icy disapproval voiced?
It was rather tentatively. I remember when I was about forty, when l by which time I'd left and gone and done other things, I remember going to his apartment and he was sitting behind his consulting room desk and said, uh Ha ha ha have you uh Have have you decided what you want to be? And I knew that he really hadn't got much time for what it was that I'd I'd drifted into rather than decided to do.
Presenter asks
2:43Is there a sense that you feel you've squandered your inheritance?
Yes, I have a sense that that I I could have done something more serious and and also more more more fundamental and lasting. If you arrive at a truth in science, it's forever. So if there is an achievement in science Um it's unquestionable.
The keepsakes
The book
Libbie Henrietta Hyman
because I had a great passion as a young student in zoology, with marine biology, and I became passionately interested in invertebrate marine life.
The luxury
I would while away the days on the desert island, revelling in the extraordinary invertebrate fauna of this tropical sea.
Presenter asks
21:54Why do you think you seem to have fallen out of favour [in Britain]?
I don't know. I'm probably because I'm old. I'm not... cutting edge now, to use again another vulgar term. Um I'm not part of that thing which critics call a producer of must see productions. I just go on doing the same stuff that I have always done, pursuing the same sort of interests, which I will never vary...
Presenter asks
23:33Doesn't giving voice to that kind of vial [criticism] say more about you than the people it's directed at?
It says something about me, but it also, if in fact you keep your eyes and ears open, it says a great deal about the people I'm directing it to, that that the people I've called vulgar fools are objectively vulgar fools. I may be, in fact, a discontented misanthrope, but the accused are guilty, and so is the accuser in his own way.
“There's a very large part of my sensibility... which is filled with a sort of inconsolable remorse about having betrayed a very good mind.”
“Most of the things that I've done in the arts I can do with my right hand tied behind my back.”
“I believe deeply that uh there aren't any really important things, there are just huge heaps of negligible things...”
“For those of us who really have no interest in ethnicity of any sort, being Jewish is really very little more than being the potential target.”
“I increasingly see the world as filled with uh vulgar fools, and uh I tell vulgar fools that they're vulgar fools.”