Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A specialist in how the human body deals with extremes on Earth and in space; works with NASA and is a consultant anaesthetist.
On the island
Eight records
Radio Ga GaFavourite
from the live performance during Live Aid, 1985 – chosen for its sense of hope and crowd participation
Everybody Wants to Rule the World
reminds him of being a hopeless DJ at the medical students' union, dancing alone with fake smoke
Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity (from The Planets)
a childhood memory of his dad lying on his bed surrounded by classical music and books; also the hymnal was used at his wedding
Where the Streets Have No Name
first album he ever bought, aged 15; recalls the remarkable sound of the introduction
On Her Majesty's Secret Service
John Barry (David Arnold version)
theme tune to his mornings driving to Kennedy Space Center, blasting along the causeway past the launch pads
used to play in his head during sleep-deprived nights as a junior doctor working 90-100 hour weeks
reminds him of making the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures in 2015 – a dream come true
family favourite from Guardians of the Galaxy; shared listening with his children in the car
In conversation
Presenter asks
9:45What did your dad work at when he was first here?
His first job was there was a friend he had in the dispatch department in, it was a department store, and he had to go to this laughable interview where he had to show them that he could wrap a box. And he spent the night before sort of rehearsing how to wrap a box…
Presenter asks
14:30You were saying that only very recently you came across this little bundle of documents, of letters. Tell me about that.
When I was growing up, I remember finding this file in his room, and it was about an inch and a half thick, and it was just letter after letter after letter, rejection letter for jobs he'd applied for. It was a good hundred or so of them… And only recently I found out what had happened was after he'd taken his degree… he'd got a job. As far as I can tell, it was sort of tantamount to a constructive dismissal. They just got rid of him. And he'd just bought a house and had a mortgage. But he'd still get himself dressed in the morning as if he was going to work and pretend to my mother that he was going to work. And he did that for six months. And he would go to the library and apply for these jobs in the library all day.
Presenter asks
20:55Let's take the temperature of the NHS right now… How would you describe the state of things right now from the inside?
The keepsakes
The luxury
The stars are so much more beautiful through a pair of binoculars, and they're much more so than actually through a telescope.
I don't think anyone who works on the front line would tell you it's not tough. I think that it's not respectful to those people who day in, day out go… to the mats for their patients twenty-four days, seven days a week… to pretend anything other. There needs to be an honest conversation about this, I think.
Presenter asks
24:10How do you think [the Soho bombing and 7/7] experiences have changed you?
The nail bombing of Soho in 1999, I think, was a really shaping moment for me. I was less than a year qualified, and I'll never forget it… I did find it hard in the weeks that followed that. I think that was when I learned that you could separate something, that something could be at the same time horribly, horribly emotionally negative, but you could take some professional pride in how you'd conducted yourselves and what you'd done. Certainly after that, I always felt like you were there and actually that was something you could set against that anger…
“This is not any heroic individual or even a small group of heroic individuals. This is an army of people who are moving to a plan that's put in place.”
“You go into space, your body adapts, and actually makes some very clever, appropriate adaptations because there's no gravity, and it says, 'Well, why should I maintain this muscle mass? Why should I maintain all this bone when I don't have to support myself against gravity?'”
“Their fear was that, you know, this struggle would continue into my generation. And so it was absolutely about getting the work done and absolutely protecting yourself from all of the hardship that they had faced.”
“Inside those buildings there is this fire of imagination going on and people who sit around and straightfacedly have conversations about how we're going to fire people 400 million miles across space to the surface of that planet. And it's not pub chat, it's real chat.”