Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Journalist and former editor of the Sunday Mirror and Sunday Express; one of the first ladies of Fleet Street.
On the island
Eight records
it was soup ladles at dawn, Fleet Street's finest. For some reason we had a lot of parties in those days and we would get up with soup ladles and this was the party song.
when I was growing up, Elvis Presley was my hero, and he had the same initials, which meant a lot when I was about fourteen.
When I used to go to the factory, they used to play music to people who were working there. And my parents did like musicals. I remember listening to Ethel Merman, who I've got great sort of admiration for her voice.
O mio babbino caroFavourite
This I have to be careful because it does make me blub. As I said before, my mother never talked about her parents but adored her father. And we had this record and I remember if I watched carefully her eyes would fill with tears thinking about her father.
You Are the Sunshine of My Life
When I Claudia was about six months old, I was in a car crash and Barry was in America and those were the times when a record would get released in America, perhaps six months before it came out here. And he came back with the latest Stevie Wonder album and this song was on it. And I was in bed for two weeks with Claudia, who was tiny. This has always been her song.
All these songs have been chosen because they bring back memories and of course if I'm stuck on this island and getting older of course I may well forget. So we used to play this very loudly and we go to uh the Hamptons at the weekends and this reminds me of New York.
Everybody has their song. This is ours, and I don't want to go on about it, but I don't think I'd ever forget, Nick, but if I'm out on a desert island, who knows what will fall out of my memory, so this will remind me.
My son got married this summer and we came out to this music and it's La Vion Rose s a song my mother loved and I I always loved jazz and the trumpet so this seems to mix them all up together.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:48What was it like sharing an office with Keith Waterhouse and Geoffrey Bernard?
Fantastic. We were all in a features office at one stage and somebody said there's going to be a union meeting at four and then somebody else said, Do you mean we can't play badminton? because we did used to play badminton in the office at four o'clock. These people taught me so much. I mean, they taught me so much about writing, and they taught me so much about having fun.
Presenter asks
4:50Have you been shocked by the things you've been hearing at the Leveson Inquiry?
I'm there's a mixture when I listen to the Leveson Inquiry. I mean obviously something did go wrong if there was widespread hacking and I deplore phone hacking and I think most journalists do. But it's very important the protect of free press. I I think it's essential because the press is the only people who holds politicians, finance, all sorts of people to account. It's quite worrying that celebrities and all sorts of people can accuse the newspapers of anything they like. They'll often say, I was convinced my phone was hacked. I only told four people that story. Four people is four people too much. And I want to say as an ex-newspaper editor, you'd be amazed at who sells stories to the newspaper.
Presenter asks
9:54Your parents weren't from Britain – where did they come from?
The keepsakes
The book
Maritime Intelligence and Publications
I know I'd be waving my knickers at the wrong end of the island, so no boats would be going past. I'd be waving there waiting for a boat, whereas I should be at the other end of the island. So that seems to be the most intelligent thing to do.
The luxury
I think to make them stop and rescue me, possibly tweezers or well, because so that I don't look like a mammoth or or um maybe peroxide. I remember Glennis Kinnick and I decided we'd gone prematurely blonde. Um otherwise they'd just think there's a strange animal on there, just we won't bother to stop.
No, my mother came from Vienna and she came here in 1938 and uh my father came from Hungary and he came here with the Free French in 1940 so you couldn't come much later. And they met in London. They were fantastically proud of being British and they this country had saved their lives. But they were lost and All my grandparents died in concentration camps. And I knew nothing about my grandparents at all. I haven't even seen pictures of them, because my parents Could never talk about it. Could never talk about it. It was taboo.
Presenter asks
11:43Tell me more about your mother – in what ways was she fabulous?
Well, first of all, she was fabulous. It's interesting that she worked uh she worked with my father. But she worked and so all my summer holidays were spent in my father's factory. My father was a mad inventor. He made strange things called a tentomatic, which was a tent that you came out of the roof rack of your car. That did all right for a year or two. That sounds like quite a good idea. Well, it was quite fun. But then he did a he did I mean, he had other years which were Disastrous. My mother kept the factory going. She was lovely. She was charming. She was warm. On my best days I think this is my mum. On my worst days I think this is my dad.
Presenter asks
18:32Despite your father wanting you just to get married, did you decide for yourself that you were going to have a career?
I sort of decided it, but like so many things, it happened by accident. I got a job at Simpsons, Piccadilly, and I met all these girls doing fashion journalism because they'd come in and choose clothes for photo shoots and I thought that's what I really want to do.
Presenter asks
31:11What advice have you passed on to your daughter Claudia about being a working mother?
Well, number one, I learnt in America two things is you always feel better if you have some running away money. So I've always had a stash of running away money. It's just nice it's there. Secondly, um I learnt from American women particularly. That, you know, don't make life so difficult. You can't cook that complete meal. Go and buy it. But still have people to your house. And I certainly taught her don't live far away from work. I mean I once had an argument with Mrs Thatcher and said, I don't believe that you would ever have done what you did if you hadn't had a constituency in Finchley, if you'd had one in Scotland. It would have been much harder. And reluctantly I did win that argument, which is unusual. Um, then I say ch the most important thing is choose your partner.
“You're the last person that gets to the doctor, the dentist. You're always ill on holiday because that's when your body says, Now I've got your attention.”
“As an editor, you're deciding what goes in and what doesn't go in. And a lot of men found that very hard to take. But yes, I mean any woman who has a high-flying job, they don't know who to compare you to. You're not their mum, you're not their sister, you're not their wife. So they make you a sort of monster nanny figure.”
“No, my mother came from Vienna and she came here in 1938 and uh my father came from Hungary and he came here with the Free French in 1940 so you couldn't come much later. And they met in London. They were fantastically proud of being British and they this country had saved their lives. But they were lost and All my grandparents died in concentration camps.”
“used to say, How can I go back? She wanted in her heart she would have liked to go back in a way, but she I mean the thing that nobody talks about is when the Jews were thrown out of their flats, the neighbors would come and loot. And so she would say, What would I do if we sat in a cafe and I saw someone wearing my mother's necklace? How would I deal with that?”
“Um, then I say ch the most important thing is choose your partner.”