Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Television reporter who talked and wrote his way around the world and into most people's homes.
On the island
Eight records
Sir Malcolm Sargent conducting the Huddersfield Choral Society and Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra
My father used to conduct a huge choir in Edinburgh, and I have sung for years in the chorus, you know, drowned in a sea of bass all round me.
Pablo Casals conducting the Marlborough Festival Orchestra
The air on the G string for poor old Pop.
The keepsakes
No book or luxury recorded for this episode.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:41Are you a musical person?
I'm a musical person in the sense that I love listening to music, but I'm quite uneducated musically, and I don't play any instrument, I'm sorry to say.
Presenter asks
4:54What was your boyhood ambition?
I didn't have any until I was well up in my teens. I it was intended that I should follow my father into the church, and I remember when I was about fifteen telling him that I simply couldn't get the kind of conviction that I thought was necessary for this calming and he was a very reasonable person and he said well if that's the way you feel I wouldn't consider it.
Presenter asks
5:21What did you do when you left school?
When I left school, I had already been writing for the press as a schoolboy, and I took a job running a little weekly newspaper in a little Lanarkshire town. I was everything, you know, editor, reporter, circulation manager. This is wonderful. Even advertising, it was a wonderful experience, but it was bad experience in one way, in that I had no experienced journalist. Supervising me. And so, after about eighteen months, very successful months there. I took a job with the very old. English weekly newspaper in Shrewsbury. where I was supervised and Where I managed to get the kind of jobs that I could never have got in an industrial area, you know.
Presenter asks
6:09What did you do in Shrewsbury?
No, oh no, the juniors did all these bits and pieces. I had cooked my age by three years and I was their senior reporter, the only man with a motorbike, you see. So I had a very free life. I could more or less choose what I did. I had no court work to do practically. It was mostly feature stuff I did. Yes, you wrote the leaders and I wrote a good many of them. I had a very lazy editor.
Presenter asks
6:40And after Shrewsbury?
by Sir Robert Bruce, the then editor of the Glasgow Herald, to come up and and join them. And I took it because I was anxious to see the inside of newspaper production. I became a sub-editor. Yes, I've got a note here that you studied medicine in in Glasgow. Well, I did. You see, it's a family profession and my older brother, by ten years, wanted me to qualify and join him in a two man practice where we'd both specialize. It was a most attractive proposition, but I still had a yen to journal. So I packed up medicine after eighteen months in Glasgow.
Presenter asks
7:17How long did you stay in Glasgow?
Altogether just over four years.
“My father used to conduct a huge choir in Edinburgh, and I have sung for years in the chorus, you know, drowned in a sea of bass all round me.”
“The air on the G string for poor old Pop.”
“I had cooked my age by three years and I was their senior reporter, the only man with a motorbike, you see.”
“I knew pretty well everything there was to know about picture editing. In fact, I knew nothing about it at all.”