Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
2 appearances
Writer, creator of the Flashman novels, a series recounting the adventures of a notorious cad through history.
On the island
Eight records
The Band of the Royal Military School of Music, Kneller Hall
Every Cumbrian has one song that always goes through his mind, John Peel.
My Very Good Friend the Milkman
My wife and I in our courting days loved this record among many others. It's by Fat Swaller, my very good friend the Milk.
Harald Paulsen and Carola Neher
This record is the cannon song from the Threpney Opera. It's a song of army reminiscence sung by Mackie Messer and Tiger Brown of Scotland Yard. And this, I think, is the original recording from the nineteen thirty production.
The Pipes and Drums of the Gordon Highlanders
The pipes and drums of the Gordon Highlanders I I couldn't possibly endure on a desert island without this playing the cock of the north.
The Three Musketeers (Main Theme)
Record number six from The Three Musketeers, the the film version. It was done by Michel Legrand.
On my desert island I would like to be reminded of the Isle of Man. And uh this is a record which has a double virtue. I like the record for itself, it's good fun and so on. And also it has the lovely Manx accent, for which I'd be very homesick.
The Adventures of Robin Hood (Suite)Favourite
The last record is another um film record. It's music by Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and it comes from a film which I s still think is one of the perfect films, The Adventures of Robin Hood.
When I was eighteen years old I was going to be the greatest bass baritone the world had ever heard, and I I took singing very seriously at that time. And of course if you were a bass baritone, there was only one, and that was Peter Dawson.
I read Sabatini's Captain Blood, and lo and behold, the same year they made the movie, and I remember going to it and the curtains opening, and this noise coming out, and I was spellbound.
The Royal Gloucestershire Hussars
I served in the Border Regiment during the war. I'm a Cumbrian by birth, although a Scot. This is a tune that I love. It's one of the the best regimental marches I know, John Peel.
My Very Good Friend the Milkman
This was um for my first years in journalism when I met my wife, who was a fellow reporter, she was on another paper, and this really is the song that was popular during our courtship, Fats Waller singing my very good friend Milton.
Monte Carlo Philharmonic Orchestra
This was from childhood. I was a great Lodland Hardy fan, and still am. They made a movie, which I think was their best, called Fra Diavolo. It was based on an opera by a French composer called Albert. I went to it for Lodl and Hardy, and I came away enchanted with the music.
The Adventures of Robin Hood: SuiteFavourite
Uh reckon I was yes, now this is film music. Um it's, for my money, the best film music I've ever heard, and it's Eric Corngold again.
In Party Mood (Theme from Housewives' Choice)
This is nostalgia back to the nineteen forties, when the housewife's choice was presented by a little Scottish band leader called George Elric.
Regimental Band and Massed Pipes of the Scots Guards
I was in the Gordon Highlanders after the war. I loved the Gordons. Winston Churchill said the finest regiment in the world. And uh I was in the second battalion, the old ninety-second of foot. And in D Company, and D Company marched to a tune that's very difficult to march to, the Black Death.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:40Is music important in your life?
Yes, I I think it's important. It has been since I was very small. I was taught to play the violin when I was extremely young. and um have done nothing with it ever since. But I decided when I was in my early teens that I wanted to be a singer.
Presenter asks
1:21What would you be happiest to have got away from [on the island]?
The News newspapers and um being told the news on BBC and and I T V and so on, that I generally find depressing. I would like to hear the news itself, but I wouldn't like to be depressed by it.
Presenter asks
2:37Your father was a physician. Did you have any medical leanings?
Personally, no. But uh it was it was thought that I should have medical leanings, and uh it was intended that I should be a doctor. And as in the case of so many people. What your parents intend doesn't come off.
Presenter asks
3:18At school, what did you want to be?
The keepsakes
The book
James Murray
The complete Oxford English Dictionary... it's endless reading.
The luxury
Typewriter, unlimited paper and ribbons
A typewriter and um an unlimited supply of paper. And ribbons.
I think I wanted to be a soldier. Uh I'd no fixed ideas of of anything beyond I suppose the war. I was fourteen when it began. And you knew you'd go into the army, and that was that.
Presenter asks
9:32How long did the [first Flashman] book take you to write?
It it took in all told two months. I I wrote half of it. Then we went on holiday and I fell down a waterfall, broke my arm. And forgot about it. And then one day my wife said, That thing you were writing, can I have a look at it? I showed it to her. She said finish it. And uh in another thirty days it was done.
Presenter asks
0:31Did [the idea to write about Flashman] come to you in a flash, as it were, or was it a long time in the hatching?
I suppose I I read um Tom Brown when I was about eleven or twelve, and even then he stuck in my mind. I thought that's the best character in the book. … Then when I wanted to write a Victorian novel … This one just seemed to to me unnatural. I thought, what happened to Flashman when he left school? … Obviously the army. Obviously he went to the bed.
Presenter asks
2:59Do you think [the real Flashman] really existed? Do you think Thomas Hughes knew him?
I'm told he did. Old rugby boys, who knew old rugby boys, have written to me and said, of course, that yes, there was the chap, but we don't mention his name. … I have a theory about him, but um it it's one I I I would never voice because it wouldn't be fair to the man uh I have in mind, you know, who was a, as far as I know, a perfectly respectable person, but I rather think he may have been the original Flashman.
Presenter asks
6:39What do you read [as a boy]?
Historical fiction for the most part. Robert Graves I Claudius. People like that, and when I was ten years old I came on a book which just transfixed me, and that was Raffaele Sabatini's Captain Blood and I thought this is the thing, this is great.
Presenter asks
10:25There seems to be no grief expressed [in your memoir] when your colleagues got killed. What do you feel people do today then in those situations?
Well, nowadays it seems to me that that uh people don't react quite as as … As courageously I mean, when I hear of firemen who get compensation for doing their job. When I hear of counselling of children when a school chum dies. … And it's extremely bad. … Because it just implants it in their minds.
Presenter asks
18:21Why did you decide, as you've put it, to write your way out of [journalism]?
Because I was deputy editor of the Glasgow Herald and I was in my mid-forties. And um The idea of being deputy editor for the next 20 years didn't appeal to me.
Presenter asks
28:55Do you live [on the Isle of Man] for tax reasons or for others?
Totally. Originally, yes. But I can say with my hand on my heart now that if the British rate of tax was lowered below the Island Man's rate, I wouldn't come back. … Because the island's lovely. It's a it's a wonderful place to be. I like the Manx, and we're very happy there.
“I can remember [the war] as being very good fun. I d I look back on it with Great nostalgia. I can remember it also being extremely terrifying and sometimes boring.”
“I think I was a storyteller, always. I used to tell my parents' stories when I was very small, in addition to the stories they told me. And I'd been writing as long as I could remember.”
“Flashman was to me a character who had been neglected by Thomas Hughes, and he used him very briefly in Tom Brand's school days, and I always thought when I read that novel, there is the best character killed off metaphorically speaking, quarter of the way through, what would have happened to him when he grew up?”
“I am politically incorrect inasmuch as I am a child of my time and I don't accept the values which have been imposed in the last twenty, thirty years.”
“You couldn't afford to have anything but a stiff upper lip. You can't afford to waste time on regrets. You've just got to get on with it.”
“I d oh, yes, I do have a sort of soft spot, but it's a a perverse soft spot. Talking about Captain Blood earlier. I wanted Basil Rathbone to kill Edolf. You know, I I've always been on the side of the villain.”
“I wouldn't like to live in Britain now. When I come back, I don't know. It doesn't look. The way it did. It looks rather shabby. It looks rather run down. I don't know, something has happened to the National Galactic which I don't quite like.”