Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Entomologist, explorer and broadcaster who champions invertebrates and has spent decades uncovering the mysteries of the small creatures that make up most of li
On the island
Eight records
GUEST: Disc number one is Rain Over Me by The Who. […] I just think the Who are one of the most amazing groups and I've picked it because I want to hear it if I'm on this island for any degree of time, any length of time, I want to have things that I can hear over and over again.
The Pipes and Drums of the Black Watch
GUEST: Well, this is the Dark Island. This is a theme, an air played on the Great Pipes, which was the theme to a 1962 TV drama series for kids of the same name. And it's a haunting, haunting air.
GUEST: Well, I've chosen Edward Elgar's cello concerto played by Jacqueline Dupray because it is just so hauntingly beautiful.
GUEST: […] this singer I I've only I only heard it for the first time about two years ago, but I just went, Oh my goodness, she's got a gorgeous voice […] I think I would play in the evening.
GUEST: […] Under Miltwood, the 54 recording with him, I would have to take to my island because you could just listen to that again and again and again.
GUEST: I love Pink Floyd and one that I heard that made a huge impact on me is Keep Talking, which has the voice of Hawking on the track.
Alone, Lost, AbandonedFavourite
GUEST: Very appropriately, this is Alone, Lost, Abandoned from an opera by Puppuccini, performed by the legendary, the one and only Maria Callas.
GUEST: […] a piece of music I heard a couple of years ago, a few years ago, by a guy from Finland called Ratu Bara. And this is a concerto for birds and orchestra.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:53How would you make the case for creepy crawleys to budding naturalists who have yet to be convinced of their charms?
Looking at insects and other small creatures is definitely the way to go. We don't know anything about them at all. We've only described about a million. There are probably eight million insects alone undescribed. There are twenty thousand species of bees on earth. I mean, everybody knows about the honey bee, but there are thousands of solitary bees and other bumblebees and other things that pollinate the majority of the world's flowering plants. And without them, we would have no fruit, no nuts, no seeds. We would lose a large amount of our food. We'd be reduced to eating grasses and stuff. So, the fact that we have a rich diversity of species and food on earth is largely due to bees. So, that's just one organism, but there are many, many other insects that are incredibly useful. And, of course, they are the food of the world. Most higher animals eat insects. I mean, a blue-tit chick will eat thousands of insects in its life. A bat, a single bat, a tiny bat flying in the evening may eat 10,000 small flies and moths. The ecosystem would simply collapse, simply collapse, like a pack of cards. And that's why we have to sweat the small stuff. If we don't sweat the small stuff, the big stuff's going to come tumbling down.
Presenter asks
5:18Was it a creative household?
My parents were oil painters and watercolorists and they did sculpture and stained glass. So yes, it was it was extremely arty. Uh not bohemian though, I have to say.
The keepsakes
The book
A History of the World in 100 Objects
Neil MacGregor
Basically, it explains in a hundred objects how we came to be here, how we are, why we are.
The luxury
I don't know what's on the island to eat, but from my expeditions, I've eaten some pretty rum things and had to on occasions. And a bit of hot sauce will make just about anything edible.
Presenter asks
5:49How would you describe your relationship with your parents?
difficult. My father was very authoritarian to me and um he used the strap or the tows as it was called, which is a hideous implement which was used on occasions on me particularly, but only on me.
Presenter asks
13:36Can you remember the trigger for your interest in the natural world?
I remember an Attenborough programme, and I've tried to find it again, but I can't find it. It was a a sequence about a garden spider and the male spider was just about to mate, and it was just captivating. And his he was saying, And the male spider charges his pulps with sperm. and advances towards the female. And I was just oh my goodness Not only was it about sex, which I only vaguely knew about, but spiders were doing it. I thought, whoa, this is this is cool, yeah.
Presenter asks
25:39Why did you want to turn the camera on yourself after your melanoma diagnosis?
Lots of people said, oh, that's very brave of you, George. Actually, it wasn't brave. What it was, was a way of my dealing with it. Almost I was becoming an outsider. I was viewing it from the outside. And just to tease apart the science was wonderful. And at the end of making the film, and I wish we'd begun it a bit earlier, I felt at peace with it because I knew that all that could be done was being done.
Presenter asks
29:46How optimistic are you about the future given the environmental challenges?
I oscillate between feeling optimistic one day and then feeling completely the opposite the other day. What we've got to bear in mind is that we as a species have been around on Earth for a vanishingly short time. And if you look at the fossil history, the amount of time spent on Earth by any largish species is between 1 million and 10 million years. We're not going to be going on forever. There will come, our time will come. We are unfortunately, in my opinion, hastening that end by our own actions, and that is the thing that we're just not addressing.
“He looked at me and said, George, you can have a watch when you can speak properly.”
“If I hadn't had a stammer, I would probably have been an actor, which would have meant I'd have been out of work for 80% of my adult life.”
“I hung up. I I didn't say anything. I just put the phone down, because I in my head I was going, I've got a job at Oxford University, I've written three books, I have a beautiful wife, I have a stepchild, I have a daughter of my own, I am doing very well, thank you. How dare you How dare you say that? And I knew that I would never speak to him again.”
“I said, look, if you marry me, I will bring you a cup of tea in bed for the rest of your life.”
“I got home, had a beer, and I typed out my thing just saying, Dear Director, I resigned my post forthwith, bloody bloody blah handed it in the next day.”