Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Author, broadcaster and journalist best known for his BBC news work and reporting.
On the island
Eight records
London Gabrieli Brass Ensemble
I thought it'd be good to have something to blow away the cobwebs and start the day with a bounce. And as a very bad brass player, I thought I'd go for some very good brass playing, and I would like a sort of fanfare called an Alloman, written by our old friend Anonymous, for the royal brass of James the First.
Fantasia on Christmas Carols: The Truth Sent from Above
Harvey Alan, Choir of King's College, Cambridge, London Symphony Orchestra, Sir David Willcocks
Well, one of the nostalgic memories of my schoolboy days was singing in the choir at Charterhouse. And one Christmas we sang a marvellous fantasia on Christmas Carols by Ray Forem Williams, who himself was an old Carthusian, and it begins with what to me has always been one of the most moving of English folk tunes, The Truth Sent from Above.
Well, in India I became absolutely fascinated by Indian music, which is extremely highly organized. Once you get used to the sound of the instruments and you you realize it has things also in common with jazz, this improvisation. I absolutely worshipped a Bengali flute player who now alas is dead called Panaral Ghosh.
I did from time to time, as journalists do, wander into a bar or a night spot and um set up one or two of those delightful American cocktails, a Manhattan, a whiskey star, perhaps even a sidecar, and listen to that sort of cocktail music which Americans do so well and at its best is superb
Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, Paavo Berglund
Well, I think many music lovers who who revere the greats, like Beethoven and Mozart and Brahms, as I do, nevertheless have a sort of personal friend among composers who mightn't be absolutely in the first rank. Well, mine is Sibelius, whom I learnt to love very much at school. Now many people think that he wrote seven symphonies. He didn't, he wrote eight. And what I want to hear is the opening of number naught, the astonishing Coulevaux symphony.
Vergnügte Ruh, beliebte Seelenlust, BWV 170Favourite
Janet Baker, Academy of St Martin in the Fields, Neville Marriner
Well, I think now I must uh bring in a religious note. And one of my joys in music is the discovery that that Bach wrote more than two hundred of his church cantatas, and I only know about twenty five. And I'd very much like to hear the opening of one of them, the cantata number one hundred and seventy, which begins with a beautiful sort of cradle song, Fernique Terue, which says to me, All shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.
Well, funny you should mention that, because it's a piece by Coubrin the Great, which is actually the theme music for the television series. It's called Les Barricade Mysterieuse, and what these mysterious barricades are, you have to figure out for yourself.
Elsa Popping and her Pixieland Band
Well, let's have a bit of fun. I mean, we're going to get get a bit gloomy on this island, I am by myself. So to cheer me up, I would like Elsa Popping and her Pixi Land Band. Now Elsa Popping and her Pixiland Band is actually two crazy French engineers who record the instruments upside down, back to front, play them at all the wrong speeds, and the result is marvellous.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:36How important is music in your life?
Well, extremely important. I think like a lot of wordy people I find it a great relief to be listening to sounds which don't have to mean anything.
Presenter asks
3:12You went to boarding school very early [at age seven].
Yes. Well, I was an only child, and I think my parents thought that I was more likely to find company if I went off to boarding school. And there had been a prep school in the family, and that was the one I was sent off to in Northamptonshire. I think it was a fairly damaging thing to have done in the long run, but off I went and was away at boarding schools or colleges from the age of seven to the age of twenty-one.
Presenter asks
3:49What was your ambition at that time [when you came down from Oxford]? Were you thinking of journalism?
I was certainly thinking of writing. I'd always dabbled in sort of school journalism. I'd always run underground magazines. The best way I found to edit an underground magazine was to write it all yourself, you know.
The keepsakes
The book
The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins
Gerard Manley Hopkins
I have to be serious again here, and say the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, not only because it's nourishing, because you have to read it out aloud, and I could stride up and down the beach trying to get the wreck of the Deutschland right.
The luxury
I was going to ask for a solar powered air conditioner after my experience of the tropics.
Presenter asks
23:08What were you progressing towards? What was your thought in starting that series [Priestland's Progress]?
Well, sitting talking to my friend and producer, Chris Rees, in the religious department one day, he said, you know, I think one thing this department's doing wrong we're broadcasting on the assumption that people know what the Christian faith is all about. that we can use terms like the Trinity and Salvation and they will mean something. To a heck of a lot of people nowadays they don't. Let's wade into the Christian religion asking questions. Let's go and talk to a lot of people and say Now what happened on the cross? What is the Trinity? How can three be one, one be three? And that's what we did.
Presenter asks
32:29Could you look after yourself [as a castaway]? Could you rig up a shelter?
I think so. I mean, I was a Boy Scout and I was a naval cadet. I've watched how people in South India do make huts with plaited palm leaves. I think I could cope with that side of it fairly well.
“I think like a lot of wordy people I find it a great relief to be listening to sounds which don't have to mean anything.”
“I think it was a fairly damaging thing to have done in the long run, but off I went and was away at boarding schools or colleges from the age of seven to the age of twenty-one.”
“The Quakers, as you may know, worship largely in silence, and I thought it would be a very good thing for me to shut up and listen for a bit.”