Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A prolific and acclaimed novelist, best known for mainstream bestsellers like The Wasp Factory and for highly successful science fiction.
On the island
Eight records
I really chose it because it's got a very sort of plaintive sort of feel to it. What it's really about is an old man looking back at his life and thinking, Oh, if I were a young man again, oh, I'd be after them fillies, let me tell you.
It's uh just a fabulous little um thing about what life, what existence is really all about. And I I always thought it was quite profound and it brings a lump to my throat.
This is uh most or less a fairly sort of slow, and this one's like incredibly fast and it's uh I thought I had to have something fast so I could sort of dance around and keep fit too.
Beware of the Beautiful Stranger
I actually know all the words to this record so I was thinking I might not actually play this. I might play about every five years or every ten years, depending on how long I'm languishing in this desert island. It's like my memory checking record.
One of my real all-time favourite bands. I'd sit around and play this and feel sorry for myself.
These are my two air conditioning records. They both bring me out in goosebumps, no matter how hot I'm feeling. So they'd be a good way of sort of keeping ourself feeling cool on this hot desert island.
It's to remind myself of the rest of human society, the rest of human history. I remember feeling sorry for myself, sorry for myself, sitting on, you know, alone in a desert island. I can think of this, the guy in the um in this song who's a a Soviet soldier who goes off to fight the Nazis and then ends up through no fault of his own in the gulag.
Mohammed's RadioFavourite
A record that I'm taking partly because I've never entirely worked out what it's about, so I think I'd have plenty of time to but it's also got some great lines in it.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:59If you're so normal, where do you find all these twisted and depraved ideas that you write about?
Well, uh my theory is that you know perhaps it's something that's just in me, some sort of idea that if I didn't actually write about, I might do them or something. I I don't really think that … I think it's one of these things that as a rule you sort of develop uh as you grow up … you do develop all these filters and you you filter out all the the demons and monsters that fill you know a lot of children's heads. And I think that I've sort of grown up without that filter in place for some reason.
Presenter asks
7:04How much of you is there in [The Wasp Factory]?
There's a bit, yes. And obviously the fact I'm an only child, I think there is quite a lot of truth in that … I used to make dams and still occasionally, if you show me a nice highland beach and a nice sunny day and maybe stream going across the beach, I'll be in there with building a dam. Bombs, yes, I did. I have a friend of mine that I used to construct bombs from sodium chlorate, wood-killer and sugar.
Presenter asks
9:04What did your parents do for a living?
My dad worked in the Admiralty, he worked in Rosaith Dockyard, and my mum was a professional ice skater. She was from one of the Croat line of a couple of the big ice shows that went and used to tour around the country in the late, late forties.
The keepsakes
The book
The Complete Monty Python's Flying Circus: All the Words
Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin
The idea being that I actually know, being a bit of a Python analyst as well, and I I can visualize virtually the entire you know Python oovra. Uh so all I would need would be the cue of of this you know book and I could like it I'd be like my own private little television station on the on the on the island.
The luxury
Front seat from a Porsche 911 (leather)
My luxury would be just the front seat, although it must be leather, from a Porsche 9-11. And it was suggested I could have the whole car and I thought, no, that'd be frustrating, sitting there on a desert island with nowhere to go in this lovely car, that would just oh, I'd be in tears. But just the seat, I could sit there going you know, and and smelling that nice leather smell and I could recreate the whole thing and play some of my records at the same time and imagine I was driving across the fourth bridge.
Presenter asks
12:02Why did you read English, Psychology, and Philosophy at Stirling University?
I knew I thought, ooh, I'm going to be a writer, I'm going to be a novelist, obviously you've got to do englit, that's self-selecting number one. And I thought, oh, well, I need to have, you know, books need to be about something, you have to have a theme, you know, so I thought, hmm, philosophy, I better do philosophy, you know, so I know how to philosophize. I thought, well, obviously books are composed of characters. You don't know about characters, better do psychology as well.
Presenter asks
24:27What is the political message in your science fiction books set in the Culture?
I suppose it's a rather sort of wishy-washy liberal, vaguely left-leading, sort of socialistic message. And really what the culture is about is a post-scarcity society. … Where they don't need money. Basically, they regard money as a cheque book, is basically a ration book. If there's enough everything to go round, you wouldn't need to have it rationed by what you're allowed to make from society as it were.
Presenter asks
27:48Would you deny that there's any gratuitous violence in your writing?
Um well, by my standards, yes. Um I mean I d I I don't think I need to put gratuitous stuff in, but but I mean it's it's not really up to me to say what's gratuitous or not. If the reader thinks that the the violence I I put into the books, not all of them, but but certainly most of them is gratuitous, then it is gratuitous.
“I think it's one of these things that as a rule you sort of develop uh as you grow up, as you go you know, grow from being a child, as you mature you do develop all these filters and you you filter out all the the demons and monsters that fill you know a lot of children's heads. And I think that I've sort of grown up without that filter in place for some reason.”
“Well there's that idea that men never grow up, you know, that well, the female half of the species actually really matures, you know, men just learn to act better.”
“I can't take myself seriously and don't expect anyone else to, so oh, what the heck?”
“We are still, in a sense, animals, and we're still faced with the problem of simply gathering enough resources and finding shelter and looking after our loved ones, whatever. And that we are led to acts of genocide and barbarity and bigotry because of scarcity.”