Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Stand-up poet known as the Bard of Barnsley, poet in residence at Barnsley FC and English National Opera.
On the island
Eight records
Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis
Philharmonia Orchestra, conducted by Herbert von Karajan
Just because I imagined myself on this desert island and what I imagined was huge banks of cloud. And that's what this tune reminds me of, and Me Uncle Charlie used to play it on a seventy eight, and it was so scratchy, it was like it was being heard from another room.
Well, it was my dad's favourite song. Right. And my dad was that very rare thing, a teetotal Scottish sailor.
I'm a very sentimental man and this is uh one of my mother's favourites and my dad's favourite, the Black Hills of Dakota. And I always thought it was instant that Costa'd been apart for so long,'cause my dad was in the Navy for twenty odd years and uh he'd be away for two years at a time.
Now this is the great Alone Again O' by Love, which I first heard in nineteen sixty seven. when I was eleven and you're at that kind of strange age where weird things are happening, and we went on a holiday down to Western Super Mayor, and we stayed in this Ben Breakfast, and I was writing get this I was writing an opera called The Diamond Studded Triceratops.
Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band
Well, this is uh I like music that empties the room. If it was up to me, I'm a fan of what my wife calls squeaky gate music. I like music that is just Strange and weird, and this is the great, the mighty Captain Bfart, Moonlight on Vermont.
It's another sentimental one. It's Pink Crosby singing White Christmas, so we'll all be blubbering again.
Leonard Bernstein & Columbia Symphony Orchestra
I'm a big fan of American music and art and language. George Gershwin is a chap who I love very much, and this is Rhapsody in Blue, which I would teach myself to play on a clarinet that I'd made out of a coconut on the desert island.
4'33"Favourite
One of my favourite pieces is John Cage's 4 Minutes 33 Seconds of Silence. People take the mickey out of that piece and they say it's ridiculous, but it isn't at all. It's a piece that makes you listen. It makes you listen so hard.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:32Is that sense of continuity and noticing the tiny things in life important to you?
It is really occasionally I think perhaps I should have lived somewhere else. But I love the idea that I've lived in the same place all my life. People know me. People couldn't care less, you know, when I'd been on the television. I'll be stirring the paper short, and there'll be a bit of a silence, then somebody'll say, We saw yer We saw yer yapping. I can tell you, what a phrase. And it's just nice to stay in a place that It's changing gradually, and you can do the universal in the local, I always think.
Presenter asks
3:09What about the notion of aspiration, that in order to realise success, the proper thing to do would have been to move on?
People always said that when I was at school. My English teacher, mister Brown, my great hero, I wrote at the bottom of one of my essays, Ian MacMillan, Future Nobel Prize for Literature winner, and he took me on one side and said Nobel Prize winners don't come from Barnes.
Presenter asks
3:45If I was to pass you in the street, how would you greet me [in the Barnsley dialect]?
I'll greet you on in a way that couldn't be repeated on radio because I would I'd move my head slightly to one side. Because that's what they do, there's a kind of minimalism. They do a kind of it's just a slight sideways movement of the head.
The keepsakes
The book
The Long and the Short of It: Poems 1955-2010
Roy Fisher
I know that I could just live with this vast breeze block-shaped book forever.
The luxury
a bicycle with wooden models of my wife, three children, and grandson
I've missed the wife and kids and my grandson so much that I'll have a wooden model of them and I'll cycle it round the island.
Presenter asks
10:22Didn't you find out after your mother had died that she had gone to prison for [love]?
That's right, she went to prison. Yeah... they wrote to each other for a couple of years before they met... Then my dad sent this telegram... I've got forty-eight-hour pass, stop, let's get married, stop... my mother was at this time in the WAFs and she applied for this forty-eight-hour pass and they wouldn't give her one. So she went Airwall and she got a train across and they got married... And she went back and got arrested two weeks in the glasshouse for love. Isn't that fantastic?
Presenter asks
15:42When had you decided to be a writer?
I think at junior school, because that fantastic education, where they, not in so many words, but they said, here's a continuum, here's Shakespeare, Dickens, and you. You can do this. You can be a writer. And then at the same time, by being a bit of a show off, you think that could actually stand up. You could combine them.
Presenter asks
16:05When you said to your Mum and Dad I want to be a writer, what was their response?
Very encouraging, actually. My Dad always said I should get a proper job. My Dad always thought partly'cause of the times they'd lived through. My dad said I want it to be a B A, not a B F. Which is a fantastic thing. He meant bloody fool. But then they were so proud, so proud once I started getting poems published in the school magazine and stuff. They wanted me to do it.
“I've lived in the same place all my life. People know me. People couldn't care less, you know, when I'd been on the television.”
“I think paying tax is what separates us from tortoises and grapefruit. You know, this sounds pretentious, but I think, you know, tax does separate us from monkeys,'cause we pay tax to help the ones who aren't as fortunate as us.”
“I have to sit somewhere where there's a bit of noise, my grandson comes in, we play a bit of football, we play Monopoly, the girls come in, my wife says, there's noise happening. It just helps me to think.”