Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Science television presenter who turns complex topics into entertainment, famed for boundless energy and enthusiasm.
On the island
Eight records
Clarinet Quintet in A major, K. 581
Jack Brymer and the Allegri String Quartet
Well, this reflects those early years, you know, because the very first public performance I ever did was uh of Mozart's Lennart quintet. So my first choice is part of the first movement of that quintet.
This piece, this next piece, is the The apex each time of the curve. I never get any better than this, but I'm almost always worse than this.
which is in Neapolitan dialect means that I I it means I want to kiss you. And it's sung by a woman called Miranda Martino who has a wonderful voice and I think it's her voice uh brings back for me all that tremendous the strength of the emotions of the Italians which I admire so much.
String Quartet No. 15 in A minor, Op. 132
This next bit of music, it doesn't remind me of anything. It's just a piece of music I like very much. In fact, I like any of the last quartets of Beethoven. This particular bit is a bit of the fourth movement from.
Songs of the Auvergne: Baïlèro
This is a piece of music that I suppose reminds me of the early folk singing days, um because it's a very beautiful folk song from the Uver uh sung by Kiriti Kanawa.
Hallé Orchestra, conducted by Sir John Barbirolli
This is a piece of music that I think I would like to sit and listen to as the sun goes down and feel, as I often do. I think it's perhaps being Irish. I think we tend to loneliness from time to time, introspection and all that. And this piece of music, while it's not very Irish, is intensely introspective.
Detroit Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Antal Doráti
This is something that will remind me on my island of all the stuff I've just said about television because it's a piece of music that we used after Apollo had landed on the moon, but for many of the rest of the missions. And it will remind me of that adventure, I suppose, in a rather sad sense because of what happened to it.
Cello Suite No. 1 in G major, BWV 1007: PreludeFavourite
I think on the island I would probably have to have a bit of music that would just m make me think, and this music always does. It's uh I put it on when I've got a knotty problem, as it were, to unknot.
In conversation
Presenter asks
3:30What kind of background do you come from?
It was very musical. My my father wasn't very musical, but my mother was extremely musical. She sang as long as far back as I could remember. ... They weren't very well off, no. They married each other against everybody's wishes and were thrown out, and in fact left Ireland and came to live in England after the war. And had a rather difficult time. I don't remember us ever having any spare money. But we were a very tightly knit family.
Presenter asks
4:52Getting into Oxford, with no money in the family, must have been quite difficult. How did you manage that?
I'm a product of the 1944 Education Act. I think without that, I would not have ever been able to go to Oxford because whatever money they might have had, they certainly never got. ... So I was a scholarship boy, yes. I mean, uh which in those days was was fine. I mean, I you didn't need very much money and what you needed you got from the state.
Presenter asks
7:06After Oxford you went into teaching in Italy. Why were those years so happy?
Well, because I think at that particular time it was the part of the great economic miracle of the sixties, whether it happened here or in Italy. So the world was in a kind of onward and upward mood. There was nothing you couldn't do. ... And at the age of twenty something, to be dumped into a foreign culture. Where the food is the best in Italy and the women are the most beautiful perhaps in the world. ... So I had a pretty good time for a number of years, lotus eating.
The keepsakes
The book
The works of Homer in the original with a built-in grammar
Homer
I would like to take the works of Homer in the original with a built-in grammar, because. One of the things I was always sorry about was that the school I went to stopped making Greek uh mandatory the year before I got there, so I didn't learn Greek. And I've always wanted to, so I use the time to do that.
The luxury
a guitar and an inexhaustible supply of strings
Oh, a guitar and an inexhaustible supply of strings. I've got to get beyond the Capriccio Arab.
Presenter asks
9:47How on earth did television come into your life?
I was in Rome once with a Canadian journalist friend of mine and moaning and groaning about the fact that the students were stupid and I was fed up with the job. And he said, There's an ad in the back page of the local paper. It says British television company requires director reporter and I said, I can't do either of those jobs. And he said, they don't know you can't. And as a sort of dare, I went to an interview ... and I got the job
Presenter asks
14:24Do you object to the critic's remark that you turn science into showbiz?
I think it's very unfortunate that in this in this in these decadent times it's very fashionable to sneer at enthusiasm. ... I believe that if I watch somebody doing something on television or listen to them on the radio and they look or sound bored with the material, why on earth should I be interested? And the other thing I try to do is ... try and make the material as accessible as possible, and to that end I use the kind of language that many of the critics don't like.
Presenter asks
18:32What part has the Apollo mission played in your life, and how significant is it?
Well, there's no doubt in terms of career that it made my career. I mean, I I was on television so frequently as to become a part of the furniture. ... I think it um it moved me away from Tomorrow's World, it moved me away from uh shop window technology because because of I suppose the feeling I had that the whole Apollo mission was understood wrongly by the public, it was understood as soap opera, it was understood as showbiz, in fact.
“I think it's very unfortunate that in this in this in these decadent times it's very fashionable to sneer at enthusiasm.”
“Our educational system ... shut out the vast majority of people at a very early age and label them failures. And their brains are the same size as mine and the same size as Einstein's. The system cannot fit each p person individually, and so it labels them failures.”
“The best kind of letters that I ever get are letters from people who never say, I have understood this subject or you have made me understood totally what this is. That you get letters that say, I didn't think I was capable of understanding this. I don't know if I am now, but I'm I'm gonna have a go. That's the ultimate accolade, I think, for the work one tries to do.”
“I believe that all that counselling was necessary because they had never ever been taught to conceive of failure, that it was a kind of Hollywood thing, that people didn't get hurt. And it was a deep shock to America because America had had regarded the whole thing as soap opera, and in soap opera nobody really dies.”