Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
An outstanding reporter both in print and on the air.
On the island
Eight records
Japanese Language Course
I would be far better doing something constructive rather than playing away at gramophone records. Why don't I learn a totally foreign language? ... So I would take a linguistic course in some completely exotic and bizarre language, for example, Japanese.
Spanish Dance No. 5 (Andaluza)
I've told you that I know very little about music, but years and years ago I did study the guitar. ... I still think it is the only instrument I can vaguely understand. And uh I would like to hear John Williams playing Spanish music.
We've had John Williams playing Spanish music. Could I have the master, Spaniard, Segofia, playing Bach?
A man and an instrument seem to me to have elements of the primitive go very, very well with desert islands ... Jochi Zamfiel, and he plays a thing called the pan pipes, which are a very, very elementary form of wind instrument.
America, you know, is absolutely full of folk singers ... but chiefly about Chicago, which happens to be my favorite American town. ... I've got some good friends there, among whom is this man called Wynn Strakey, and he he he's got a song, and this was actually recorded in the house of a friend of mine called The Forty-third Ward.
Under Milk Wood (Opening)Favourite
I would like to recall, if I could, on my desert island. the the really brave and creative days of the B B C when work was being done that was exclusively radio work. ... And I would like to refresh my memory with the very beginning of Undermilkwood, an absolute milestone, I think, in radio history.
It became a sort of national anthem for the various forms of protest movements. ... I wrote the words, for the occasion of the first Oldermaston march, way back in the sixties. And this thing still brings tears to my eyes.
My last record is music again, but the sort of simple, naïve music that I understand, which is a military band playing a recognizable tune by a recognizable composer
In conversation
Presenter asks
2:30Were you born in Scotland?
No. It's a very well kept secret, but I have to be obliged to say that I was not. ... I'm obliged to confess that I was in fact born in London.
Presenter asks
3:04How did your education in France happen?
There is a sort of tradition in Scottish families of of having their children sent to France. ... But chiefly it was because my father was a very impoverished writer and by a strange paradox ... my father thought his six pounds a week would go further if we went to live in France, and that's how it happened.
Presenter asks
4:01What did you want to be [when you came back to the UK at fifteen]?
There was I, with no qualifications, no degrees, no university education. virtually illiterate in two languages at once ... Now what other trade could possibly accept such a person as I except journalism, which is used to illiterate?
Presenter asks
10:24Why did you leave the Daily Express?
The keepsakes
The book
Laurence Sterne
because I considered it to be my life's work to finish Tristram Sandy one day.
The luxury
it'd have to be the whisky because that would allow me to forget the cigars.
Because I fell out with them on a matter of policy ... I thought they behaved extraordinarily dishonestly over a certain political issue and I I just felt I couldn't carry on any longer, that was all.
Presenter asks
11:42What happened to you after Picture Post?
In two years I really was in a total mess. Then I found my home finally, my true home in the News Chronicle which was then going and which was the the one place where I really felt happy and comradely relationships with everybody
Presenter asks
26:15How well could you manage on a desert island?
I don't think I would have much trouble about that, provided there was some fruit or something available. ... I'm a very, very small eater. A very, very tidy eater indeed. I don't know that I'd be much good putting up shelters and that sort of thing.
“I am musically totally uneducated. I have very, very unsophisticated tastes in music. And to be frank, I get very little pleasure from it.”
“It was a deeply and profoundly unsettling life and uh ruinous to a domestic life. I mean, it dest destroyed many people's marriages, of course, as it necessarily would do, but at the same time It's very difficult to say that one would have chained had it otherwise because it gave me opportunities of seeing the world that no could never possibly have had otherwise.”
“I get much more understandable pleasure out of words than I do from music.”