Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Novelist and filmmaker, best known for his novels Taipan and Shogun.
On the island
Eight records
The Impossible DreamFavourite
I wrote Taipan in Vancouver, and we had this wonderful house on the sound. And when I was writing Taipan, we had only a very few records. And one of the records was Man from the Mansha. And we kept on playing it. And I have an association with this for Vancouver. And every time I hear Man from the Mansure, I can remember this wonderful house and this wonderful time we had in Vancouver.
Eternal Father, Strong to Save
St John's Methodist Church Choir, St Austell
it's a naval hymn actually and um it's the one that I remember very very very clearly. My father when he came back on leave he used to take us to um Portsmouth, uh to the Portsmouth Naval Hosp uh Naval Church on the Ladies Mile and we used to sing this rousing hymn.
This was given to me by my son-in-law, who is a Virginian, and it's called The Floating World. And it does things for me. It's sort of it's kind of cookie and way out and lovely.
This one's The Beatles because you can't have a musical programme and as I said I'm turned deaf without the Beatles and this is just a hard day's night which began it all.
this is from Camelot and it's If Ever I Would Leave
I've chosen a piece out of Evita which I rather like and it's Don't Cry for Me Argentina and I rather like it because it has such a lovely melody and um it reminds me of nice times. I saw Evita the first time in London and um it was a very happy time for me.
Well, because green sleeves is something that we were brought up on as kids and I mean, green sleeves has been played for hundreds of years now, isn't it? And it's English and England.
Frank Sinatra and Rosemary Clooney
Well, my last choice is one enchanted evening.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:02How much does music mean in your life?
Well, I'm sort of turned deaf, I think. In other words, if you give me three notes, I really can't tell which one goes up and which one goes down. But as a writer, I get sent by music.
Presenter asks
3:55Where did you serve [during the war]?
Well, I was in 18th Division. I was actually in part of the Battle of Britain time. I was with the Royal Artillery in various small regiments. And then I was part of the 18th Division, which was the first of the British Armoured Divisions. And we went overseas in the tail end of 1941. While we were on the high seas, Pearl Harbour happened. And then naturally, a snafu, they call it, you know, the situation normal all messed up. And our equipment went to the Middle East that we were trained for, because at that time, the Germans were coming down the Caucasus again for Iran, always Iran, always the trouble spot, you know, the crossroads of the world. And we went to Singapore and we arrived there with no equipment, no nothing, and we were in that debacle, which was, as you've read a million times, crazy. And from that, we went from Malaya and fled down Malaya backwards.
Presenter asks
7:02How many men were there in that hell hole [Changi jail]?
Well, it's uh In a way it wasn't it was not a hell hole, and in a way it was kind of extraordinary. Of course, from a point of view of these these number of years since it was 42 to 45, you know, the my POW days. I mean that's a long, long time ago and it's almost a different lifetime. I believe that about one hundred and fifty thousand troops were captured in'forty two, of which around ten thousand survived.
The keepsakes
The book
Reason being that you can read that forever and you can keep on reading it like the Bible and it goes on forever and it's in poetry, which is rather nice. And it tells the same sort of stories, great stories.
The luxury
Presenter asks
11:10Did you have formal rehabilitation [after returning from the war]?
Oh, no, not at all. When I got back, we got back to Greenwich, a place in the northern part of Scotland. The ship came in and a naval officer came aboard and he said, I've been told to give this by His Majesty. And every POW that came back, the King, George VI, His Majesty then, had written a sort of proclamation. It was a form proclamation and signed, which said, We understand, of course, that you had terrible sufferings and we were welcoming you home a conquering hero and all of this stuff. And merely to show you what the state that I was in at that time and this was a naval officer and I was brought up in a naval family and he was a lieutenant commander or commander and he had given me this formally from His Majesty and I took this and I tore it up and threw it at him.
Presenter asks
16:18How did you learn your job [as a film director]?
Well, at that time there was a man called Maurice Ostra who ran Gainsborough Pictures, and I asked him, How do you become a film director? He said, Become a producer. … I said, uh why? He said, Well, nobody's going to give you a job, so you have to become the producer to appoint yourself. … So I said, how do you become a producer? He said, well, you've got to have money or a property. So I said, what's a property? And he said, a script. But he said, before you become a producer, become a distributor. I said, what's that? He said, that's the person who sells films. Because only in the selling of films can you understand production. Distribution is the key to production. So I became a distributor for three years.
Presenter asks
28:56Where's your base? Where do you go to write?
Well, I don't have one really. I must I'm I learned in Chang'e you present a moving target. I think writers should be citoyens du monde sort of citizens of the world really. I have to sit in one place when I'm writing a book. But between that, as I said, I mean I I I did um Taipan in Canada, Shogun here and everywhere else in Europe.
“if you live at the edge of death, you appreciate life. It's the only way you can really appreciate life, at the edge of death.”
“Providing you know what you want to do, you can do it. The problem is, uh particularly in England, I find, that people say you can't do it, meaning that it's impossible to do it, and you can then prove that you can do it. And then they say, Well, I'm terribly sorry, old boy, but you can't do it, meaning it's forbidden.”
“I'm only a storyteller, please give me a quarter of an hour of your undivided attention. If I have not caught you in a quarter of an hour, then I've failed.”