Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A journalist and television presenter best known for transforming BBC's Top Gear into an icon of popular entertainment.
On the island
Eight records
It's a really happy thing to put on. It just I don't dance, but if I were to dance it's the kind of song that would cause me to go on a dance floor.
It was the second album I ever bought, and it's still to this day the only album where I really like every single track on it. Who's Next? I mean not just mildly like, or I can tolerate, I love every single one of them.
1976, just the hottest it was still hotter than the sum we've just had even, by a small degree. And it was the first year when I started kind of going out. It was it was parties. I was going to parties. I was an independent free spirit. Girls were important. And this song by Bob Seeger is about starting out on that voyage.
TimeFavourite
Everybody should listen to the words of this, because it's about not wasting anything.
I love Detroit and I love Motown. I love I love again, so you don't waste time listening to a Motown record. Poof, on, off, out, done, happy.
Make Me Smile (Come Up and See Me)
it's all to do with one must never be in a bad mood, ever. And if you do find yourself slipping that way, go and dig out your old forty fives and put this on.
I just like the idea, you know, this sense of there's always hope from a relationship. Like, there's always hope. And I really like it, because that seems to me to be a lovely sentiment.
I wanted to have something like Genesis, but I knew everyone would laugh at me and say it was all prog rot and terribly seventies and I was old fashioned. So I sort of narrowed it down a bit, went for Peter Gabriel, Salisbury Hill.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:27What is the point of having a car that can do 170 miles an hour when you are stuck in traffic jams?
Mine does over two hundred. ... if I'm in a pub with some not that I go to pubs anymore, but if I were to be in a pub and somebody says my car goes 190, I'm a better person because mine goes 200.
Presenter asks
8:04What was the atmosphere like in your childhood home?
No, it was a very old farmhouse, four hundred years old. I couldn't stand up in it. Well, I could if I stood between the beams. I just couldn't move about very easily. ... the family was happy within ... everyone was at home all the time.
Presenter asks
11:59Were you humiliated or angry when you got expelled [from Repton]?
It didn't register. Really? It just didn't register. I went home. And I was walking down the village street at home and this chap came along and he was the general manager of the local newspaper. ... So he said, What are you doing here? I thought you were at school. And I said, Well, you know, I've been thrown out. And he said, Oh, you've been thrown out of school. You've got to be a journalist. And that was the first time I'd thought about it.
The keepsakes
The book
I've got a photograph album, it goes right back to about 75 to present day. I'd take that.
Presenter asks
13:37How did you talk your way onto the Rotherham Advertiser?
I'd written in my application letter that if I got the job, then I would be the third generation of um of my family to be associated with newspapers in Yorkshire. ... So this chap said, was he called Dr. Ward? And I said, yeah, he said, he came out in an air raid during the Second World War to deliver my first child. He'd start on Monday.
Presenter asks
23:36Do you mind when people say terrible things about you?
You do mind, of course you do. In the wee small hours you do think, I wish I were a nicer person. I wish I could be nicer about people and things. But then in the heat of the moment, a month later when you've perhaps had too much coffee. And you're in the studio and something crops up and you say something and everybody laughs and you feel great and go home and actually then you've s uh upset somebody else.
“I miss my children. Now, if I haven't got 500 brake horsepower, I can't get past. And I will miss them.”
“Do you know how long you've got if you live to be seventy? Six hundred thousand hours. And you're asleep for two hundred thousand of those.”
“I've made a career out of cheap sexual metaphors”
“I like reading Winnie the Pooh stories at bedtime to the children.”