Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Actor and writer who worked as a farmhand, plumber's mate, light bulb inspector, shop assistant, and paint salesman.
On the island
Eight records
I'm going back now to some very happy times in California when I was doing Ron and Martin's Laughing and around that time there was a great song for me then called Hotel California by the Eagles.
Stéphane Grappelli and Yehudi Menuhin
Ben Bernie / Maceo Pinkard / Kenneth Casey
When I was in the old people's home, I used to dance to something called the Hop Club de Paris, which was Stefan Grappelli used to play with Django Reinhardt, and that sort of music always stuck with me, and I saw him teamed up with Yehudi Menuin, and they did Sweet Georgia Brown, which is one of the few tunes I can play with any confidence on the guitar.
Indoor Games at NewburyFavourite
Now, I the first time I heard this, I loved Bechaman, but I loved the music that his poems have been set to, and this is how I was introduced to the man that composed the music, Jim Parker, who became very important in my life later on. And this is from Betcherman's Banana Blush, and it's called Indoor Games at Newbury.
Let's Do It (Let's Fall in Love)
Well, another of my favorites I'm really going back in the past a bit here, I'm afraid, Michael, but Noel Coward in Las Vegas, because there was another man who put everything together terribly well with words, which are are my trademark words.
Well, can we manage Madam Butterfly? I think we can. Oh, wonderful, because uh it just sort of thrills me for some reason. I just love it.
I'm very fond of Edith Pieff. I suppose it's really'cause she feels she's crying out from the heart, but no regrets has always got to me as well. And I think if you've got that and I've got that on my island, I'd like to think that I don't have any regrets being there.
Well, although I was going on earlier about my father and I not getting on, he was always a terribly smart man, and he was undeniably an enormously charming man, and looked very like Jack Buchanan, and sounded rather like Jack Buchanan. So whenever I heard Jack Buchanan singing Good Night Vienna, I would think of him.
And it was actually done on record by Petula Clarke, and it's a story of a little Cockney sparrow falling in love with a lady, French sparrow. You probably haven't heard it. It's called Fred Marguerite. If you've got that, I'd love to hear that, because I wrote that at four o'clock one morning with the candle burning in my little cottage in the middle of London, and it's very close to my heart.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:50How come that you were educated at an old people's home?
I think it was because I had to leave school at twelve and a half. I was unfortunately not very bright at school, and although I paid a lot of attention, I didn't remember anything that they taught me, so they sent me to a psychiatrist who recommended that I should leave immediately. He didn't suggest I should go anywhere else, so my father... found an old people's home near where he lived. He didn't actually want me in the house, and he he rented a room there for me, and so I became an old person at 14 and a half. At twelve and a half. I was actually about thirteen, I suppose, yes.
Presenter asks
2:00We mentioned there that your father didn't want you around. Why was that?
Well, he didn't like me... I think, really from the year Dot, because he left home the moment I arrived. My grandmother brought me up, so I learnt to speak, and then when I came back and spoke to him in it he still didn't like me. And uh he paid for my schooling, but then when they said that I'd failed to learn anything, he decided there was no point in spending any more money, so... He said, As long as I never see you, life will be fine between us. So he put me in an old people's home.
Presenter asks
2:31Did you later on in life make any attempt to to contact him?
The keepsakes
The book
Jerome K. Jerome
Wonderful book. Marvellous book and a story. I mean, hilariously funny, written at the turn of the century. And that's England again, the Thames, as I remember it, and wonderful, funny.
The luxury
Ah, because then I can continue to compose songs, I can accompany the wind as it blows through the trees and the sound of the waves and the sea. I can even get better, not that anybody'll ever know. And I can also probably pinch one of the E strings to make a fishing line.
I did, yes. Unfortunately he'd become an alcoholic by then, so it was rather difficult. And I w I I was quite sad about it because there wasn't very much communication between us and then he had a nasty accident and he did say then he was in a hospital and and and about to depart from this world. He did say, I'm very proud of you, you've done very well Well, I just burst into tears because I mean to have that sort of communication right at the end was a shame really because I'd like to have had it before.
Presenter asks
7:50What came first with you, the writing or the acting?
Oh, the writing... I decided on a Wednesday to write. I was uh selling paint actually at the time and uh I'd been doing that for four or five years. And in the bad weather I was nipped into a cinema... And I think when you go every day you sort of get into the plots rather well, and I thought one day I think I'll have a go at at writing a film. And so I parked my paint salesman's car in a lay by, and got my note paper out, and I wrote a film called What a Whopper, which was the story of the Loch Nest monster.
Presenter asks
14:59Where do you get the idea from [for Are You Being Served]?
I suppose three years as a trainee at Simpsons in Piccadilly. Where I was finally fired for selling soft drinks in the fitting room at the height of a heat wave. But I think when you've worked in a store like that, you get a good idea that words like I'm free and are you being served and the sort of pecking order of the head salesman and the second salesman and the third and then the junior, where you're not allowed to go forward unless everybody else has had a try and failed, does have a slightly hysterical feel about it. And it just occurred to me this was a marvellous vehicle for a comedy series.
Presenter asks
25:12You write well and beautifully for children and yet you've never had any children of your own. Is that something that you regret?
Yes, yes I do. It's not too late. But I would like to have done. I've got a lot of friends with children and a lot of friends with children who've grown up and had children. And so I communicate with them a lot and go out and fly kites in the park and chat to them. And I thoroughly enjoy that. But I would like some children, yes. But I mean we can't always have what we necessarily want in life.
“My education really took place at an old people's home. They had a very nice library, a ballroom where I learnt ballroom dancing with the wife of a World War submarine commander.”
“I enjoy writing for children and I see that they enjoy it. Every writer writes for himself in a way or something that you know you're not specifically writing something you don't understand about and I I do understand children or the way they think because that's the way I think. I just happen to be taller.”
“Yes, it is lonely writing. I suppose you're not lonely writing, of course, when you're actually writing, because you've got all the characters you're writing about who are keeping you occupied. But it's a strange life because the muse may fall upon you at any moment and you get up at three o'clock in the morning to do it or whatever.”