Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
2 appearances
An entertainer and comedian who in his twenties became compere of Sunday Night at the London Palladium and later presented his own shows.
On the island
Eight records
Cliff Richard and the Drifters
first hit called uh Move It Then. It was Cliff Richard and the Drifters, they were called.
Sunday Night at the London Palladium (theme)
When I have down periods … I've got a tape of that show and I just sit in my little room at home and put it on the tape recorder and play it.
O mio babbino caroFavourite
Frank Chacksfield and His Orchestra
I have a routine of a morning. I get up and I like peace in the morning. I get up very early and I like to read the paper and I like Puccini and it's o meo babbino caro and I love the orchestral version of it. It is so peaceful of a morning.
I never dreamt that these four fellows would change the face of music totally, and they became the four most famous people in the world for a short period.
When I first heard the introduction to this rock and roll record, the hair stood up on the back of my neck.
Elvis Presley certainly did [change music]. I got to meet him. We I was in Las Vegas. Tom Jones took me over to Las Vegas.
I love Elton John's music and I'm a very, very big fan of Rod Stewart. I think his voice is just superb.
Brian Johnston and Jonathan Agnew
Laughter is the best medicine, and I love unintentional laughter. This was of course uh a very funny man anyway, Brian Johnson, and it's the great cricketing uh thing when both of them try to step over the stumps, and I hear this all the time and I just cry with laughter.
I heard a new talent, a girl called Nora Jones and she made an album and it's the best new album I've heard for years and years and I'm just a a huge fan
Well, this sums it all up, really, and when they use the word star. It was underused in this man's head. He was so charismatic.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:00As a youngster, what did you want to be?
Professional footballing. That was always always a being my ambition. I suppose it still is to a little little degree.
Presenter asks
0:21Were you fascinated by show business as well? Did you hang around music halls as well as football fields?
Oh yes. My my granddad was a Pyrrho in the Isle of Man, and uh not that I ever saw him do that, but uh when he was a young man. And uh I've always loved the theatre.
Presenter asks
0:38What was your first job when you left school?
I was a mechanic in a garage, apprentice mechanic. … No, terrible. … Oh, you name it. I did it. I I really couldn't settle. I was in and out of jobs, you know.
Presenter asks
5:46Now you were 23 years old, looking back. Had you the experience to handle it [your own series]? Could you select the right material, build the character the way you think Tarbuck ought to go?
The keepsakes
The book
Henry Longhurst
I read the book regularly and you can go back and read it again and laugh. Great humour.
The luxury
I would have to take a set of golf clubs. ... just a set of clubs with a real good supply of balls that would keep me occupied.
Honest with you, at the time, Roy, it was all great fun. … You see the Beatles had arrived. That's what had really started it, I suppose. And they'd got this great youth cult going, mm, and all of a sudden another fella came on, with the same type of suits, same accent and same hairstyle. And uh Zippo Bang, it was marvellous.
Presenter asks
7:01As you said, a national figure, but I should think good and overexposed. This was a time when your career had to be planned. What happened next?
He said, Well, what do you think? I said, I don't want no television for eighteen months. … I worked, you know, very hard. … A lot of the public … they're under the impression, you know, that if you don't if you're not on tele, you're not working. But of course you are.
Presenter asks
7:39Is your career planning out the way you'd want it? Is there any further ambition? Do you want to change it in any other direction?
Well, I think I'm thinking of making a comeback. … People have often said to me … if you could have your success like it's been for you Would you have it from twenty to thirty, thirty to forty, forty to fifty, or … give it me when I'm twenty to thirty, man, because like you can enjoy it so much and I have enjoyed it.
Presenter asks
1:52Do you still get the same buzz of adrenaline [after forty years of performing]?
I absolutely love it. I get nervous, apprehensive, till I walk on there and it's just very, very enjoyable still.
Presenter asks
5:53Were you alike at all, you and John Lennon?
Well, he was quite an aggressive kid. He you know, he'd get in the scraps in the playground and things like that. ... Oh, great practical joker.
Presenter asks
9:40What kind of pain did you cause your parents?
Well, I was you know, they were always coming having to fetch me, I was getting brought home by policemen for stealing apples and things like that. ... Yes, I did. I got expelled. I never went. That's what happened. I never went.
Presenter asks
23:25What about your kids when you were used as the butt of that kind of [alternative comedy] humour?
Well, I just said to them, I said, Look, there's th you'll hear things about me, just say yes, we tried to stop him doing it. I said, Don't get involved in arguments about me
Presenter asks
24:00Does it start to happen that you find yourself being treated as the father of the more famous daughter?
Well, I think uh to a certain age group, I'm Jimmy Tarbuck, the stand-up comedian, and then to another age group, oh, that's Lisa's dad. ... Oh, there's no doubt about that, yeah.
“I got up on the stage just to give them a laugh in a in a r uh talent contest. … everybody else left and it was a quite exhilarating feeling.”
“Without those uh the without the seasons in the holiday camps, I don't think I'd have been uh professionally uh as advanced as I was because I was never off a microphone, always talking to people, even if it was Hello, Missus, how are you today? and it's the bingo round the corner and whatever it was, all the time I was on a microphone.”
“I've got a tape of that show [Sunday Night at the London Palladium] and I just sit in my little room at home and put it on the tape recorder and play it. And everything was super.”
“I was at school with George Harrison and John Lennon for a while. … I used to go and see them there. … It was very exciting times.”
“The great, great I've worked with uh only a few comedy geniuses. I've worked with good comics, but geniuses. And one of them, absolute hero, Eric Morgan, just said to me when I was a kid, he said, You've got something. Never ask what it is or analyse it, and I never have.”
“The thing that fascinates me in the theatre, Sue, is the people who don't laugh, who sit looking at you. And that's like a magnet. I'm not looking at the ones who are falling about.”
“I've been blessed that I could do those things, but I couldn't pick a phone up and say, Will you cure them? And that's when you see what fame is all about.”