Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Scottish actor who survived World War I.
On the island
Eight records
Chicago Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Sir Georg Solti
Rightly it is an overture, and rightly it's one of the great overtures. … I'm playing this just to get me going as it were on some of the greatest music ever written.
String Quartet in G minor, Op. 10, L. 85: III. Andantino, doucement expressif
Ah, this is a tune that's haunted me, I think, all my life.
The Music MakersFavourite
Janet Baker, London Philharmonic Choir, London Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Sir Adrian Boult
is a setting of a very fine Late Victorian poem, The Music Makers, O'Shaughnessy is the poet.
This is the best performance of Don Quixote that's ever been given, is this man brooding over his cello.
I've got to mark Sundays, because I think it's nice to make Sunday different, even all alone. So I've decided to mark it by playing the 23rd Psalm.
I've really chosen that poem so that I shall not forget how to speak my native Scots.
Well, here I become totally sentimental. Tristan and Isolda, please.
it is a tune which again has haunted me. And again, I remember my mother so very, very well.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:32Could you endure loneliness for an extended period?
Yes, I'm very good at being lonely. I like being alone. I have a vivid imagination. I like reading. I like listening to music.
Presenter asks
4:20Did you see much theatre as a child in Dumfries?
No, very, very, very little indeed. … This is one of the mysteries, you see, because I had a father who was an elder of the kirk, and a very strict elder of the kirk at that and if he had lived I'd never, never have got on the stage, that is quite certain.
Presenter asks
4:38As a boy, what had you made up your mind you were going to be?
I I very much wanted to be an architect. In fact, I started training as an architect. … Did two years before I went into the war.
Presenter asks
5:38What was your first professional engagement?
At the Vicar. The old Vic in in dear old Lillian's days with Robert Atkins. A marvellous training. Robert was a very difficult man, very angry man. He had perpetual earache. and uh w was savage to uh us youngsters. But he was a kind of true Elizabethan.
The keepsakes
The book
Shorter Oxford English Dictionary
William Little, H. W. Fowler, and Jessie Coulson
I've always been a word man, so if you'll be kind enough to let me have the two-volume Oxford Dictionary.
The luxury
a magnifying glass with a light
It's a very handsome big reading glass that lights up, and you'll give me a pocketful of batteries, please, to keep it going.
Presenter asks
14:36How do you feel after fifty five years in the profession [achieving] your greatest popular recognition by doing perhaps the least demanding role you've ever played, Private Fraser in Dad's Army?
Well, it comes right, doesn't it, at the end of a long-ish career when one's getting a bit worn and one's voice isn't quite what it was and one's memory is practically non-existent. It's delightful to have eight years with nice fellas playing just a few lines and some of them are very good. And I think it's the nicest possible kind of pension anybody could have.
“I got as far as Passchendale, and then something decided for me inside that it was enough, and I found myself in a stretcher. I wasn't h wounded in any way, no bloodshed whatsoever. But I was quite worn out.”
“In my second season at Stratford, I played Hamlet. This was uh an extraordinary chance because I had only been five years on the stage and uh w such a thing was quite unheard of. But the strange thing is, looking back on it, that was my definitive Hamlet. That's the way to play Hamlet. Don't wait too long.”
“I consider myself one of the better verse speakers. and I don't consider myself the better of much else, but I do have a kind of pride In the fact that I speak the ballads, for instance Scots ballads. Perhaps. Yes. Yes, I'm good to say it. I speak them better than anybody else alive, as long as my breath gives uh doesn't give out.”