Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Literary scholar, author of standard Victorian fiction works, biographer, pioneer of mobile phone book summaries, former Booker chairman.
On the island
Eight records
I can remember the wonderful effect that the opening sort of call of this saxophone in pain had on me when I first bought the record. But at the time it represented for me a world which was so far away from myself, you know, like the city on the hill, where in fact there were kind of saxophonists, black saxophonists, sort of serenading flamingos.
The record I've chosen, which is The Foggy, Foggy Dew, which was quite often played on things like family favourites or housewives' choice, was very naughty. It's about illegitimacy, it's about sort of sex. And somehow, I don't know how, it became a kind of quite often-heard record on the BBC, though it had a kind of impropriety which I found at the time really charmingly daring.
The Regimental Band of the Coldstream Guards
I was in the Suffolk regiment, known throughout the British Army as sometimes the Silly Suffolks and sometimes the Suffolk Swedes. They didn't have much respect, they had a lot of very impressive battle honours. But they also had what in fact was the the least sort of uh convenient quick march song in in the British Army called Speed the Plough and which as soon as as soon as it was played everyone's feet started falling over. It's very, very hard to actually sort of march to it. But I have a certain affection for Speed the Plough.
I never had really a sophisticated taste in music though. In fact, modern jazz always seemed to me to be somehow classy in a way and I was terribly culturally snobbish about it. But this next record, which is Dave Rubeck and his quartet playing The Way You Look Tonight, that for me was the acme of sophistication.
The Piano Has Been Drinking (Not Me)Favourite
this is in fact is uh a wonderful sort of anthem to alcoholism. It's Tom Waits and the piano has been drinking. Uh of course every alcoholic blames everything except himself for the fact that he's drunk.
Don Felder, Don Henley, Glenn Frey
I got server in California and California had had always existed for me. I'd been watching movies ever ever since I I was a conscious child and I'd always had this vision of California, the places where, you know, I spent a kind of sort of uh an Elysium. I I did love it. And then and the next track is uh it's it's rather corny. It's the The Eagles and and Hotel California. I like that line you can check out but you can never leave.
sometimes mu music can actually just sort of um you know just just just make you feel sort of uh terrific and th this has always had that effect on me.
I've been very lucky in that all my kind of professional life has been spent with young people and I do admire just the smartness really and the way in which culturally and in terms of their kind of you know their tastes that nowadays they they are so so much further ahead than I was at their age of my little Earl Bostic stuff and the the last track is France Ferdinand and Take Me Out. It's a very enigmatic sort of very enigmatic lyric that it has, but the music is wonderful and this is music created by young people for young people and it is, I find, incredibly hopeful for the future when I listen to this kind of thing.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:56Have you come up with any explanation for your academic bent?
I was very lucky. Obviously, I was no cleverer than my antecedents. It just so happened I was born at a time when the opportunities were there. And also, I think it's all the unremembered, often unremembered, acts of assistance and kindness and interest, actually. It's people taking an interest in you. And of course, for me, the big social event, which I think in fact was a liberation, not just for me but for my generation, was the Second World War. which for one thing shook up the British class system.
Presenter asks
3:07What did you read [as a boy]? Did you devour books?
I suppose so. I I yeah, my childhood was I I was shaken up by the war, I said my at least my my circumstances were. My father was killed, my mother really had to go out and make her own way in the world. As a result of it I was left alone a lot and I I think as what they call a a good child, one of those who's seen and not heard, because I I found it quite convenient to put my nose in a book.
Presenter asks
7:14How old would you have been when [your father was killed]?
I still have to be about three or four.
The keepsakes
The book
William Makepeace Thackeray
I think it's the greatest novel in the English language. More fun than Middle March and you don't feel lectured.
The luxury
if I'm going to be marooned next year, I'll take the hundred and twenty megabyte iPod, which I'm sure is coming down the track.
Presenter asks
8:56Did you feel like a nuisance [being passed around the family]?
I felt in the way all that all the time I was an only child and adults to some extent can't incorporate young children into their social lives. So I d I did feel at at times that I was I was uh as it were sort of um a hindrance. And I was of course.
Presenter asks
9:20Is that instability in your childhood one of the reasons behind your drinking?
Yes, I mean, uh un unless you have you know inner qualities, which I I don't think I did have, um, it it leads to crippling shyness, which I certainly had. And drinking was one way in which I I managed to, as it were, treat that shyness very successfully, I must say.
Presenter asks
18:36What motivated [the serious drinking] at that point [in Edinburgh]?
Well, it was a kind of there was a cult of what we might call heroic overindulgence. But it was also very companionable. People always always, to some extent, sort of forget the good side of drinking, which it makes people sociable. It's a lot of fun. Looking back, I feel there was a lot of liberation as well that came along with this kind of what would now be called partying, I suppose.
“the great sort of political intervention was the 1944 Education Act, which … if you were intelligent, if your working class boy was intelligent, all of a sudden you could do something with your brain.”
“I've always felt very safe in institutions, that's to say, you know, I felt there's a kind of shelter over me, and to some extent it makes one into a company man. And yet there's another part of me, of course, like all company men who who is also the kind of the rebel, there's a bit of a bristow about me, I think.”
“this is kind of a feature of the career alcoholic, that for about 20 years, sometimes longer, they can usually actually sort of hold their drink, is the phrase which is used. And at the same time, sort of be quite high-performing. Certainly, I could keep it all together. But in fact, there is too much of it, and a cost is paid.”
“I started going to Alcoholics Anonymous which is an American invention really, a very good one in which i i it it starts from the premise that only alcoholics can help alcoholics. It works for some people. It certainly worked for me”