Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
He is a poet, novelist, critic, biographer, and professor of poetry at Oxford.
On the island
Eight records
the one musician who has never failed to take me out of a fit of depression is Fats Waller.
Voi che sapeteFavourite
I must have it sung by Sina Urinak, that wonderful Yugoslav singer, with that thrillingly pure voice that can almost make you believe that a woman's voice can be as beautiful as a nightingale's.
Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche
Dresden State Orchestra conducted by Rudolf Kempe
I think I liked it for the impish playfulness and also the sort of lyricism. It it's rather like what my character was like. I think I was Till Eulen Spiegel.
I would never last on a desert island without his superb rendering of St. Louis blues.
Louis Armstrong and His All Stars
I'm going to assume that this island is big enough to have a river and maybe a lake, and I'm going to go canoeing on it, and while I'm canoeing I'd like to hear Louis Armstrong singing Up the Lazy River.
Sidney Bechet, Wild Bill Davison and Art Hodes
I think I would have to have at least one record where jazz men really blow up a storm with that tremendous uninhibited inventiveness which leaves you amazed.
I must have a record that reminds me of Wales, because Wales has always been a very important second country to me.
one of Alastair Clare's songs that I love most of all is called The Irish Girl.
In conversation
Presenter asks
2:10Could you face a long isolation?
Yes, I think so. I'm quite good at being on my own. I think that perhaps many artists are. You know, one one needs long periods of of uh isolation.
Presenter asks
5:22Were you good at school?
No, I was very bad at school. I was backward, I was inattentive. I failed a lot of examinations. I'm not being proud of this, I'm rather ashamed of it, but the fact is that [I] went to Oxford because my father had the money to send me.
Presenter asks
5:54Was writing already in your own mind your intended [career]?
Uh literature was. I went a slight detour when I got to Oxford because I fell in love with Oxford. I fell in love with scholarship. I admired the men of learning that I met there and and for a time I wanted to be a scholar.
Presenter asks
6:53Who influenced you [in writing verse]?
Well, uh you know, I think that spectators see more of the game than players, and I think it is very difficult for a writer to say who influenced him. I was reading the classic modern poets. I was reading Ezra Pound and Eliot, and I was influenced by Orden a great deal.
The keepsakes
The book
James Boswell
Boswell's Life of Johnson, of course. Last 20 years on that.
The luxury
Presenter asks
10:49Did it now seem that you could cut adrift from the academic?
I could cut adrift from it as far as making a living from it was concerned, although I I respect academic work. I have always had an amateur's interest in it … so that I never quite cut away from academic life, which is why later on when I became professor of poetry at Oxford, it wasn't a violent re-entry.
“I went into business as an imaginative writer. I wrote poetry and fiction, which is what I've written ever since.”
“I don't believe in staying within my range, but it left me with some sense of how to write a play, and since then I have gone on, and I shall go on more.”
“I want to tell stories to people. I think that telling a story is a wonderful thing, like singing a song. It's people need it.”