Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Winner of the Booker Prize for The Remains of the Day, a novelist whose works explore people at history's dramatic intersections and the language of self-decept
On the island
Eight records
Hey, That's No Way to Say Goodbye
This for me brings back a certain point in my early twenties when I used to drift around Europe and North America, you know, with a backpack, and there were all kinds of other young people doing the same thing.
Nocturne in D-flat major, Op. 27, No. 2
I love Chopin because there there aren't any orchestras around. I like this quiet introspective surface, but with very strong emotions underneath.
For me, that this man, Dick Gocham, a Scottish folk singer, is a possessor of one of the greatest singing voices.
Tryin' to Get to HeavenFavourite
No other single artist has had such an influence on me. He's somebody who managed to carry a whole audience with him, appeal to a mass audience, and yet he's always been unafraid to move on.
This is a song about homesickness. And I love these homesick songs where you're not quite sure whether the singer is missing the place or a particular person that they left behind there or is it a particular era in their lives.
They Can't Take That Away from Me
This is one of my favorite um late night slinky jazz singers, Stacey Kent, and sh here she is doing a version of Gershman's They Can't Take That Away From Me.
But the way Jarrett plays it here, it's like someone quite advanced in life who recognizes that a lot of things that have happened to him, a lot of the patterns that have emerged in his life, somehow derive from things that happened in his youth.
The one artist above all that I think is a is an enormous talent uh i is an American singer called Gideon Welch. She sounds a little like she's stepped out of the Depression years from the Appalachian Mountains, but actually in a funny kind of way she's she's also quite kind of modernist...
In conversation
Presenter asks
4:36Why did you suddenly decide to go on the creative writing course at the University of East Anglia?
Well, I'd been working in West London working with homeless people, and it had been a very intense year. And the idea of going back to university to do another degree suddenly became very appealing to me. And in those days, this East Anglia creative writing course wasn't well known as it is today... And I just came across this, and it looked like even less work than writing a long essay.
Presenter asks
5:57Did you learn to write on that course, or did they refine you?
What that course did was to simulate as closely as possible the conditions in which you would write as a proper writer, if you like. That's to say, you know, very few distractions, a very empty space. It's just you and the piece of paper. And I think this is the most difficult thing. I think a lot of people spend their lives telling themselves they would like to write, they would write if they weren't so busy. Sometimes you take away all the stuff that makes them busy. They discover that they've got nothing to write.
Presenter asks
12:31How was your family assimilated into Surrey in 1960?
Looking back, it must have been very odd. This was long before England had become this multi-ethnic cosmopolitan place. My recollection was that w I didn't see anybody who looked vaguely Eastern or Japanese for about the first five years of of my stay in England... But looking back now, given that this was only, say, you know, fifteen years after the end of the war, people were marvellously generous and kind to our family.
The keepsakes
The book
Anton Chekhov
I think short stories would would be the thing. It it would give me a a large variety of worlds.
The luxury
I wanted like um a kind of a a gigantic roll ... like a fax roll, or maybe a a scroll, which could just sit there on the dunes. ... I'll be able to spend my time sort of writing something a long yarn, something like the Count of Monte Cristo.
Presenter asks
14:26How did you get on with learning English when you first arrived?
Yes, I was five and because when you're five, you know, the world is changing every year... I think where I was a little confused was on T V in those days they had a lot of cowboy shows... And it was difficult for me to distinguish between the kind of English being used by those people and the kind of English that would be appropriate in Surrey in the early 1960s. So as I was learning English, I would pick up all this kind of Wild West Frontier language and go to school and say, Howdy?
Presenter asks
20:19Did your mother decide to tell you her version of the atomic bomb after you began to be published?
Yes, I I think I think that there was there was this deeper thing too. I remember her actually saying, you know, you have actually have some you've now got some power, you know, in in the world. I mean you you you write things. And so yes, indeed, she she she told me
“I think history has shown time and time again that we often don't have perspective when we're doing things. We we don't really know how we fit into the larger scheme of things.”
“I think at some level, most of us, we do have a deep nostalgia for childhood, a time when the world seemed a kinder, nicer place.”
“I think there's a great danger in being trapped by the things that once worked for you. It's rather like insisting on wearing the same clothes you wore twenty years ago. There comes a time when it's inappropriate.”