Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Comedy writer best known for co-writing the sitcoms The New Statesman and Birds of a Feather.
On the island
Eight records
I was just bowled over by it. I like what people call dinner or lift jazz. I like everything about jazz except the improvisations and the long solos. So this is my sort of music. And also growing up on the Beach Boys and the Beatles, having the good fortune to grow up with that music. This song really reflects the sort of teenager I was at the age of sort of 14 or 15, morose and full of self-pity. And this is a beautiful song if you're morose and full of self-pity.
I went to see a film very popular at the time called Alfie. Lovely film, I enjoyed it enormously. But what I enjoyed more than the film was the soundtrack. It was this saxophonist playing this wonderful theme, in my opinion. And I thought from that point forth, A, I would like to learn to play the saxophone, and second, I saved up all my paper-round money to go to the old Ronnie Scotts Club in Gerrard Street to see Sonny Rollins play. And whilst there, with all these really cool dudes of the sixties, I heard him play this song.
(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural WomanFavourite
I love pop music. I love soul music. All the music that I care about came out of Africa, of course. And having not even eight but only four songs, I've got to choose one that can remind me of everything. And the first time I heard Aretha Franklin, I just thought firstly, she was an artist supreme. And latterly, I was delighted to find out that the song was composed by two Jewish geeks, so there was hope for me in soul music as well.
You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'
Barry Mann, Cynthia Weil, Phil Spector
This takes me to 1985, Hollywood, when Morris and I went over there to work, and I had gone over there first because Morris's wife was expecting their first child. I didn't know anybody in Hollywood, but was invited one Sunday lunchtime to a barbecue party, and I was standing around the pool, not knowing anybody, until a blonde lady smiled at me and came over and said to me, Hi. She introduced herself as Cynthia. ... she said, Have you written anything I may have heard of? And she said to me, You may have heard of You've Lost That Loving Feeling. At which point I wished the earth had opened up and I just sunk down because it is my favourite pop song ever. And I met the composer.
Chuck Wagner and Robert Westenberg
Well, when when I was compiling my records, my daughter was over and she said, Well, you've got to have something from Into the Woods, because that was a show that my wife and I saw in London and loved. This is probably twenty years ago. And then the American version came on TV and our kids who were about eight and five just loved the show and learnt all the songs and still know the songs by heart and we've all been to see it whenever it comes on and it's just bizarrely the family sing-along. And so I've chosen the reprise of Agony because it's the best song in the show and it's the one they left out of the movie.
PICTURES AT AN EXHIBITION BY MAZORSKI. I, as a journalist, was visiting a woman that had been sentenced to death that was commuted, and she was serving life, and I became her power of attorney, and she asked me to take her few belongings home with me. for the day whenever she might come out. And amongst the belongings was a group of records and one of them was pictures at an exhibition. The opening movement stayed with me forever. It was so planted on my mind that when Morris and I came to write New Statesman, I said to Morris, this is the music I think gives it the dignity that Alan Bastard deserves.
When we were asked on to Desert Island Disc, we knew we only had four records each. Had I been invited on my own, I would have had eight records, and one of them may well have been Paul Simon's American Tune. But because I only have four, I have to choose the piece of music from which Paul Simon took American tune, Lock, Stock and Barrel, and go with the chorale from St Matthew's Passion. But I also choose this piece of music because when my father died, the City of London, as they did with Seven Seven, had a memorial service at St Paul's Cathedral, and as we were walking into the cathedral, this was the music that was being played.
I'm a huge Steely Dan fan. Steely Dan, our American group we've been going for about 40 years at least, and who encapsulate everything people hate about over intellectualized, wordy, obscure, West Coast, Ponce, American rock music, and I love it.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:45Are you actually friends?
I suppose we are friends. We were friends before we were fellow writers, but now because we work so much together we have to [Rasha now socializing, otherwise we'd be sick of each other.]
Presenter asks
4:24Do you see your writing in the tradition of Jewish comedy?
Yes, although you could say that step toe and son was extremely talmodic. I think we do see it in that tradition, and certainly when I was growing up when I wasn't being morose and feeling sorry for myself, I was listening to uncles and cousins telling jokes. Joke telling was a competitive exercise in my extended family.
Presenter asks
8:16How would you set the scene of your household?
The house I grew up in looked remarkably like the house that Harvey Moon moved into at the beginning of Series 3 because it was our house. Victorian semi-detached house in Finsbury Park that we owned, but we lived in about a third of it and Lodgers lived in the rest. You had to put two or three pennies in the a metre to have a bath. If you really want to luxuriate, you might put four pennies in the meter to have a bath. And my mother was a little bit frustrated. She was one of those women who had been whipped out of school at an age where she couldn't fulfil her academic possibilities, because this was nineteen nineteen. Her mother had died of Spanish flu, and She had to go and work behind a sewing machine, whereas what she wanted to do was to read books and write. Did she ever write? She wrote essays and poems and had the odd thing published in sort of youth movement magazines in the thirties. The most important thing I can say is that I grew up in the belief that the finest calling was to be a writer.
The keepsakes
No book or luxury recorded for this episode.
Presenter asks
15:47Can you put your finger on what it was that made you want to leave journalism and write comedy?
I suppose that Morris and I had been writing by the time The decision had to be made for about five years. Sending scripts into the BBC largely and getting nice rejections. I think that I always felt that and I think Maurice felt this too that if we were given this opportunity to do this thing that was beyond our realm, not to have done it would have been to have spent the rest of our life wondering what might have happened. Well, I was in a situation where if I had left, there was very little chance I could have gone back at the same level. So it was one of the few brave things I've ever done.
Presenter asks
17:14What was Frankie Howard like to work with?
Well, Frank was pretty much like you'd expect him to be, sort of a shambling, morose genius with a dead hamster on his head that no one had the nerve to refer to. I don't know whether it was funny that he wore it or that he thought no one noticed.
Presenter asks
27:48What advice would you give to aspiring writers?
Well, we do talk to writers often and we say all sorts of things. I like to say to a room of writers that the chances are that none of you will make it. But if you want to make sure that you don't make it, stop trying. It's the only craft stroke art where you've got no excuse. You can't say I'm a sculptor, but I can't afford marble. I'm a musician, but I can't afford an instrument. If you can afford a pencil and a bit of paper, you can be a writer, so you've got to write. If you've got to write. The key to comedy, I suppose, is attitude. You have to have strong attitudes for your characters. And then the dialogue comes because it's just how the character you make it sound you can't do.