Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Historian, academic, public servant who gave his name to a famous report on the future of broadcasting.
On the island
Eight records
Well, I thought actually I might talk about something which was very characteristic in my family love of France. My mother, although American, was educated in France and Germany, and my grandmother always used to um invite her grandchildren to visit her in a villa which she took each year in Bieritz.
Piano Concerto No. 27 in B-flat major, K. 595: II. Larghetto
Alfred Brendel, Vienna Volksoper Orchestra, Paul Angerer
Well, the thing I chose, actually, I've chosen as an example of the sadness in some of eighteenth-century poetry. The melancholy side of it.
This, of course, it brings me to the whole question of the war. ... Now I've chosen this because that was a song which I think many people had a real experience of of the one week when they were on leave, the one week in the hotel with the girl they'd just married, and then off to the Middle East or to the front.
And I thought I'd choose for my next record, just as I chose something to illustrate France, my other great love in Europe is Germany. And this is Greeter Keller, singing one of those German songs so well publicised very often by Lotta Lenia.
Swan Lake, Op. 20: Act IV: Finale
Moscow Radio Symphony Orchestra, Gennady Rozhdestvensky
The next record which I'd like to choose is connected with Cambridge because when Mennic opened the Arts Theatre at Cambridge, he invited all of us undergraduates who were in the hostel which was next door to it ... to attend the opening, and the opening was given by Saddlers Wells Ballet ... and that was how my association with Ballet began.
Don Carlo: Act II: "Dio, che nell'alma infondere"
Carlo Bergonzi, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, Sir Georg Solti
is the famous duet between Don Carlo and his great friend Rodrigo, in which they sing together about the importance of standing together politically in the name of liberty. And liberty is the thing that broadcasters need if they're to do any good work.
String Quartet No. 77 in C major, Op. 76, No. 3, "Emperor": II. Poco adagio; cantabile
Well, this I've chosen because um of my time in Germany. ... I had the great fortune, good fortune, when I came back after the war, to marry someone who was a member of a great famous German family called the Ulsteins ... And as these exquisite strains filled the air, I saw tears running down their face ... How tragic it is that people love their country and then are rejected by it in the way that these people had been.
Symphony No. 7 in A major, Op. 92: IV. Allegro con brioFavourite
NBC Symphony Orchestra, Arturo Toscanini
It reminds me of the occasion when I first heard Arturo Toscanini Conduct Beethoven's Seventh Symphony. ... the pace, the vitality, the absolute passion which came into that conducting ... It is my favorite symphony by Beethoven.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:29Was being born on Christmas Day the cause of some misery as a child?
No misery at all. Absolutely marvellous. Everybody was rejoicing on the day of my birthday. It uh has always been perfectly all right as far as I'm concerned, being born on Christmas Day. And I had a very happy childhood. I was very lucky.
Presenter asks
1:48You said before now that yours was a rather unintellectual family. Can that be true?
Not entirely in the sense that my mother read regularly all the best-selling novels of the day, and my father read a detective story every night, and there were in the drawing-room, of course, the complete works of Shakespeare and the complete works of Kipling. But it was not a family life in which we naturally went to concerts, to galleries, or anything like that.
Presenter asks
4:49What sort of regime was it [at your prep school in Seaford]?
It was entirely Philistine. There were two things which were taught tremendously well. One was the Christian religion, and the second thing was Latin. And very severe it was, too, because if you in the top forms, if you made more than one false concordance ... you were beaten.
The keepsakes
The book
Homer
Either the Iliad in Greek and English, because I don't know Greek, but I might teach myself Greek if I had it there.
The luxury
Because it's the one thing which is a real luxury on a desert island where the only kind of water available is the sea.
Presenter asks
8:40Can you define what [King's College, Cambridge] was [that you were looking for]?
Well, I don't know that I'd been looking for it ... but when I got there, um, of course I came up against real teaching, in the sense that I'd been stimulated enormously at Stowe, but it was at King's where I was really put through things and made to realize that a lot of the things that I wrote and said were simply repetitions of other people's views, and I hadn't thought them through ...
Presenter asks
10:41Did you and your contemporaries ever spot [Guy Burgess] as a spy?
No, he was far too unreliable, a haywire, dirty, brilliant. We didn't think of spies as being like that at all. I mean, the Philby type is much more understandable, and indeed nobody could believe at one time that Burgess Sky Burgess had ever been a spy.
Presenter asks
13:47Why do you think [Margaret Thatcher] inspires that great hatred?
Oh, I think it's because people feel she's bossy, people feel also that she has, in fact, challenged most of the assumptions of my own generation. And people don't like suddenly understanding that perhaps all the things that they've really run their life on, their beliefs, are being overthrown, challenged, despised, derided, all the rest of it.
“I am notoriously inaccurate by nature, I am afraid.”
“I've never been tremendously affected by the idea that what I'm going to do is going to change things for the better. I sometimes think that I might change an institution for the better, but society, that's too big a thing.”
“I've never been bored, I think, in my life. I've always got something going on inside my head, though not necessarily anything very important.”
“Leadership means understanding, having a feeling for what the future is going to be. It's not just reacting to public opinion. If we reacted to public opinion, we'd still be hanging people in public.”