Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Olympic champion middle-distance runner and chairman of the London 2012 Olympic Games.
On the island
Eight records
Well, it i it's the music that we used during the bid. We were probably sitting. Fourth out of the five cities, with about a year to go. And we needed to do something that really started to engage and excite, so we commissioned a film and Heather Small. Sang the soundtrack and it's it's it's as evocative today for me as it was five years ago.
Well, you know, if sport is my passion, my deep abiding love has been jazz. And I first heard This recording Probably when I was about four. My parents were very big jazz enthusiastic, and this is the first recording I heard, and again it's it sounds awfully precocious, but that's the moment that I just thought I'd heard something that was quite extraordinary.
Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen (from The Magic Flute)
I f only really fully appreciated opera when I heard it for the very first time live in Rome, before the games in nineteen eighty where I was training. And it was the magic flute that when I first heard it performed in Rome just blew my socks off.
George Melly with Mick Mulligan's Magnolia Jazz Band
Well, by the time I was thirteen or fourteen, my parents used to take me to jazz clubs. And there was one jazz club it certainly doesn't exist any more, but it was a pub in Holborn, and it was the Sunday residence of George Melley. And I can remember just waiting the whole week. for this Sunday lunchtime. And it was just the sheer exuberance.
I had an extraordinary close friendship with uh with a guy. who probably in his own way was just as inspirational as my father. ... And he sadly died a couple of years ago. And there's not a day that goes by without missing him desperately. ... It was a song that was his favourite piece of music.
It's probably the most spectacular debut recording of any musician. It's the recording, the nineteen thirty-six recording by Lester Young of Lady Be Good. ... Chicago was where I, it's a city I adore, it's where I prepared. in those tentative last few weeks before the Los Angeles Olympic Games. And it was just a very good excuse to to listen to as much jazz as I could.
the most defining sound in jazz, certainly arguably the most defining sound actually of the twentieth century in music, is Louis Armstrong. And the opening sequence to West End Blues again is something that was just extraordinary. It it still almost brings tears to my eyes listening to it.
The Closest Thing to CrazyFavourite
Well, my final one is my daughter loves singing. I probably witnessed the same passion in her for that as I brought to my track and field. And in her final year at prep school, she said she was going to sing. It was the school concert ... And she started to sing. ... And there were grown men with tears rolling down their cheeks at this.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:17Does being judged hold no fear for you?
Not really. I guess that ... the nature of everything I did in in track and field was judgment all the time, so it's it tends to be the world I lived in. And of course one of the you know the ultimate judgments was getting my UB forty at twenty past five in a drafty sports hall in Camborne in nineteen ninety seven when politically a career finished. So judgment is has never been that far from me.
Presenter asks
2:59Where were you and what was your state of mind in the minutes leading up to the announcement that London had won the 2012 Olympic bid?
Well, the the minutes leading up to I I I I didn't want to sit in the hall for, you know, sort of hours beforehand. I guess it's something that came from athletics. I never liked to be sitting around for a long time before a race. I tended to come in towards the you know, the moment of truth.
Presenter asks
7:20When your running records were broken, did it matter to you?
not really. I it's funny. I mean I'd had them for so long you'd almost forgotten about them. They got broken in roughly 1997, 1998. I'd I'd been retired eight years. And actually the guy that broke it Wilson Kip Keeter. I was very pleased that he did that because he was a proper 800 metre runner. He'd got real style and poise and I was really pleased it had gone to him and not some of the others that were around at the time.
The keepsakes
The book
Benny Green
I'll take a book of jazz essays and critiques by Benny Green called Such Sweet Thunder and there's hardly a week goes by without me dipping into one of those.
The luxury
Piano and a self-help guide to the piano
the luxury would be a piano and whatever passes for a sort of self help guide to the piano, because I fully intend in all this time I hope I have after twenty twelve to learn to play a musical instrument.
Presenter asks
11:57What sort of dad was your father when you were young?
Great. ... Classic dad, always working very hard but always had time, slightly quirky. Sundays were long walks which were great, but you know, after perhaps about sort of three hours where you know my younger brothers and sisters were being sort of dragged along, we were always surrounded by OS maps on a on a Sunday morning, planning you know, some walk through the Cotswolds or up in the Peak District.
Presenter asks
20:18Did you ever want your father to lay off coaching you?
Oh no, I think I've always been fairly pragmatic about these things, that, you know, whatever he was doing seemed to be working. I remember getting it and my mother was absolutely mortified at the side of a cross country course in Sheffield, where I'd won a race at the age of fourteen by about a minute and a half. And a father whose son came in second or third completely lost it, ran across the course, grabbed him literally grabbed him, and was screaming at him, You're killing him, you're killing him ... but I knew that actually that whatever he was doing was working.
Presenter asks
28:52Do you have any political ambitions to sit around the Cabinet table in a future Tory government?
No, I I I really don't. I don't have any political ambitions at all. Um, you know, the the next three years is absolutely focussed on delivering eight great games. ... And no, not after and even after that, no. I really want to go off and do some of the things that I haven't had a chance to do. I wanted to go away and do some serious writing and have the time to do that. And that I just don't want to combine that with politics. I sort of feel I've done that.
“the nature of everything I did in in track and field was judgment all the time, so it's it tends to be the world I lived in.”
“I don't scare at all. He said the last f forty years have been a bonus. And I suddenly realized, of course, you know, when you've been through that, we talk about experience. I don't think my generation can ever possibly understand. What it must have been like to have gone through all that as a nineteen year old”
“I'm actually quite good on my own. I'm sociable. I love. people around, but I and friends, but I'm actually quite capable of going off for a week on my own and and reading and walking, and I don't need to have people twenty four hours a day. So a period on a desert island would not panic me.”