Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Photographer and TV documentary maker known for quirky subjects like Victorian lavatories and doll's house food, and heritage crusader.
On the island
Eight records
Impromptu in G-flat major, Op. 90 No. 3
the perfect piece for the peace and calm of the island, which is Schubert's impromptu opus ninety number three. Because it is gloriously beautiful and a huge big thing about it is that for the last forty years I've been dreaming. What I imagined was a forlorn dream of being on Desert Island Disc, and it has always been on it. So, over the years, when I've heard it, it's also meant Desert Island Disc to me as well as the beauty and the calm of it all is a lovely, lovely piece of music.
because two reasons. One is it makes me shriek with laughter whenever I hear it. Three reasons. The second is that it's beautiful. And the third is that I'm making a series about modern architecture.
That plunges me back into the past. I remember going to the reunion concert. And sitting there was very, very strange, because you knew that you were the age you were. I knew I was whatever I was, watching it, and yet I was, despite knowing it, I was seventeen and I had life in front of me, and it was absolute magic of the music bringing back precisely every tiny aspect of the feeling of a seventeen year old, and yet the magic of knowing what was going to happen for the next twenty years. It was very strange.
A Four-Legged Friend
Makes me cry straight away hearing it. It's a four legged friend. Um lots of reasons. The mai mainly just childhood and the thrilling waves of mysterious nostalgia of times past, even if they weren't happy, which these ones were and worshipping dogs and horses.
Mir ist so wunderbar (Quartet from Fidelio)Favourite
Sona Ghazarian, Hildegard Behrens, Hans Sotin, David Kuebler
the most beautiful of the lot, which just makes you melt with the beauty of it
I'm a Fool to Care / (Now and Then There's) A Fool Such as I
This one makes me melt into being a teenager, and life just beginning, which is Elvis Presley of fools such as I, I first heard it very strangely when I was standing in front of the Basilica of Saint Francis of Assisi and thinking about the world of Saint Francis, and then suddenly this booming, strange, incongruous music came out of a cellar cinema in the main street of Assisi. And it just reminds me of life at the beginning, as life dawned, a fool such as I.
chosen for lots of reasons. It it's very important example of how you should have different types when you're there to enhance different moods. And this strange early sound of this nineteen twenty recording of blues does certainly make you feel a special feeling at a special time. And it's called lost lover blues and has the added bonus of making you shriek with laughter because there's an abundance of birdsong and yodling.
the agonising choice between the Battle Hymn of the Republic and the March from Norma and La Marcelaise … it came down to the marseillaise because of the particularly fine recording with the soprano singing over a choir of some thousands of people. … It is smashing.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:59What would you say you were most passionate about?
My children first.
Presenter asks
1:39But they are such strange things that you wish to draw people's attention to. I mean, an obelisk to a pig in Cornwall or a memorial to a balloon in Bedford. How do you find them and why are you interested in them?
I'm interested in them because they make me roar with laughter, and give me the thrill of excitement of the discovering them, finding them, and what could be more delightful than chancing upon the information that Lady Myant Hedgecombe kept a pet pig called Cupid, and had it tethered to a gold chain, and took it down to breakfast, lunch, tea, and dinner, and took it to London outings. I mean nothing could be more delightful, and when it died had it buried in a golden casket. … [And] a huge soaring stone obelisk put over its head. Sam, what could be more delightful than that? You get both the interest and the laughter.
Presenter asks
2:28Does that sum up your life, an uncontrollable, thunderous pace?
I suppose, except it all has to be controlled, really. But certainly it seems uncontrollable and it and it's and it's pretty well non-stop. … It's odd at the moment because I'm alternating between doing all these films that are so different. And one day I'll be standing in Wimbledon dressed up as Lady Hamilton doing her Pose Plastique or holding Anne Boleyn's comb in my hand that hasn't been washed since she combed her hair before her head was cut off, and Marie Antoinette's pearl necklace that was taken off her severed neck. And the next day I'll be in the beautiful new leisure centre in Doncaster … And I do find it very, very difficult going from one to the other, but it's all so delightful.
The keepsakes
The book
Dictionary of National Biography
(multiple editors, standard reference work)
it's a work of prose and poetry, and despite being the dictionary of natural biography, then you're going to say no. But it's a reference, but you can't have a reference... I found Jeremy Bentham... from the Dictionary of Natural Biography... Wonderful book.
The luxury
I would very much like to sit there with a word processor and write of the last thirty years
Presenter asks
5:08Is it true that you once swam across to an island with a saw between your teeth to cut away undergrowth, which was spoiling the picture you were about to take?
Yes, that's true, yes. And also um disrobed because I didn't want to get my clothes wet and embarrassing 'cause the world and his wife were picnicking outside Glasgow and it was this lovely Gothic duck house on an island and it was the only way 'cause you couldn't see it. I knew it was there.
Presenter asks
6:58Why did you [photograph lavatories]?
Because I realized having seen the Gent's Urinals in the Philharmonic at Liverpool, which were pink marble, pretending marble … I saw those and saw how disgusting they were. … and saw how many lavatories were repellent all over the country and saw that they should go and they therefore should be recorded before they went. … and then of course find out they've been invented in England, and sort of within living memory.
Presenter asks
24:08Would you say that, Lucy, though, actually, despite all all the joking and all the laughter, that you're actually quite a serious person?
But that the that's the best thing is is, um serious things with a laugh is twice the value, isn't it? I hope. I mean, I it's ba I'm certain I am painfully so, yes.
“I'm interested in them because they make me roar with laughter, and give me the thrill of excitement of the discovering them, finding them, and what could be more delightful than chancing upon the information that Lady Myant Hedgecombe kept a pet pig called Cupid, and had it tethered to a gold chain, and took it down to breakfast, lunch, tea, and dinner, and took it to London outings.”
“Daily, hourly, all the time, I feel as if I'm always with picked flowers rather than flowers that are actually planted. And any new information hasn't got the right foundation because it's gathered anew on the surface.”
“Four-legged friend, a four-legged friend, he'll never let you down. He's honest and faithful right up to the end.”
“I feel sort of banana sitting here talking at all. … I was paid the greatest compliment by my friend Anne Cruikshank the day before yesterday, who said fundamentally decent, which was wonderful.”
“No, I don't [get depressed]. No, there's it's always great excitement, indeed. Terrific excitement for either the Leisure Centre in Doncaster or Lord Kilmorey's Mausoleum.”