Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Novelist and professor.
On the island
Eight records
The Best of All Possible Worlds
Max Adrian, Barbara Cook and Robert Rounseville
I'd like to start with a piece of satire. O one of my favorite musicals or musical operators.
Well, the um uh second is a record that I greatly admire for its bitter texture, its it's almost its nastiness. It's Lottie Lenya, a great heroine of mine from the thirties.
Well, it comes exactly from that moment. The title that I chose for my ... Novel was Eating People Is Wrong, and that comes from a record by Michael Flanders and Donald Swan.
I thought that since America has been a fundamental theme of my life, I ought to try and find some British group who have also been preoccupied with the United States and to find as complicated a form of this as I possibly could.
Là ci darem la manoFavourite
Eberhard Wächter and Graziella Sciutti
Well, um this is straight out of the history man, or the television version of the history man. I see Howard Kirk, the central character of that um story, as a mixture of two ... literary figures. One is Iagio and the other is Don Giovanni.
Well, um this is uh again an expression of my American interests. It's from Laurie Anderson's uh extended sequence called United States, and it's the track called O Superman from uh Big Science.
Well record record number seven is um I do enjoy records which have a quality of strangeness and fantasy about them, which is partly why I picked Laurie Anderson. The great British fantasist for me at the moment is Kate Bush.
Matthew, amongst other of his activities, has been roading for an a Norwich group called Airbridge. And um I would very much like to have um as part of my eight records a record that reminds me of uh of of him, especially if he's not going to be on the island with me.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:34Have you ever daydreamed about being a Robinson Crusoe?
No, I haven't. I I teach Robinson Crusoe in my classes and I always present him as a a rather unfortunate figure who is uh stranded uh on a capitalist desert island and uh forced to uh scrape a living from the soil. And I've never been good at that sort of thing myself, so um on the whole I'm happy where I am.
Presenter asks
4:12Did [having a heart condition] turn you into a studious lad, throwing you on your own resources?
Yes, yes, I must have made me quite obnoxious. ... I'm sure it's the reason why I became a writer. ... Which I did very early. I had to retire to the library when everybody else was ... Doing healthy activity. ... So I spent uh much of my days from about twelve to sixteen ... Avoiding games by writing books.
Presenter asks
8:46How did you survive when you nearly starved on a trip to America?
I arrived in New York to be told by my host there that the foundation that had given me the scholarship had collapsed. ... So I went on to Canada ... to the University of Toronto, where they very kindly found me a job mowing lawns round the suburbs of Toronto ... with a Philippine gardener. ... I got back to New York and had ten dollars left I think when suddenly discovered that not only had the research scholarship packed up but so had the airline. So various pieces of fortune that came along and rescued me and I lived from hand to mouth in in New York, which is rather a frightening thing to do if you're nineteen for a couple of weeks until I managed to get a flight out.
The keepsakes
The luxury
Presenter asks
16:50How does [the writer's colony Yaddo] work? Are there house rules?
Yes, oh yes. You can't talk to anyone between nine and in the morning and six o'clock at night. After that all hell breaks loose, of course. But food is delivered to your studio door in a lunch bail. You know, a little bit of milk and some nice rolls, and you eat them over the typewriter, which is why my my type scripts are so stained.
Presenter asks
32:07Are you a practical person? Could you look after yourself on a desert island?
No, no, I'm totally impractical. I need a guide interpreter.
“I'm sure it's the reason why I became a writer. ... I had to retire to the library when everybody else was ... Doing healthy activity.”
“I lived through, you know, the early part of my life thinking that I wasn't going to last for very long, and suddenly I had to face some sort of perpetuity.”
“I do need a very sharp separation between the act of teaching and above all the act of writing criticism ... and the writing of fiction. There is a curious suspicion of the author which exists both in universities in general and in contemporary criticism in particular. And so in order to be one ... to be a real one is almost an embarrassment on a university campus.”