Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Prize-winning stand-up comedian, broadcaster and writer, best known for the Radio 4 series Mark Steel's In Town.
On the island
Eight records
I was five when I heard it, but I do remember thinking, wow, I like this. However, you articulate that when you're five. And now, I'm quite proud of the five-year-old me because it's, and of course it's a historic song because for most people it would be, yeah, it was the first reggae song that was played really to any great degree in this. I do have a memory of me mum with it sort of the song coming on. I'd have been five or six and my mum going, oh, he likes this one.
I was 17 when punk arrived and I bought the Clash album... I remember just putting that in a little needle on it and this is the first track of the first Clash album and by the time the drumming, the opening drumming bit stopped, I was in a different world. I was angry about the world. I was angry about me dad. But then when I was 16, my dad had to go to a mental home in nearby Dartford. So I was angry about him, but I was also angry that he'd had to go there.
Johnny Cash, for many reasons. When I look back at it, there's so many things I love about Johnny Cash. First of all, if you were to sort of ask most people to list radical protest singers, people would go from that area. He'd obviously go Bob Dylan and many others singing about Vietnam and so on. Very few people would think of Johnny Cash, but I think a greater percentage of his output was overtly political than almost any of them. But also, he had such a charm and such a love and such a compassion, and there was nothing preachy about him at all.
Having said what I loved about Johnny Cash was his how to change the world but be kind and compassionate and not to scream and rage, I will now contradict myself as much as it's possible to do. This is killing in the name of by rage against the machine as magnificent a screech against everything as has ever been created.
Top Marx if people know this, this is a woman called Ivor Pals... I've always had a fascination with Iceland and Greenland and the Faroe Islands... She was playing at a disused cinema and it was one of the best gigs I've ever seen. She was amazing. And it's in Faroese. And I think I just adore anybody who's speaking, singing, acting with passion about their local quirky place.
Love Me or Leave MeFavourite
The piano bit in the middle, there's about two minutes of her just playing the piano. It's such a tremendous bit of playing. It's jazz, obviously, but she was such a fine classical pianist that it's that as well. It's jazz and classical. And there's another reason for choosing it, which is that my lovely daughter has a daughter of her own called Ray Simone, named after Nina Simone.
I've got to have a romantic song and I chose this one. I think partly because his sort of voice and his whole demeanor doesn't lend itself naturally to romance. He's spent so much of his life singing about rather dark things. And I just love piano. So, and it sounds beautiful on this. And again, it's so simple. This makes me think of one person in particular, even though she doesn't really like Nick Cave.
I had to have some hip-hop in there. I don't know why, just as I don't know why I got fascinated with the Nordic countries, but I got fascinated with foreign language hip-hop. This is Anna Tijou and it's 1977. I think it's beautiful because it's got a lovely Central American sort of, but she's Chilean, but it's got a very sort of South American beat, I think, to it.
In conversation
Presenter asks
2:50What do you remember about [your first performance at a holiday camp in Devon at age eight]?
Most performers have this, this terrible ego that means you just want to be on stage in front of people. Now at the age of eight, I really hadn't developed anything that was worth watching. I knew I wanted to be on stage. I'd got that bit. So I wrote a poem. I wrote a poem about the A to Z of animals.
Presenter asks
11:17So you went to visit [your father in the mental home] and you saw him there — how long did that go on for?
Well, he died in there about nine years after he first went there. The Christmas before he died, I had a girlfriend. Debbie, it was very lovely and she said we should get your dad out for Christmas and it was quite an administrative palava and then they said here's all his drugs, make sure he has all of them, and gave me a great big schedule. And I didn't give him any of 'em. And he was absolutely fine. And he sort of got up early in the morning. They said, oh, he stays in bed till one in the afternoon. And each day he got up about eight in the morning, had a shave, put his like jacket and tie on, went down to the local pub that I went to with my mates and he was down there. He came down there and sat there with us. It was brilliant. It was really brilliant. We were so glad we did that.
The keepsakes
The book
I think whatever book I take is going to end up disappointing because once I've read it eight or nine times, I'll know it off by heart.
The luxury
I can play it. I'm not a good singer at all, but I can sort of sing. ... That won't matter, will it, if I'm on a desert island.
Presenter asks
13:38You were expelled from school at fifteen — [the story I've read is] it was because you went off to do a cricket course, but given what you've told us about what was happening at home, it puts it in a different light. Can you tell us about it?
Yeah, I suppose so. Now I used to skip off quite a lot. I really didn't like school. And there was a course at Beckenham and it was during term time. So I asked the teachers if I could have a week off to go on this course and they said, no, you've got your O-levels coming up. And I thought, oh, I don't care about them. And they said, no. So I just went on it anyway. And then a meeting where I was called in to see the headmaster and he said, you're not allowed to come here anymore. And I thought, so the punishment for not wanting to come in is I'm not allowed to come in. This is the happiest moment of my life!
Presenter asks
17:36[You left home at eighteen] — you also discovered the Socialist Workers' Party around that time. How did your parents react to your choices?
Well, I just wanted to get away from the tower. And you could in those days. That's what's so difficult now. Amongst the options of being able to move out was you could move into a squat. In Crystal Palace, there were some houses that were going to be demolished and then an estate built in their place. But the council moved everybody out and then didn't have the money to build the houses. So a load of squatters moved in. There were three roads. There must have been about 80, 90 houses, I guess, something like that. And it was mad. Just the most normal things were things that should never become normal. People would knock on the door at two in the morning and who's that? And they'd go, oh, do you need some peanut butter? Have you got any peanut butter? Someone knocked on the door once... And he went, complete stranger. He said, Have you got a wardrobe? What did your wardrobe for? And he went, I need somewhere to keep me owl.
Presenter asks
42:02How do you think comedy has changed since [your first Radio 4 appearance in 1984]? It's a long time to be in the job.
I think the main way it's changed is it's become something that you can realistically think that you can go into, and that's a brilliant thing. So it was something that you had to be really very mad and quirky to think about going into it 40 years ago. And now you can go into it thinking, no, that's quite viable and possible. And there are clubs about everywhere. Every town pretty much has got a comedy club. That's a brilliant thing. What I think has changed as well, and this is not the fault of comedy, is that because it's so difficult now to find anywhere to live, to find that isn't like a thousand pounds a month to live in some awful little place, there's no squats, it's really difficult if you're from a normal working-class background to take a job where you're going to be five years not earning any money and then there might not even be any at the end. And that's why the percentage of people now in acting, in sport, comedy and so on is far more weighted towards people who come from wealthier backgrounds as it was. How have we managed to become more unequal over that time? But that's not the fault of comedy.
Presenter asks
44:22What about the solitude? We've talked a lot about how much you like people, like getting out there and meeting them.
I'd find that really, really difficult. I'd really love to be around people so that I can say something to them that hopefully they'll laugh at.
“There'd been a lot of that. Anger doesn't follow a nice, neat pattern, does it? So then, in the early stages of this, I'm just about the world in general. And I get home with me clash album and I put this further clash. This wasn't like any music I'd heard up to then. It just seemed to speak to my generation. It's like even in the drumbeat, it's like they were going, you know that you're angry and everyone tells you you shouldn't be angry and it's your fault. Well, try this for anger. This trumps you, mate.”
“My Aunt Gwen said, well, my brother, Ernie, lives in a town called Swanley, and him and his wife can't have children, and they would very much like to adopt a baby, so maybe you can give the baby to them. And in those days, that's pretty much how it was done. It was probably more administrative work to hand over a washing machine. That was how it was organized, as I was told.”
“His first words, he said, I've got a lot of meetings today. This is the most awkward. And I said to him, Oh, that's okay, Joe. I said, Incidentally, I'm in touch with the family. So if you want the money back that they clearly owe you for the abortion, I can ask if they've got it. And he went, hmm. I said it was a better joke than that one. And he went, Yeah, yeah, it was.”
“As I was leaving, this guy Salvatore said, I love Frances so much, but always, all the time I knew her, I thought, there is something angry in you. Why are you so angry? And then he sort of just give us a little hug and went, Now I know why she's so angry. And I think that's why she couldn't meet me, 'cause she was just so angry. Bless her.”
“I think genuine romance is coming through the tricky things and finding the love despite all that, isn't it?”