Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
BBC newsreader and host of the Miss World pageant.
On the island
Eight records
The eight records for this collection haven’t been catalogued yet.
The keepsakes
The book
The luxury
Not recorded.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:08What was the experience of being evacuated during the war like for you?
A very unsettling experience for a child, I should think. It was. I suppose I can blame all kinds of uh character defects on that ever since. … [Taken] out of London with a with a label round your neck, not knowing where you were going.
Presenter asks
1:01Was there any show business background in your family?
No, none at all.
Presenter asks
1:07As a youngster, what did you want to be?
Well, I was terribly keen to be an actor. Always wanted to be an actor. I'd go to the pictures and then re-enact everything I'd seen. I also wanted to be an artist, a cartoonist, and used to draw funny faces and people would say, Who is it supposed to be? Nobody, just a funny face. But I enjoyed that.
Presenter asks
1:40You were a paratrooper?
I was a paratrooper in the territorial army after the two years in the infantry. I spent a year in Germany.
Presenter asks
3:08What brought you to the metropolis [London]?
Well, uh they were having periods of employing guest television announcers in the late fifties. This was nineteen fifty seven and I was recommended from Cardiff, came back to London, took an audition, that worked, and uh used to sit there wearing the old common old dinner suit with a peg in the back, so that it fitted me.
Presenter asks
4:01Which news bulletins that you read come to mind?
Well, it sounds rather shallow, I suppose it is, but uh when uh Marilyn Munro died I had to announce it with what was described as a a brutal sense of drama. Of course the Kennedy stuff and the the Abervan aftermath.
“I was the last child to be taken from the town hall.”
“I did the parachuting to get over my terrible fear of heights. It didn't work.”
“I always regarded it as a stepping stone, and have in fact fallen foul one or two ex-colleagues by by saying publicly that I regarded the job as a bit of a sinecure because it wasn't uh demanding enough.”
“I have to prepare sixty interviews in ten different languages, none of which I speak, because I don't know which seven I have to talk to.”
“There were the people hammering on the windows of the coach, screaming, you're debasing the female sex. And the girls inside were first of all frightened, then they retaliated and you had We Shall Overcome being sung inside the bus as well as that.”