Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
BBC correspondent in Jerusalem for over 17 years, a familiar voice reporting from Israel.
On the island
Eight records
Spring (from The Four Seasons)
The Soloists of Zagreb, conducted by Antonio Janigro
It's a crutch to help me over the first lonely moments.
The Roger Wagner Chorale and the Concert Arts Orchestra, conducted by Roger Wagner
I like requiems you know they speak of the majesty of God, the universe, the earth, and so on ... and the Foray Requiem for me ... ends on a more optimistic note and speaks of redemption when we come, and this is what was irresistible to me, when we come at last to Jerusalem, where I've spent half my life.
The Lonesome Train was written in about nineteen thirty eight by Earl Robinson. He wrote the music, and Millard Lampell, a fine radio writer, wrote the words. And what it is, it's a cantata about the death of Lincoln. ... and the cantata is a combination of folk song, folk music, and gives the character and meaning of Lincoln and has this marvelous phrasing that freedom's a thing that has no ending, it needs to be fought for, it needs defending.
The Almanac Singers, led by Pete Seeger
It came at about the same time, and it was sung by the Almanac singers led by the great Pete Seeger, one of the greatest of America's folk singers. And it marks a period when I began working for the organization of trade unions, specifically of the agricultural workers, the Okies, the migratory workers, in the farms in California.
Piano Sonata No. 23 in F minor, Op. 57 'Appassionata'
I've chosen it as played by Sirkin, whom I don't know but who projects a gentleness and a brilliance that is remarkable when combined in this fashion. And I chose it because in the midst of all this bursting energy, when I was doing everything that I thought a human being could do, back in the thirties, the Upashanata was one of the first records of classical music that I really listened to, and as I recall, it was the first such that I ever bought with my own hard earned money.
Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 in D major, BWV 1050
The London Baroque Ensemble, conducted by Karl Haas
I like all the monumental music. You are this thundering, universal gut music that shakes the walls and shakes your emotions. But if I was sitting, cast adrift on a desert island, I feel that I would be well aware of the immensity of the universe and sufficiently frightened by it, and I would need something a bit more comforting and sprightly, and something I could live with easier, and so I chose this.
Benny Goodman and His Orchestra, featuring Martha Tilton and Harry James
Nineteen thirty-eight was a time when I was ... swinging, and everyone I knew was swinging, not just musically, but we were living at the peak of our abilities, and we had the whole world in our hands, or so we felt, and we were going to change it, shape it, we were going to build it anew with the face of a kind of humanist socialism.
Lyke-Wake Dirge (from Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings, Op. 31)
And the section that I have chosen is a section that speaks of one ... well, what might be described as getting one's just deserts when you're dead and facing purgatory and whether you go to hell or heaven. And I like to think that on balance ... if I got my just desserts I wouldn't go to hell.
In conversation
Presenter asks
3:02Do you look back on your childhood as a deprived one?
We were deprived of material possessions. I knew I was poor and I think it made me aggressive, but I had no real basis for comparison. Everyone I knew was poor.
Presenter asks
3:12When you left primary school, what did you do?
We were all what you would call young hoodlums. We ran around in the streets, you see, and we were all fairly tough, or thought of ourselves as fairly tough. This was a time when there was a great deal of gangsterism in the old movie sense in New York. And I think our ambitions were to be real top gangsters. Well, many of us never made it, but I must say some of my friends made it. And ... One was electrocuted. ... What I did was I made a kind of raffish living. ... As a sort of handball professional. ... And I would travel around betting on myself, and often won, and when I lost I had a fast pair of feet. ... And I also was a pool room hustler, played pocket billiards for money. I was pretty good.
Presenter asks
4:30Who helped you, Michael? Who got you on your feet? Educated you?
The woman was a teacher in DeWitt Clinton High School named Ina Newman. I wouldn't say she got me on my feet. I was on my feet in terms of the real world. I think what she did was let me be aware that I had an imagination and that it could flow or fly. ... She taught me a love of the English language. She was an English literature teacher in what you would call secondary school. And ... She taught me pride.
The keepsakes
The book
The Hero with a Thousand Faces
Joseph Campbell
Ruth suggested it immediately, and there was no other book in the world that I would choose for that one book.
The luxury
an electric typewriter with solar batteries
I would like to think that in the loneliness of a desert island, being then the smallest part of the universe, I would like to think that somewhere great thoughts would come and it would be a shame for posterity to be robbed of them. And I would also do the autobiography because I would already be naked and alone. What can happen?
Presenter asks
5:07You went off to California. How did that come about?
Well, I like to think that it came about solely because I wrote a few short stories and articles when I was a kid in secondary school, and they came to the attention of film producers who then had a program called the Junior Writers Program. ... I was apprenticed to a woman named Frances Highland, who taught me whatever I learned about screenwriting. So I would like to say that it happened out of my own merits and very considerable talents. But I must mention that, by the way, that at the time my brother Saul, my older brother, was a producer in Hollywood. And that is kind of helpful.
Presenter asks
15:09How did you set about this task of smuggling arms [for the Haganah]?
Well, first of all, there was a huge quantity of surplus weaponry. ... left in the United States after the World War, and this was in the hands either of junk dealers or arms merchants. And there happened to be a law against exporting these without a federal license. And so we engaged in a lot of sort of cops and robbers stuff in evading this.
Presenter asks
20:27How did you become a war correspondent for Columbia Broadcasting?
I didn't know I was becoming a war correspondent. I probably would have been terrified of that. That just happened to me. I was in Paris and I was completing a film and ... CBS ... called me and asked was I coming back to Israel? and I said yes. And he said, How would you like to be a CBS Stringer, that is part time correspondent in Israel? I said fine, on the theory that if you've never done it, there's no evidence that you cannot do it. ... And when I got to Israel, I announced to the government people responsible for the press that I was the new correspondent. And they said, why don't you go in the next room and inform the old correspondent who's still there and knew nothing of it. And he threw me out. And some months later, he left the country and the job fell to me.
“We were deprived of material possessions. I knew I was poor and I think it made me aggressive, but I had no real basis for comparison. Everyone I knew was poor.”
“I was approached by representatives of Haganah, the defense unit of the Jews of what was then the emerging Jewish state of Israel. ... I felt there ought to be a Jewish state, there had to be a Jewish state, and the Jewish nation had to be reborn out of the ashes of the Holocaust.”
“I would never claim impartiality. I would argue that I believe the record shows that I always gave a fair report. ... My argument was, and the BBC's argument was, that what I was personally didn't count. What counted was what I put on the air.”
“You do an autobiography and you're naked and alone before the world if you tell the truth, or you're a cheat if you don't. So I'd prefer to start with a carefully selected group of memoirs.”