Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
An artist specializing as a cartoonist, known for being prolific and for selling his first cartoon at age ten.
On the island
Eight records
Dear Mr. Gable: You Made Me Love You
Where we start with a childhood sweetheart of mine. I think she was a year older than me, Judy Garland. And uh this was a record I used to play on in a very terrible old machine with my cousin, who was more like my brother.
My Very Good Friend the MilkmanFavourite
The second record is my most favorite performer, Fat Swallow. And the reason I'd chosen it is that it was a favourite of my father's and he introduced me to Fatswaller. And I actually was lucky enough to see Fatzwaller live, playing with his back turned to the audience in a white suit against a white piano at the Hoban Empire before the war.
Bing Crosby and Louis Armstrong
The next record is a very personal favourite of mine because it combines two artists who mean a great deal. Bing Crosby, whose relaxed style of life has really made an enormous influence on my own feeling about life and my own behaviour, I think, and Louis Armstrong, no need to say anything about him.
Piano Quintet in A major, D. 667 "The Trout" (Fourth Movement)
Amadeus Quartet with Hephzibah Menuhin
I would very much like, as we're on a desert island, to have something which gives me an an optimistic feeling that I wouldn't starve to death, and I would like Schubert's Trout Quintette.
One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)
Record number five is very glamorous, a very glamorous man anyway. Frank Sinatra, a record I could not do without, and which will depress me night after night when I play it on the on the island, but it's so beautiful.
Fred Astaire with George Gershwin
This again is one of my clever choices where I can have two for the price of one, in that it's Fred Astaire, one of my old time idols, and he's singing a song of Gershwin's. And he's actually accompanied by Gershwin on the piano, and Gershwin also speaks to him.
If I Could Be with You One Hour Tonight
I'm surprised that I've been able to delay him so long, because he really is a very great favourite of mine, and that's Jack Teagarden. And he's playing something which isn't one of the more obvious things that one could have chosen, but it sums up, I'm sure, what I would feel on a number of occasions if I last long enough on this island to be with uh someone rather sweet...
Piano Concerto No. 21 in C major, K. 467 (Second Movement)
Artur Schnabel with the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Sir Malcolm Sargent
A touch of the sublime after some of the ridiculous. Arta Schnabel playing Mozart's twenty first piano concerto. Why'd you choose this? It's just about the most beautiful thing I've ever heard.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:32Do you play music while you work?
I play a lot of music. ... Yes, it's a marvellous companion. Actually. Otherwise one might go mad.
Presenter asks
3:19What was your first artistic influence, Michael? Were you taken to galleries [as a] child?
No. No. My parents were very Philistine in spite of uh there being lettering men and sopranos. I uh didn't really have any kind of uh early education in art except through again through my cousin who introduced me to uh Van Gogh and others. I was rather a slow starter, but I was a very quick starter as an artist. I started drawing at six, and uh I just had to make it up as I went along.
Presenter asks
3:51You sold a cartoon very early, indeed, at a very young age [ten years old]?
Well, it was a a a a sort of fluke. There was a competition in an evening newspaper and you had to uh turn a little decorative squiggle of a line in fact it was called squiggles into a cartoon with a caption and um I think I was about ten years old and I sent one in and I received uh the handsome sum of ten and sixpence for it.
The keepsakes
The book
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass
Lewis Carroll
the book that I most filched from professionally uh and that is Alice in Wonderland... I find it a a most marvellous book
The luxury
artist's lay figure (mannequin)
an artist lay figure... I thought it would be rather nice because if nobody turned up to save me from this desert island it could make a rude gesture
Presenter asks
12:34What was the first regular commission you got, a weekly job which would enable you to relax a bit?
It was a monthly job, and it was for a defunct magazine called Lilliput. And it was, of all things, illustrating a crossword puzzle. And it was called Lillipuzzle. It had a little picture in each corner of the thing, and you had to do the numbers as well. ... I was actually living on a regular income of 96 guineas a year.
Presenter asks
17:54Your studio is in Shaftesbury Avenue. Don't you find that rather distracting on people sort of wandering in up the stairs at closing time?
You have to uh play um the perhaps not too difficult role to adopt of being a rotter and saying, I'm not talking to anybody this week or this year or what have you. ... if you're going to get any work done, you just can't uh have too much
Presenter asks
24:49Now we've got you on this desert island, Michael. How well could you look after yourself?
I wouldn't look look after myself at all, well. I doubt if I'd last long enough to play all the records, quite frankly. I'm totally hopeless with my hands.
“I was the only talent.”
“Staying [with] the bunnies wasn't that uh hot, really, because they were always so exhausted from being bunnies that they just crashed down and and disappeared. All they could think about was sleep and a doughnut sleep on their own.”
“If someone had told me when I was a boy that I would actually get paid for going to the movies, I wouldn't have believed such good luck was possible.”
“I actually did want to found a dynasty. I wanted to be uh a Bruegel and have uh sons who followed my own profession, but uh it didn't work.”