Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A journalist from a Yorkshire mining community, former local newspaper reporter and press officer, with a passion for jazz and pop music.
On the island
Eight records
The keepsakes
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:35From this mining community in Yorkshire, was there any likelihood of you going down the pit?
No, not at all. I mean, all my contemporaries did, but my father, God bless him, had very rigid ideas about this, which he expressed quite forcibly. He said, If I ever see you walking through the pit gate, I'll kick you up the backside.
Presenter asks
2:24What sort of life was it on that paper [the South Yorkshire Times]?
Uh It was hard work, but very interesting. Very good grounding for. Either break your heart or make you a journalist. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it was so awfully, staggeringly boring. But if you could survive it, you you you wanted to be a journalist.
Presenter asks
3:32And when you hung up your uniform [after National Service], did you go back to the Humphrey [Bogart] hat?
No, I didn't. I went to work in a bottle factory in Barnsley. I worked on a night shift with three hundred women. I learnt nothing about bottles and a lot about women.
The luxury
Presenter asks
4:46When did television first cast its spell?
Well, I'd done a little bit in Manchester. I was the worst performer in the world. I did a a programme up there, a local programme for ABC television, and I'd always wanted to do it because I'm very vain and I wanted to be recognized in the street.
Presenter asks
5:29But since then things have got better. Now, serious television, as it were, started for Granada, didn't it?
Yes, it did. I was working in London on a magazine, it folded. Right out of the blue, there came a call from Granada from a man I met once at a party political conference saying would I go up there and think about sort of uh producing programmes? And I went up there and I did a programme, uh a nightly current affairs program called CMS 630, which really wasn't, it was a deep end, but it was again the best way to learn.
Presenter asks
9:25Michael, are you good with your hands? Could you look after yourself on this island?
No, I'm absolutely Clear. Totally useless. Can you cultivate? Can you build shelters? No, no, nothing about that at all. Really? I mean, I I probably could, but they wouldn't be very good. Fish. And chips. It's like for the citation game. No. Try to escape. I can't swim. I mean it's a you know, be obviously used. I'll be there forever. You're gonna hate it every minute.
“All my contemporaries did, but my father, God bless him, had very rigid ideas about this, which he expressed quite forcibly. He said, If I ever see you walking through the pit gate, I'll kick you up the backside And I never did.”
“I went to grammar school and I learnt how to play cricket. The only thing I apart from that that I learned at grammar school was how to smoke. I became a very good smoker at my grammar school.”
“I had a sort of uh poacher turned gamekeeper.”
“I went to work in a bottle factory in Barnsley. I worked on a night shift with three hundred women. I learnt nothing about bottles and a lot about women.”
“I thought they're going to come flocking at me, they're going to have autographs and all this kind of thing. And after about five minutes the landlord came out, he looked at me, he said, by God, lad, he said, there's been a fellow on television that looks just like thee.”