Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Poet, performer, and writer of more than a hundred books for children.
On the island
Eight records
really it's to remember the wonderful times my parents used to take me well, we used to schlep right the way across London from the suburbs where we were brought up in Pinna all the way down to Stratford East in East London. So in my teenage years there I was going to see Oh, what a lovely war and it would be good to have a little bit of irony, I thought.
Ewan McColl was quite a presence in our house. I think people forget about Ewan McColl. They remember that he wrote First Time I Saw Your Face or Maybe Dirty Old Town, but he was a great discoverer. He was a great archaeologist and discovered this whole body of song and poetry that was made up in the nineteenth and early twentieth century that we don't really have a word for it, but you could call it industrial song.
Black, Brown and WhiteFavourite
there we are in the suburbs. My brother and I, and we're listening to this wonderful blues guitarist and singer, Big Bill Brunzy, and this song about discrimination before Martin Luther King. The song comes from 1951. We were listening to it in the 50s.
I think I'll need to remember the sixties on this island, won't I? Well, I don't know. It felt that the the shackles were falling off, all that sort of drabness that I remember from Pinna and those front rooms without the lights on. Suddenly the lights did come on. In our lives, and to remember that, I think the best person to remember it with would be Aretha Franklin and my favourite track, Spanish Harlem.
what I love about Irish fiddling where it comes from that tradition is that really this is a It's like a testimony to the unnoticed. There's a thing we do about what we call roots music or folk music or whatever is that we forget they just incredible skill. that these guys have and so I think I'll think about that when I listen to Miss Ramsey on on my desert island.
One whole side of my life is wrapped up in France. It's it's always very difficult to describe this because you always sound a bit kind of poncy, don't you, as a sort of English person saying, Oh, I love France, I do so love red wine and all that. But when I was uh sixteen, my dad said, Why don't you go and stay with a colony d'Accons, which is really a youth camp? I'm sixteen. The old man sends me off to the Ardèche.
on the island I'll want to remember all the wonderful times I've had in and around schools, but in particular in London schools. And London is such a funny, odd, quirky, diverse place and you go into schools and kids are cheeky to you and you might be cheeky back at them and you you see them banging out rhythms on the desk and coming back at you for what you've written and to sum all that up, I'd like to hear Smiley Culture doing Cockney Translation.
Last record introduced to me by my wife. And I knew of Taj Mahal. That's not his real name. Blues artist. I'd even seen him perform in the sixties. And he did that thing that some of the African-American blues artists did, or blues musicians. They met up with Africans like Dizzy Gillespie meeting up with Hugh Masakela. And this is Taj Mahal meeting up with Tumani Diabete and an album called Tunkaranke.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:58Why wouldn't it work if you made it up? Why can't you tell fibs?
You can't tell fibs because it won't the the the poem won't work. If you tell a fib about what you're feeling, the next time you read it you'll be embarrassed by it, you'll feel awkward about it and it won't do the the brain work for you because when you write about something honestly, when you look at it on the page, it can talk back at you and you can look at yourself almost as if you're another person.
Presenter asks
5:26Was poetry always destined to be your medium? Was it always going on in the house in Pinner?
Yes, my mum in particular, um I can see her sort of sitting on the sofa dreamily thinking about WB Yeats. And um yes, uh they were we used to have t uh records as well. We used to have records of Dylan Thomas um doing um the whole [Under Milk Wood] … And my brother is all part of the take-offs of my dad and so on. He would do take-offs of these things.
Presenter asks
10:36Did [the school performance] alter the way you wrote stuff after that?
Yeah. Yes, and sounds and it had never occurred to me that you could make it into a whole Acti piece
The keepsakes
The book
Carl Sandburg
A writer of free verse and prose poems and paragraphs and stuff. So, yes, that's what I'll take.
The luxury
In the last months of his life Eddie would sit in the corner trying to play a didgeridoo. So I could sit there for hours going thingy.
Presenter asks
15:53Did they tell you it was because of your parents' links with the Communist Party [that you were sacked from the BBC]?
Oh, no, not at all, not at all. No, I thought maybe I hadn't been very good at getting up in the morning … And then I was invited in to see HST, Head of Staff Training, Owen Reed, and he invited me in and he said, We've been very, very glad to have you on board, Mike. But we think it would be better if he went freelance. And I thought brilliant … it took me the time it takes to get from the Langham to Oxford Circus tube station, which is about two hundred yards, to realise that I had actually been fired.
Presenter asks
19:16How did [the death of your son Eddie] happen?
Um he was working as a crewman in the theatre, and would be very tired during the day, and I came back from doing a performance in Bristol. Uh I came home. and he was lying on the sofa, saying he felt a bit fluey. So I gave him paracetamol. … I had to get up in the morning quite early. And then I went in at about six. And he was dead. He was lying in the bed. I could feel immediately it was cold and stiff
Presenter asks
28:56Do you regret that you weren't able to recreate [the solid and secure family feeling] that your mother and father gave you?
Yes, there are moments I I kind of think it it was the continuity of it. … it's that kind of permanent reference point that you can come back to again and again. … Now I I suppose what I m I miss that. I miss the fact that somehow or other I don't have these kind of shared reference points that we can all sit round and say those things in quite that way. Everybody's kind of gone off in different directions.
“when you write about something honestly, when you look at it on the page, it can talk back at you and you can look at yourself almost as if you're another person.”
“I like the idea of a popular poetry that's built up out of the things you catch in the air. And I don't want to embellish them, I don't want to make them into rhyme, find a rhyme for over, dova, rover.”
“Sometimes they're jokes, and sometimes they're ironic looks, and sometimes they are just as I see them as as paragraphs, little scenes, fragments from a life.”