Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
British animator best known for creating Ivor the Engine, Noggin the Nog, the Clangers, and Bagpuss.
On the island
Eight records
Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 in F major, BWV 1047
Bath Festival Orchestra, conducted by Yehudi Menuhin
I shall need something to wake me up in the morning and tell me that life is still worth living.
The Lass with the Delicate Air
I can remember from my first school we used to sing English traditional songs and I liked them very much. I loved them and I sang all the time.
Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Sir Thomas Beecham
I think stuck on a hot, sandy island, I shall miss certain peacefulnesses, sitting by a woodland pool on a summer evening and looking at the dust flittering on the surface and watching the dragonflies among the reeds.
When the Saints Go Marching InFavourite
Throughout my life I loved jazz, and I really, really liked slightly constructed jazz, but this particular piece I'm very devoted to.
Graculus' Memory Music (from Noggin the Nog)
I suppose I'll have to take something with me to remind me of all those years I spent pushing bits of card along with a pin. But all the pieces of music were composed for me by Vernon Elliott.
Pyatnitsky State Russian Folk Choir, conducted by Valentin Levashov
I think what I shall miss on this desert island where it's really hot, I shall miss the cold. I shall miss the exhilaration of riding out in Odroski with a gang of comrades to see the sun on the snow, and the green buds sprouting on the silver birches, and being able to breathe in great lungfuls of the icy air and know that the winter is over at last.
This was a piece I found for Prue actually, funnily enough. I came across it um shortly before she died, which was twenty five years ago now, and brought it to her and she loved it very dearly.
When you go to a desert island and you're alone, all your ghosts and all the blames and all the follies, the mistakes and the regrets, the toe-coiling stupidities we've been talking about, they come crowding in with you from the past. So I shall have to find a way to turn on them and turn on the whole daft world and tell it to get stuffed, and there's only one record for that.
In conversation
Presenter asks
4:33What kind of childhood did you have [growing up in a prominent political family]?
My grandfather was George Lansbury, who was leader of the Labour Party in 1935 and a pacifist and a great socialist, and my mother was his secretary. … My father was editor of Tribune, which was a left-wing weekly paper at the time, and we were deep in the movement in a sense. But of course, all that meant was that my parents were rather absent most of the time. … Ray, my father, was a rather distant figure, but he was very friendly. And Daisy, my mother, was a very important part of my life, but a lot of the time she wasn't there. And John and I were regarded as a general nuisance, I think, as indeed we were in a tiny little box of a house in Hendon.
Presenter asks
7:09What sort of legacy do you think that education [at Dartington Hall] had?
Oh, d uh very very powerful uh on me. Having been Deprived of self-discipline. Completely. I still, in my eighties, have a fight with myself to make myself do something I don't fancy at any given moment, which is ridiculous. It makes me really angry with myself.
Presenter asks
8:58What was your reaction [to being called up for military service in 1943]?
Very difficult. I was very firmly convinced that Hitler was a phenomenon of the Versailles Treaty, that the way which Germany had been treated at the end of the First War was the cause of the discontent that gave rise to Hitler, and that if we had another one, then the wheel would turn again and there would be another fifty million people killed twenty-five years later. And it seemed to me at the time that to join in was wrong. I mean, I think I was wrong. In doing it, because in practice the wheel did not turn again.
The keepsakes
The book
A huge book of all English poetry
'cause I never gave it enough time in my life, and I regretted that I could spend a lot of time looking through and enjoying the things I've missed.
Presenter asks
14:27What do you mean by [describing yourself as] a verb, not a noun?
I'm a thing for doing things. I was brought up to think of myself as inferior. I didn't exist unless I was doing something, unless I could show that I had achieved something. So I was forced into neurotic achievement almost. And Prue used to say to me, for goodness sake, get yourself a project, you're not fit to live with. I felt I was like a mincing machine or a sausage machine, and that if there was no sausage going through, it minced itself.
Presenter asks
23:38How were things in your real life around about that time [in the early to mid-seventies]?
Anything about my parents both died within within weeks of each other and suddenly I was out on my own. I hadn't realized the extent to which when I went into my imaginary world I left my father in charge of the real world. Suddenly I w he was no longer there as a referee and I realized I was having to think about the world, the real world, and I didn't like it. I didn't like it at all, and I was tremendously frightened of the winter of discontent when the miners are fighting political doctrinaire battles with Edward Heath government and so on.
“I was led to believe right from the very root that somehow anything I thought of was inherently wrong, just because I thought of it. So I then had to think of something even funnier and even cleverer than I would naturally think of in order to be there at all. And it's quite absurd.”
“The essential thing about Dartington was that it was theory-led, and you were required, expected, to do what you fancied. … It's a very good school for goats. But it's no good for sheep, you see, and I'm a sheep. It was One of the unhappiest periods of my life.”
“I have this reservation that I was not entitled to be righteous. The world didn't belong to me. And yes, as you say, I am, in a sense, a guest.”
“I had no I had no idea about the children, never gave them a thought. Having an infantile mind, I liked the ideas. … if you did things solely intended for the kiddiwinks, you were insulting them, because children, I believe, learn by picking up fag ends. You know, they want to be round the edges of adult life and pick things up.”
“I wouldn't have done any of these things if I hadn't needed to keep doing things to prove that I existed. I regard it as an illness. I regard it as a personality fault that I'm able to do these things.”