Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
2 appearances
Playwright best known for A Day in the Death of Joe Egg (about a disabled child) and Privates on Parade (a musical set in post-WWII Malaya).
On the island
Eight records
I'm a Ding Dong Daddy (From Dumas)
Because it's always been a great favourite of mine. I admire the musicianship of the four people playing and it's a very lively piece that would cheer me up a lot on the island.
Why Do the Worst People Travel?
I admire, of course, the way he... wrote these neatly turned lyrics. This show was not in itself successful. There was one very good number which is sung... beautifully sung, I think...
Horn Concerto No. 3 in E-flat major, K. 447
Alan Civil, Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Otto Klemperer
I'd like this on the island because I think it would it it's got this hunting horn effect, which I think would help me uh when I had to go off hunting.
Well, this is to make me laugh on the island. It's my friend Barry Humphreys... and it's part of a live performance given at the Globe Theatre, London... it will remind me of that theater and the sound of a live audience...
I've partly chosen it because I saw him on the stage at the Hoban Empire in nineteen thirty nine... I think it reminds us what a very marvellous stride pianist he was...
Which I would like to have a little reminder of because it was a very happy experience. I enjoyed writing it and I enjoyed the new experience of writing lyrics...
He Trusted in God (from Messiah)Favourite
London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus conducted by Colin Davis
I've chosen because I love choral music... And also because choral music plays quite a large part in passion play...
Duke Ellington and His Orchestra
partly because I would always want something by Duke Ellington. And it seems that it's a particularly melancholy, sad piece that would suit those moods when you were sitting there looking over the sea and thinking about your own solitude...
Fred Astaire with Leo Reisman and his Orchestra
I remember watching him doing Dancing Man, and I looked up at my wife, and we were both in tears. And it wasn't because it was sad, it was because it was beautiful.
Sidney Bechet and his New Orleans Feetwarmers
Sidney Becher, who I think is a great artist and was... spotted in an extraordinarily prescient way by the conductor Ernst Ansomé in 1919... playing Scott Joplin's Maple Leaf Rag.
City of London Sinfonia conducted by Richard Hickox
This is Ponchinella. Stravinsky wrote this ballet music. It's lovely. It's the beginning of Stravinsky's neoclassical period.
A Ceremony of Carols: There Is No Rose
Choir of St John's College, Cambridge directed by George Guest
It represents the beautiful simplicity and innocence of children's voices and it's another irony really I think which is that children who are grubby, messy, anything but innocent are represented by adults like Benjamin Britton as being beautiful and angelic creatures.
Requiem in D minor, K. 626: Hostias (Quam olim Abrahae)Favourite
John Alldis Choir with the English Chamber Orchestra conducted by Daniel Barenboim
This is... the close of Act One [of Passion Play]... and the actors speak a correspondence and telephone calls against the fugue.
I heard on the radio one morning this rather marvellous rap record, and it's a lovely parody of life in New York for the posh people.
He commissioned me to write this musical. And when I was over in New York recently, we visited his house... and he said, By the way, you're sitting in the original rocking chair.
Henry V Suite: Charge and Battle
Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by William Walton
To remember too the traumatic, wonderful, ecstatic experience of first seeing the film of Henry V... I'd be doing that if I were on the island and I'd want William Walton's music for it.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:38How big a thing is music in your life?
It's always been a very important part of my life. I suppose I became a jazz fan as a result of reacting against my father, who... enjoyed classical music more... And now I've come full circle, and I hope I enjoy most kinds of music equally.
Presenter asks
2:59Do you look back on a happier childhood on the whole?
Tense, I'd say. Really? Yes, rather tense. Uh i mean, actually my childhood has somewhat disappeared. I'm one of those people who can't remember my childhood very well. I remember my adolescence more.
Presenter asks
3:34Can you remember the time of your first inclination towards imaginative writing?
No, I can't really. I always wanted to act or to be in the theater in some way or another.
Presenter asks
8:52When was the point when you said you were going to escape from the salt mines of television and write for the theater?
The keepsakes
The book
Peter Nichols
I think I want to take My Diary which I've been writing since I was about eighteen. And uh it sounds cocky, but it's not because of its literary quality, it's simply because I could relive much of my life. So I'll I'll be there starting from nineteen forty five and and reading it all through.
The luxury
Full-size snooker table with all the apparatus
I can't think of anything sweet and lovely except a full-size snooker table with all the apparatus.
Well, I was trying all the time, really. But it's always seemed to me that there's got to be some sort of very special reason for writing a stage play... to say something special. This is something that can't be done any other way.
Presenter asks
20:06How accurate was your stage picture [in Privates on Parade]?
In some places very accurate, in other places not at all. Some of the least convincing and plausible scenes were in fact based absolutely, with great fidelity on life, and some of the more convincing scenes were invented by me.
Presenter asks
28:26Would you try to escape [from the island]?
Oh yes, yes, I think so. I I suppose I'm used to solitude in a way. Being a writer, one spends a lot of one's time alone. On the other hand, when I've stopped writing... then I want company, I'm very g gregarious, so I'd get very miserable alone.
Presenter asks
1:51Have you always written autobiographically? Is that your main inspiration?
Perhaps it's true to say that most writers write autobiographically, but I don't dress it up as much, and my brother said to me, I don't mind your writing about the family, but couldn't you disguise them a bit more?
Presenter asks
3:44Is [laughing] autobiographical too? Is that how you've got through your difficult times?
Yes, I do think that's true. Yes. We've now got five grandchildren and we've started again doing with the babies the same technique as we did with the handicapped child. We put words into their mouths as we had to do with Abigail because she couldn't say anything... So that I think this kind of jokey way of talking helped us a lot.
Presenter asks
15:48How close did you come to [suffocating your daughter] in your own life?
Well, I think we both came pretty close to it. It would have been both easy and difficult to withhold the sedation... which would have meant that she died of epilepsy... you think, well, is this really a life?
Presenter asks
16:57Does the irony of that success [with A Day in the Death of Joe Egg]... haunt you at all that this great tragedy in your and Thelma's lives was really [the beginning of your success]?
Well it was... yes, it's an irony... on the first night in New York when Albert Finney was playing it and all the Connicenti and all the s furs and diamonds turned out to welcome it, the producer's wife gave him a dozen gold eggs from Tiffany's. And I said it's a it was strange to think of the Bristol Hospital and the goose who had laid them.
Presenter asks
19:38What did you think of [Laurence Olivier]?
Well, he didn't really have a direct... part in any of my productions, but he didn't like the National Health and he didn't want it to be done because Olivia thought it was disgusting to be representing real illness on the stage of the National Health... He was... both a terrific ruffian and a very posh... Henry the Fifth side of him... also contained Archie Rice, you know, and I loved him for that.
Presenter asks
24:59Where's all that jealousy come from?
Well, I don't know about thinly disguised. I think he was an amalgam of various people and really a fantasy figure. The fact that a lot of my fantasies have since happened to Tom is a question of life imitating art... I had to sort of solve it in myself, and had some treatment for it... I do feel it, yes, I do feel it very strongly, but I think it's a spur. I think it's not entirely negative. You say, He's doing that, I can do it too.
“I always wanted to act or to be in the theater in some way or another.”
“it's always seemed to me that there's got to be some sort of very special reason for writing a stage play, to persuade people to get up out of their cosy rooms and go in in the rain possibly and pay a lot of money to sit in a theatre in comparative discomfort.”
“I write stage directions to be performed and to be taken notice of... what's on the stage is pretty much what I said.”
“I was and am a late developer. I think almost everything's happened late.”
“I don't think of them as passive telewatchers. I think of them as people who can be embarrassed, made to laugh, and then choke back their laughter as much as to say, What the hell am I laughing at?”
“In the betrayal of someone you know intimately you get to the point where you're not quite sure which lies you've revealed and which you haven't and which is your real self and which is not and I think it's that that rings the bell with the audience.”
“It reminds me a little bit of that brilliant film, Miracle in Milan, by Vittorio De Sica... every now and then comes a little shaft of sunshine, which falls like a spotlight on a certain point. And all these cold poor people run into this spotlight and stand there, singing and rubbing themselves and enjoying and basking in the sunlight. Then it all goes out... And then the spotlight comes on somewhere else and they rush over there. And it seems to me, life's a lot like that.”