Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A broadcaster who was the voice of cricket on television for over thirty years, also covering 27 Wimbledons, 6 Olympics, and presenting Come Dancing.
On the island
Eight records
I suppose really that one ought not to have on a desert island a a theme which I think is of uh haunting solitude, but I love the music.
I think that Edith Pieffe was unique as an entertainer. Never been anybody quite like Edith Pieff.
My wife and I had a lovely evening. I can't remember how many years ago it was, Michael. We went to see the film A Man and a Woman and I can remember we held hands and we said afterwards, how lovely to go to see a film that is just a simple love story.
Chorus and Orchestra of La Scala Milan, conducted by Claudio Abbado
My son Simon, who's a solicitor our son I should say, took us to see Verdi's Requiem a while back, and I thought that uh the D A's Era from that was a marvellously uplifting piece of music, and uh that perhaps would be good for my soul when I'm uh observing the breakers and thinking of home.
I'd like to evoke wartime memories, Michael, if I may. This uh almost more than any other record reminds me of the war years, deep purple.
The uh American comedian Shelley Berman I don't know what's happened to him. I thought he was marvellous in his prime. Um he had these one ended telephone conversations, didn't he?
Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor, Op. 18
Moura Lympany with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Sir Malcolm Sargent
Can please have a little Rachmaninoff at the closing bars of Rachmaninoff's second piano concerto?
Adagio of Spartacus and PhrygiaFavourite
London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Stanley Black
The last one I think would be one that was used for theme music for the A Needed Line.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:29Have you ever pondered in your busy life, travelling around the world, that in fact the Desert Island would be the ideal place for you to settle in?
No, it wouldn't be the ideal place, Michael. I don't think I'm a particularly lonely sort of person. I think I could be reasonably practical if I had to be. I'm the worst do-it-yourselfer. I can do menial jobs like gardening and mowing the grass and that sort of thing. But if you're stuck on a desert island, it'd be damn silly, wouldn't it, just to moan and sit on your backside and do nothing about it. So I like to think I could have a shot.
Presenter asks
2:49In [your autobiography], you actually enjoyed going to school, didn't you?
Yes, I I did. I look back with considerable affection and pleasure on my years at Cranbrook in Kent. It was a small public school. The staff was full of characters, I think, in those days.
Presenter asks
8:11What effect did your illness [spondylitis] have on your army career?
Well, I was invalided out after a quite unheroic three or four years, around about the end of 1944.
The keepsakes
The book
I just wonder whether I was left with any crosswords to finish when I got marooned on this desert shore. I'd like to take the Oxford Book of Quotations, because if it couldn't answer the crossword clues for me, at least I think it would improve my mind in many ways.
The luxury
Well, I'm a nutcase on gardening as well. Am I allowed to take a set of gardening tools?
Presenter asks
10:28What was your big break in journalism?
I was very lucky indeed. I was told I went round Fleet Street and was told, of course, to go off and learn the trade in a local paper, but I persisted and eventually got taken on by the Exchange Telegraph Agency. And it was while I was working for them as a young reporter with an L plate on my back that I was sitting at Taunton next to who else but the one and only CB Fry.
Presenter asks
19:19Do you remember any people particularly from that period [in Somerset cricket]?
Well, in the post war years, of course, Harold Gimlet. I wouldn't say that Harold Gimlet was uh a character, as I think you you uh meant it a moment or two ago. He was a magnificent batsman, a a very i indrawn, uh, introverted character, and had, of course, a very sad ending. To his life, but my God, couldn't he play?
“I have to admit that I'm not a particularly musical person, Michael. It hasn't really played a governing part in my life.”
“I think you learn very early in life if you're on television that the old uh truth of the old saying, you're not going to please all of the people all of the time. I I I've always treasured the one from a viewer somewhere in the north who said, Why don't you take up advertising birds' eye peas? They're full of wind as well.”
“I don't think I ever will lose my enthusiasm. Cricket has to be very, very boring to turn me off, um, Michael, and I think with you too. I d I mean, I don't mind slow cricket if it is absorbing. I think sometimes the greatest cricket in the world is slow, isn't it? When you've got uh a great struggle going on in the middle, that's what makes Test cricket so riveting.”