Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A television producer who created the long-running series Grange Hill and Brookside.
On the island
Eight records
Pinchas Zukerman, English Chamber Orchestra, Daniel Barenboim
I just like this piece of music because every time I hear it it's so evocative. I I lived in the last road in the city before the country started and at the end of our street the countryside proper started and the summer it was all cornfields and things and things like that and I used to tra we used to travel twelve miles through the country to the new town in Kirby to go to school. And so I've got great memories of long hot summers of going out of the city into the country and just messing around out there and this The Larkess Ending always kind of brings that back to me.
Growing up in the fifties and sixties I was a great sort of Liverpool football club supporter. I was a fanatical copite, you know, I was born and bred and raised under Bill Shankley. And in a sense, some of his management philosophies are running the club I've adopted when I set up Brookside and the whole thing about it's the team is bigger than the individual and the strength and depth of that you train your own people so you don't have to ever go out and buy expensive people or indeed have to worry about injury because you've always got somebody to step into.
Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125 (Ode to Joy)
It's simply because this was the first classical piece that I ever listened to that I actually enjoyed as a piece of music without somebody having to explain to me what it was all about and then say, Oh, I see what you mean, yes, you know, and sort of get into all that kind of nonsense.
Brookside ThemeFavourite
It means so much to me because it's changed my life so drastically and it's opened so many avenues and so many doors to me throughout my uh past twelve years. Every time I hear this piece of music it doesn't remind me of Brookside, it means you know what Brookside has actually meant to me.
I choose it because I was thinking on Desert Island I'd also like something not just take me back to my roots but take me back to other places that I'd been and seen in the world and this one would do it.
I remember years and years ago being stuck in one of these really hot London summers and the traffic was just gridlocked, nobody was going anywhere and everybody was getting frustrated and and then this track just came on the radio and it was Bob Seeger and Roll Me Away talking about a guy who's fed up with everything'cause he decides to go up and get on his just walk out, get on his Holly Davidson and ride across the American West and it just sounds like what a great idea at the time.
I got remarried five years ago and and this record was out at the time and it was it became almost like the theme of the of the wedding. It's just an another ev nice evocative memory.
Philharmonia Orchestra and Chorus, Riccardo Muti
I quite liked the idea of it being sort of based on sort of baudy songs that were written by monks in the mediev from the medieval age. That was kind of kind of appealed to me. And then even more appealed to me that when I found out in some quarters it was deemed not quite right, you know, as a classical piece, because it had more in common with rock music. I thought, well, that's for me.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:02What was the driving force behind your inventions, Phil? Was it the desire to put across a message, to entertain, or simply to make money?
I suppose the the the crass answer is to make money and behind that is the avenue out of the traditional working class background in the council estate, the the comprehensive school. And where do you go after that? And the traditional routes out were always entertainment or sport. Or through education. I was a social experiment really, a a guinea pig in the educational system in the late fifties, early sixties when comprehensive schools were first thought about.
Presenter asks
2:28What made you think that television was the answer to your dreams, was going to give you the way out?
Oh well, I think I was one again, I was one of the first children of the electronic age. I mean, growing up in the fifties and seeing uh the BBC come online properly, then seeing IT V come online and the early work of Loach Garners, uh Z cars, all those things, Monty Python, it all seemed to be so exciting, so you know, so vibrant
Presenter asks
7:37Why did you veto glue sniffing [as a storyline in Grange Hill]?
Well glue sniffing is the one subject where if you have the wrong type of metabolism and you smell the wrong solvents, one sniff can actually do ir irre irreparable brain damage and it can actually be fatal. And I just thought that with an audience of eight million watching, the the risks of somebody just deciding to smell one solvent just to see what it was like is just too great.
The keepsakes
The book
Charles Dickens
I think Dickens is in a sense is a is a lot closer to my cultural background and my cultural world
The luxury
I'd like to take a magnifying glass with me because I realize if I'm on a design this age my sight will probably start to go so I'd probably need my magnifying glass to read Dickens and whatever and also to you know look at the flora and everything all around me. But also you see with a magnifying glass I'd then be able to harness the sun's rays.
Presenter asks
17:33Why do you shoot Brookside on one camera like a film?
I wanted to try and capture the controlled atmosphere of the studio, but with the vibrancy of location. That was the idea of just building Brookside as a real set, so it would be real houses. The actors wouldn't have to worry about slamming doors or falling against the walls'cause they wouldn't fall over. But at the same time, it would be under our control. And we would shoot it like film so that we would not have this these sort of five dinosaur creatures cameras sort of moving around the studio.
Presenter asks
20:51You were much criticised for the Emmerdale plane crash storyline. Is it not a bit cheap, that direct link between crisis and viewing figures?
We took a situation that can happen anywhere in the world to any one of us, and that is that we can be walking down the street and a huge chunk of metal can fall out the sky, which happened to be attached to a plane or be part of a plane. ... Now, when I looked at what could actually happen to a small, sleepy village in the Yorkshire Dales ... the only thing that could actually really happen to that kind of village is something fall out the sky.
“I was a social experiment really, a a guinea pig in the educational system in the late fifties, early sixties when comprehensive schools were first thought about.”
“I decided to throw the hippie school of management out the window. Just go back to the classic Victorian, I say what gets done and we do it, you know”
“At the end of the day it's only television, and if we stop tomorrow nobody dies.”