Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Sociologist, education adviser and champion of comprehensive education, later Reith lecturer on family breakdown.
On the island
Eight records
My Old Man (Said Follow the Van)
I remember very well my mother singing it in exactly the same voice as Marie Lloyd, because she was a cockney.
This is my father, really. It's the nightmare. ... It gives you exactly ... the atmosphere of the house in which we lived.
The Choir of St Paul's Cathedral
I learnt it early as a code for the whole of life to be a pilgrim. And it really is to do with the Protestant work ethic, the stint.
Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five
Louis Armstrong was very characteristic of those days, and ... this is the Savoy Blues, and demonstrates his fantastic capacity as a trumpeter.
Margaret, my wife, and I used to go often to Covent Garden and Saddler's Wells. In order to remind ourselves of that, I want to hear Kirsten Flagstadt singing.
One of the things that informed my life as a young person was sport. ... And I was very, very struck, therefore, by the film Chariots of Fire, and I want to listen again to the background theme song of that film.
Well, it's really returning to undergraduate visits to the opera. And I remember Joan Hammond singing in Madam Butterfly with enormous, enormous pleasure.
BenedictusFavourite
Arleen Auger, Cecilia Bartoli, Vinson Cole and René Pape
Well, let's let's listen to a bit of Mozart, shall we? I mean, that's the Benedictus, isn't there, from the Requiem. And that might be a very good thing to take.
In conversation
Presenter asks
6:52How were you given the news [of passing the scholarship to Kettering Grammar] and what reaction did you have?
It was a very difficult time for me. Going to this remote school ... was really a kind of desertion. Which my mother didn't understand at all. Her first insistence was that you had to be a good member of the family, that the family would be the unit of survival.
Presenter asks
11:10Why would you then later on, when you're an education adviser to the Labour Government, seek to dismantle [grammar] schools?
But I didn't. I wanted everybody to have the same experience. I wanted a combination of the grammar school and the technical school for everybody and not the elementary schools. ... I think that the main reason was that I romanticised the cleverness of other children. And I did that, I suppose for understandable reasons, by the experience of my own family, and didn't appreciate and really understand what those kitchen seminars were really like, how it taught me how to conduct an Oxford University seminar.
Presenter asks
19:14Can you explain to me the ways in which you think our attitudes have become wrong-headed as far as the family is concerned?
The keepsakes
The book
Thomas More
It's a Renaissance reform of London in which a modern welfare society is created, admittedly a non-Christian one, even though he was a great Catholic... And I would love to have a program in which we reverse the roles in which I had read Thomas More, and I would say to you, Now what do you think is good and bad about that?
The luxury
it would be a terrible deprivation to me that would be the worst deprivation to be robbed of radio form. I do listen to that with great appreciation over and over again.
It seemed to me that individualism has gone mad. I was brought up under conditions where there was a enormous acceptance of duty. If I compare my mother's life with those of my children and grandchildren ... I have a deep sense that they're much more discontented than she ever was. And that was partly because she just took it for granted that that was her fate.
Presenter asks
23:47What can we do to save ourselves [from the demise of the family]?
Let's take one. It's not so well known that the aging of the population leads not only to dependency ratios and all those sorts of things, but also to an enormous advantage. And that is that there are more people over sixty five in good health than there are people under fifteen. Now take that and use it. They could be used to buttress up the education system by starting all kinds of clubs and societies to do those parts of the curriculum that how now have to be left alone. ... Parenthood, but also I'm talking about art and sport and civic education, how to be a good committee person and so on and so forth.
Presenter asks
27:26When was society at its best then, in your view, if you could put the clock back?
It's always a good idea to of course put the clock forward, but if you're talking about the past, my view as an English person would be that it was in the period of Attlee's government immediately after the Second War ... because there, on a much poorer basis, at about a third of the income that we have now, they set out on a tremendous ambition to have health, housing, education and welfare put before everybody in the land. ... There is something about the spirit of solidarity, of togetherness, of looking after each other, which has been definitely lost in the period between Attlee and now.
Presenter asks
30:47Is your [religious] faith undiminished despite your scientific discipline?
In one important respect it is not diminished in the slightest. But of course the gradual revelation of Darwinian and genetic forces makes one really rather disbelieving about the historicity of of one's religion, so I don't care too much about that. ... What really drives me at any rate is the sense that we have a purpose. All of us have a purpose, you have a purpose, I have a purpose in life, which can't be explained in those terms. You just know that it is so. That is a faith that will never die as far as I'm concerned.
“They were in effect saying every day you must despise your parents if you want to get on and you want to join the educated community. And I wouldn't do that. So I learned to be bilingual. I would speak in the received way by the school, and back into the dialect when I got home.”
“I wanted to pursue some sort of academic life that would enable me to live out the same political ambitions, but without the elbows.”
“We, as it were, made justice between women and men, but at the cost of failures of every kind on the part of the children.”
“A self-respecting cat doesn't tie a tin can to its own tail, so I wouldn't want any of those things.”