Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A popular science communicator and professor of public engagement in science, best known for presenting the BBC archaeology series Digging for Britain.
On the island
Eight records
I remember hearing this for the first time on a jukebox in a pub at the bottom of Park Street in Bristol with my friend Catherine. And I was blown away. It reached inside me and grabbed me by the heart and filled me with this incredible passion for music.
when I started to put together my discs for the Desert Island, my lovely friends, Wendy and Fiona, and we've been friends since university, and they said, well, you can't not have the Sisters of Mercy. Come on, Alice. It was all you ever wanted. Whenever we went out dancing, you'd be going up to the DJ going, please, can you play Temple of Love?
when you're playing the game, the music is the emotional backdrop to what you're choosing to do. And if you choose to do something adventurous, the music will start ramping up underneath you. It's just, I mean, it's so clever. But I also love playing video games.
Really difficult to choose one track, but this is definitely the one that would get us all rushing onto the dance floor.
it was such an amazing demonstration of how music could bring everybody together when we were in the throes of the pandemic.
I love System of a Down. I mean, they're very, very strange, I think, in a brilliant way. It can be quite aggressive at times, and then it can be absolutely beautiful. And Serge Tankian's voice is amazing, it's operatic, and the lyrics are just crazy, and I do like a crazy lyric.
Merry Christmas, Mr. LawrenceFavourite
this was one of the pieces that she was playing a couple of months ago and it's just absolutely beautiful. This is Phoebe playing Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence.
Johnny Flynn and Robert MacFarlane
When Digging for Britain rebooted … we ended up with this beautiful piece of music … It's Coins for the Eyes by Johnny Flynn and Robert MacFarlane.
In conversation
Presenter asks
3:05Why is the clavicle your favourite bone?
It is a beautiful bit of human anatomy, I think. And then it's got this incredible backstory because it ossifies, so it turns to bone in a really weird way. Most of the bones in our body ossify by forming little cartilage models first, which then turn into bone. … The clavicle does this weird thing where it just ossifies out of embryonic tissue. It doesn't have a cartilage model first. And this is a clue that the clavicle was once part of a skull, but you have to go back a very, very long time in evolutionary history before you find it back in the skull. And it's in your great to the power ex-grandmother probably about 500 million years ago who was a fish.
Presenter asks
7:05You have said that as a young girl you struggled with being a scientist at school. What did you mean by that?
I don't suppose I s I it wasn't so much science, but I was bookish, I wore glasses and I did get bullied to within an inch of my life at primary school, and it was physical bullying as well as kind of verbal.
Presenter asks
12:07So you became estranged in 2018. How did it happen? Why did it happen?
The previous Sunday, I'd done an interview with a newspaper about becoming president of Humanist UK, and my mother had responded to that interview without talking to me at all, first of all with a letter to the newspaper, and then following that up with quite a frank interview as well. It was awful. … I just realized that the relationship I'd been wanting to work, you know, I'd I wanted that relationship to work, I wanted affection, I wanted I wanted approval actually. And I think I realized at that point that I was never going to have that. And so I decided to make the break at that point. And I think it was the right thing for me, and it was probably the right thing for her as well.
The keepsakes
The book
George Eliot
It's a very humanistic novel. And I also love it because it is about ordinary people. And it is about the small choices that we make in our lives that are really important.
The luxury
I mean, it's just absolutely amazing to be kind of at that level on the top of the waves. I think people have been moving around in small boats for tens of thousands of years. And so I'm looking at the coast in a way that my ancestors would have been very familiar with as well. And it's just my happy place.
Presenter asks
14:07Your mother died last year while you were still estranged. How did you navigate that time?
It was difficult. I mean, I knew that she was dying, and I did say to other family members that if she asked for me, I would have gone to see her for her sake. But I so I didn't see her. She didn't ask for me. And I was very sad, obviously. … I think I'd already done a lot of grieving for that, the relationship that wasn't there. And the only way I can deal with those kind of moments and those kind of feelings, I think, is going off for a walk or going off for a kayak. I went for a very long kayak paddle on my own. It was interesting because the waves that day were a little bit rough and that's what I needed. I needed to be fighting against the ocean.
Presenter asks
18:13You said that you did your rounds on Rollerblades. How did that end up happening?
When I was on call, I was in the accommodation on site at the hospital, but it was still actually quite a long way from the hospital itself. And there were underground tunnels that ran from the accommodation into the hospital. And it struck me that the best way of getting down these underground tunnels quickly when your bleep goes off in the middle of the night was to stick rollerblades on and go rollerblading in. And then, once I'd kind of worked that out, I decided that I would keep my rollerblades on for ward rains. I don't think you'd be allowed to do it nowadays.
Presenter asks
24:54Where do you go to find meaning if you don't have a spiritual dimension in your life?
This is probably quite controversial. I think that some atheists, agnostics, humanists would say, Well, we're definitely not spiritual. I would say I am a spiritual person because I find myself moved by nature. I love being out in nature. I love contemplating the deep past in our landscape and thinking about all the generations that have been in these places that we now walk in before us. I think that art and music and nature are what move me. And I think there is what you might call a spiritual dimension to that.
“It is a beautiful bit of human anatomy, I think. And then it's got this incredible backstory because it ossifies, so it turns to bone in a really weird way. … The clavicle does this weird thing where it just ossifies out of embryonic tissue. It doesn't have a cartilage model first. And this is a clue that the clavicle was once part of a skull, but you have to go back a very, very long time in evolutionary history before you find it back in the skull. And it's in your great to the power ex-grandmother probably about 500 million years ago who was a fish.”
“I don't suppose I s I it wasn't so much science, but I was bookish, I wore glasses and I did get bullied to within an inch of my life at primary school, and it was physical bullying as well as kind of verbal.”
“I felt like my world was falling apart around me. And I remember waiting up until midnight to see the newspaper being published online. And it was yeah, it was incredibly difficult. … I just realized that the relationship I'd been wanting to work, you know, I'd I wanted that relationship to work, I wanted affection, I wanted I wanted approval actually. And I think I realized at that point that I was never going to have that.”
“I would say I am a spiritual person because I find myself moved by nature. I love being out in nature. I love contemplating the deep past in our landscape and thinking about all the generations that have been in these places that we now walk in before us. I think that art and music and nature are what move me. And I think there is what you might call a spiritual dimension to that.”
“When I had my daughter, Phoebe, there was a kind of intellectual thing which struck me in the moment, which was that I felt myself to be part of this chain of life going back and back and back and back and back, you know, mothers and mothers and mothers and mothers all the way back. But there was also something that I was quite worried about actually up until the point that she emerged, which was that I didn't know how I was going to love her. … And I fell in love. And I wasn't expecting that. … It was almost like somewhere inside me that this little cupboard had opened and there was this all this love.”