Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
2 appearances
Journalist and author best known as a restaurant critic, who crossed deserts and drove 24,000 miles across South America despite being in a wheelchair.
On the island
Eight records
I've chosen the first record that I re can remember owning, which was uh Fred Astaire's Night and Day, and I remember playing that when I was six.
The second record comes really more from a period when I was interested in jazz. In when I was at Cambridge I used to play a lot of Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman, and I've chosen Louis Armstrong playing the St James' Infirmary Blues.
Your third record, and is perhaps based on that, is Chartrenet's Duce France.
Horn Concerto No. 4 in E-flat major, K. 495
Dennis Brain performing, who was the greatest, absolutely greatest horn player I've ever heard. And I became very attached to this. My first wife was very musical indeed, and this was one of the records she used to play a lot, and I've always been fond of it.
(There's) Always Something There to Remind Me
My fifth record is Sandy Shaw singing Always Something There to Remind Me, which is great.
Record number six is very appropriate for the desert. It was also a great favorite of mine, although quite an old one, is a singer called Nelly Lutcher. Singing cool water.
Record number seven is another French one. I've always been fond of French songs and I've chosen a rather unusual one which is uh Henri Salvador singing Malady d'Amour and he came from the West Indian Islands, the French West Indies, Martinique and Guadeloupe, and he sings a bit in Patua, but I think it's a very interesting song.
Violin Concerto No. 1 in G minor, Op. 26Favourite
I've latterly come to like classical music more than I want to listen to classical music more than I used to, and I love this piece, and I it's got a a marvellous, triumphant, optimistic ending, which is the bit that I think we should play.
My first record really is because I've had many associations with France. My father was British consul in the Riviera, he we lived in Nice. I've always been going back to France a lot, and then I lived in France for ten years. So Charles Rene's singing Douce France is to me very evocative.
Amici in vita e in morte (from La Forza del Destino)
Plácido Domingo & Giorgio Zancanaro
Don Alvaro and Don Carlos are swearing eternal friendship. And it doesn't actually work out like that, but that's what the ugly to my mind. Friends have been the most important thing in my life, and music largely. It reminds me of particular friends.
My Very Good Friend the Milkman
Well, the third record really does remind me of Sarah. I had anyhow at that time. a great enthusiasm for swing and jazz and and sort of Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw and all that. But Sarah was very fond of her fat swallows.
Wynton Marsalis & English Chamber Orchestra
I think I'm very keen on wind instruments, really. And this is the supreme example.
The reason I pick this is partly because of later travels in South America, but also it's somehow n nearer what I used to enjoy in those days. which was Caribbean music and calypso. But as we can't have too many records, I thought that this would have to do for both the Caribbean and South America.
Beim Schlafengehen (from Four Last Songs)
Jessye Norman & Gewandhausorchester Leipzig
While I was living in France, somehow music came into my life much more, and in particular because the Hamlet where I was living, very often there came the opera producer Richard Carson, and one day he brought me. A tape of Jesse Norman and the four last songs. And by curious chance. One day I was flying out of from Marseilles airport. And there I suddenly saw Jesse Norman getting out of a car laden with flowers. This majestic figure And I sort of fell for her because not only because I liked her singing, but because she was so nice. to everybody who was happier she was modest. and unassuming at the check in counter, and really such a delightful person, plainly.
The next record is really to do with the desert. Those desert trips the reason I loved them was you are reduced to really three things water, food to some extent, and the way. Finding the way And It's that austerity which I like. The fact that you are. reduced to that, and no other considerations really the matter. So this song by Nellie Lutcher, a blues singer. which is about the desert and Cool water, it's called. And it's about mirages and what you see and how you must not be deflected by a mirage.
Adagio from String Quintet in C major, D. 956Favourite
Melos Quartet & Mstislav Rostropovich
Now the last record is really a tribute to one of the young men who has looked after me. Who came? some years ago and he introduced me to a lot more music. He introduced me to Schubert's string quintet, but and and much, much more. He himself is a musician, mad cricketer, and he's just got married and it's lovely. So it is the adagio from Schubert's string quintet.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:46How much does music mean to you?
I often wonder about this, because I've just done a trip uh across the Sahara for a year and a half, and I was rather surprised how little I missed it. … But they uh I was rather surprised that I didn't miss it very much. And on the other hand, I think music is very important subconsciously to to everybody.
Presenter asks
2:36Did you want to become a lawyer?
No, I think I had that same sort of thing that people have. They can't be an actor, well then they'd like to be a barrister and stand up and do the Perry Mason thing. I think I was always full of ambitions of that sort.
Presenter asks
3:59When did journalism come into your life?
Nineteen fifty three, when I was, I suppose, twenty seven or twenty six, I add hastily trying to reduce it. I came back to England from reading to my old blind gentleman, and I just by chance met somebody who had been appointed the deputy editor of the Evening Standard in London, and he thought that he wanted to find some new blood, I suppose. Anyhow, he asked me whether I would go and work for them.
The keepsakes
The book
Michel de Montaigne
Because they shed light on such an extraordinary light... are things we all think about.
Presenter asks
Why did you call your book [about Japan] A Curse of Blossom?
Well, it was really the contrast of the prettiness of Japan, which is ravishingly beautiful, and so many of the customs are beautiful, the manners of the people are exquisite, and at the same time I felt that they were so bound down by their traditions that it almost became a curse upon them, that they couldn't break free.
Presenter asks
28:38Could you stand the loneliness [on a desert island]?
I think so. I I must say, I mean, I know this is a a thought that you often put. I'd much rather not. But uh in some ways I like being alone some of the time.
Presenter asks
0:29On the whole, it has to be said your attitude to disabled people seems to be fairly merciless. It's kind of put up and shut up, isn't it?
It's more that I feel that one can do everything. I mean, if the thing I'd like to give to everybody was confidence, uh, which of course is a hard thing to give. I mean, I think the people who complain About rights and all that stuff. You you know, you've just got to accept you can't do some things. I'm not going to walk along Hadrian's wall, nor do I want it to be d despoiled. for the disabled by putting a lasted tarmac road beside it.
Presenter asks
2:12At what age were you diagnosed as having muscular dystrophy, and what were you told then?
Oh, about six or seven. Well, my mother was told I'd be dead by the time I was sixteen. and I was told I'd be all right by the time I was sixteen. Perhaps he had a thought of I'd be in heaven. I don't know. And anyhow, so I rather fatuously, although it was perfectly plain, Went on hoping that somehow round about sixteen that everything would come right, but it didn't.
Presenter asks
4:47Tell me about Eton, 'cause you've written that it was absurd and unnatural. In what ways was it absurd and unnatural?
Well, in the way that I mean the rules were so preposterous that you couldn't walk about, you had to carry your umbrella not rolled up, but flapping like a rook at your side. And uh you had wear your collar turned up, you weren't allowed to turn your co overcoat collar down, you had to walk on one side of the street, not the other, even if you were going to go from one shop to another, that were Thirty yards apart it went across the road and then crossed back again. So many idiotic rules. And then on top of that, you had the boys disciplining one another, beating one another, and that seemed to me unreasonable.
Presenter asks
6:34Your father wasn't always very kind to you, was he?
Remember they were so much older than I mean my father was forty-six when I was born, and my mother forty-five. So I mean the gulf was huge. And he had ideas that you should be. afraid of your parents, and so he used to set out to make us afraid of him. I mean he had very eccentric ways about Teaching one things, I mean he. He thought fencing would be a good thing for me to do when I was at school, and so he was a champion fencer originally. And so we used to fence on the terrace at home. Every joust... he would, by some trick, flick my sword out of my hand, and half way down the garden I had to run down and fetch it. But he'd do this again and again.
Presenter asks
28:53How much did your disability have to do with the fact that those three marriages ended?
I think a lot, actually. It's very Demanding living with somebody who's disabled. I think it's a burden for them that. Some people manage it better than others. ... Each of them had different qualities. All of them were admirable, and they taught me many things. But uh It is a burden, I mean I always feel sorry for the wives of people who are disabled.
“I think music is very important subconsciously to to everybody.”
“I think I was always full of ambitions of that sort.”
“I think that'd be the one thing about being on a desert island would be to change the … atmosphere by making something new all the time.”
“Nothing, he says, debars a disabled person from the really important things in life: love, happiness, and achievement.”
“I think if you start... fussing about themselves. I don't fuss about myself, I don't want to fuss about myself. And so I just like to get on with things.”
“Happiness versus unhappiness, hope versus fear. For me, those are questions of choice.”