Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Novelist and member of the literary Longford family.
On the island
Eight records
Benedictine Nuns of St. Cecilia's Abbey, Ryde
Well, the first one casts me quite a long way back, I'm sorry to say now, which is to my childhood. I went to a string of convent day schools in London.
Ruhe sanft, mein holdes Leben (from Zaide)
Yes, yes. Uh a few years after that I discovered uh Mozart. Well, it's an incomplete opera, but it it it's the opera that uh Mozart started before he wrote Seraglio, and is rather reminiscent of it, uh, called Zaida. And there's one particular aria which I think is as beautiful as anything he wrote.
Yes, yes. I I suppose after what I've said, it seems odd that I find him so wonderfully evocative, but I do.
Symphony No. 2 in E minor, Op. 27: III. Adagio
London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by André Previn
Well, the fourth one is linked to this period of meeting and coming back to England and marrying my husband, because he was then directing a feature film called Interlude ... And for me this record, which is Rachmaninoff's second symphony, says to me this is love, this is what love is.
Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra in E-flat major, K. 365Favourite
Oh, it's well this is a sort of tribute to Radio Three, the music programmes in the morning, because I've always worked in the morning because that fits in with school times and with children.
Prince Gremin's Aria (from Eugene Onegin)
Oh well, this is actually linked in a way to the latest novel. Because I've always admired more than anything else the Russian novels.
Siegfried's Funeral March (from Götterdämmerung)
Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Georg Solti
And so I felt I would want something on my island, something Wagnerian. Of course it's very difficult to choose a little piece, so in the end I felt Um just in case things didn't turn out too well there, I would have Siegfried's funeral march.
Rosamunde, D. 797: Entr'acte No. 3 in B-flat major
Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, conducted by Bernard Haitink
My last one is most glorious bit of music. To me it says everything about people, about human nature. All I'm most interested in, the perfect surface, and yet with this terrible feeling of pathos underneath.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:23How difficult did you find it to choose just eight discs?
Incredibly difficult uh very difficult. I mean, in the end I used two criteria. One were things that would remind me of my past, and the other was just things I love and and couldn't live without the sound of wonderful music.
Presenter asks
10:22What took you into the field of television?
I think I always had been interested in the performing arts i in one way or another. And of course television then in the early sixties was quite an exciting, relatively new area, particularly commercial television. And I was also interested, though in a fairly subliminal way, in writing. I hadn't thought I was going to be a writer in any capital letters, and I went into the research area of television, which is rather like being a journalist in a way.
Presenter asks
11:57What field [of documentaries] did you work on [in the United States]?
I worked mostly for about six months on a programme about drug addiction. And that was rather interesting at that sort of period in the middle sixties because it was the time when the marijuana and the whole pot smoking and the flower people and the Californian life style and the dropouts, all this was kind of there on one side. ... But in fact, the documentary I was working on was about a terrible, tragic, kind of pathetic heroin addict on the New York streets whose only future was death
The keepsakes
The book
Leo Tolstoy
I would be able to, gradually, as the years passed, make out what was being said in this novel, and so not only would I have this wonderful story book to read, but I'd also learn Russian in the process.
The luxury
I write on these special pads... they are shaped in a particular form and they have a particular kind of whiteness and a particular length and breadth and they're eighty pages in each pad and the holes are properly spaced. And without them I couldn't write a word at all... You couldn't slip in a pen. I feel I wouldn't be too good at making charcoal.
Presenter asks
17:26Did you deliberately get out of television because you didn't want to be trespassing on [your husband's] patch?
No, I don't know. Well, it was that. Yes, it was very much that. It it's a bit awkward when someone has I mean, at that time he'd won a lot of awards, he was well known in that kind of area, and it was It was difficult both not to go to the people he knew who were in a position to give jobs and and yet to do it. So I didn't want to do that. And he said, Well, what else can you do? And I said, Well, I've always thought I could write, and being a sensible Northerner, he took this seriously immediately, and said, Well, then write.
Presenter asks
26:33Do you write purely to entertain, or is there a didactic feeling anywhere?
I certainly think that there is no point in writing something if you can't communicate. I don't think I write purely to entertain. I don't think they're didactic. I think what I'm trying to do is make people feel. I'm trying to get cross emotion to people, to make them feel the emotion of other people. And I think this is what writing novels is about, to try and bring out from your reader particular kind of emotions that maybe they haven't felt and that this sends them back to the world having grown a bit wiser.
“I much as I admire politicians female politicians, I do think their children have to compromise quite a lot.”
“I think novels are very serious business, even those that appear to be and should be entertaining as well.”
“I've always admired more than anything else the Russian novels. ... the Russians will say it straight out and I admire that tremendously.”
“I'm a great optimist, you see. I wouldn't swim out in the belief I was going to drop to the bottom in the end. I would actually swim out in the belief that a boat would hove on over the horizon and pick me up.”