Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
An explorer who travels to remote, dangerous places like the Congo, Borneo, and the Amazon, and writes humorous books about his adventures.
On the island
Eight records
Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Sir Georg Solti
I used to play over and over again, writing this thesis at night.
My grandmother gave them to me when I was six, but it was years before we actually could afford to get a machine to play it on, so I've handled it a lot but not played it much.
Address to the Nation, 18 June 1940
Ah, well this this is to a little tribute to my pa and his job in the war. I think probably the most exciting time for him. He was the chaplain at Biggin Hill.
The Music of the Baka Forest People of Southeast Cameroon
Oh, this is very special. This takes me to the heart of the Congo. People that I really fell in love with.
Women Abandon Us (La donna è mobile)
Arthur Davies, English National Opera Orchestra, conducted by Mark Elder
And this I would want to take to the island to remind me of um James. And this is a song from the first libretto he did, the great success of Verdi's Rigoletto.
Andean Flute Music
pipe music from the Andes, just something something to remind me of. In fact, the middle of South America
This very early Rolling Stones that Blyn and my wife liked and uh it would remind me of uh her early life too, life on the farm.
Clarinet Quintet in A major, K. 581 (Second Movement)Favourite
Puffin O'Hanlon and John Melvin
Ah, well. This this is Mozart quintet, a piece that my daughter Puffin, who's eleven, has just begun to play on her clarinet. And this is the record that I take with me, I'm afraid. I'd listen to this uh sitting under a palm tree and I'd I'd howl
In conversation
Presenter asks
16:29Why do you feel so passionately against God?
Um again, I'm afraid it it probably just goes straight back to childhood. My part really did does believe that God put the eye spots on a butterfly's wing for our delight. But after Africa, I'm quite prepared to admit that it's in some ways a decadent view of things from Oxford to assume that people without access to the extraordinary expensive educational system could possibly get through their lives without some narrative structure.
Presenter asks
18:11Are you sure you don't [believe in the fetish]? I mean, you take it everywhere with you.
Yes, again, it's on. on marshy ground here. It's actually it was just unfortunate that when I lost it in Rotterdam in a restaurant, my wife was with me. Uh and I said the fetish has gone and broke out in a sweat. So there was no way of pretending that it wasn't a serious matter.
Presenter asks
20:17What was so bad about [your book] that it got you sent down [from Merton]?
Uh well there was just a little report in Charles in the student newspaper, saying Merton popporn and uh it had been passed around in TypeScript.
The keepsakes
The book
Leo Tolstoy
I'd take the greatest novel ever written, I'd just go for War and Peace, and those descriptions of battle would put any problem into perspective.
The luxury
a pair of trinovid binoculars insulated the eight pi twenties if you can manage it. Sort of things that you ring up and they say price on application.
Presenter asks
24:03Hasn't the whole business got a rather more serious intent than this kind of good mates up the Congo getting into a spot of bother?
Oh yes. The aim is to write a perfectly structured travel book that's as good, say, as Goegles Dead Souls, I mean the nearest thing you could call a novel, which is also part travel book, and to produce an intimate portrait of a country with as long a reach as you can.
Presenter asks
29:43How does [your wife] cope when there's no word from you for weeks?
She's, as I said, farmer's daughter, tough, used to it all. Anyway, she has a big business to run, or her own business. So that I mean, her life is full, I like to think.
“Depression's always waiting for one out there, I think. But not in the jungle. Jungle. No, never, no.”
“It's that growing up in a vicarage, you really... that kind of Protestantism anyway, uh and I can't get rid of this feeling that it can't really be real unless you're suffering.”
“when you have come very close to that kind of despair and thought of killing yourself and had a shotgun in your mouth. Afterwards. There really is that's, it seems to me, the only, as it were, eternal life, your second go at life, afterwards, and all kinds of things you'll find you're released from. If you can get through that bit.”