Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Academic and author best known for 'The Uses of Literacy', arguing working-class culture deserves more than mass consumerism.
On the island
Eight records
It's a depression song, not a depressing song. My wife and I, we were courting at the university at the time in Leeds. We first heard it then. It's a lovely defiant, cocking a snoop, turning your thumb in your nose at the upper classes as they think themselves.
Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Roberto Patanostro
It was a bookless home. That's obvious. It was also a musicless home. ... somebody gave me a wind up grammar phone and I took it up to the attic and a few days later I bought for, I don't know, threepence or something. An old record. And it turned out to be the prelude to Traviata
Castleford Ladies' Magic Circle
This song by Jake Thackeray, who went to the same university as I did, is part it's not dressing up, it's dressing down because they strip off.
Cello Concerto in E minor, Op. 85
Jacqueline du Pré with the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Daniel Barenboim
It's uh Jacqueline Dupre playing that cello concerto, which is a f a famous recording, of course. ... what you see there is a human brain which has recorded all that she's not watching, she's not have she doesn't have a score. That brain is pushing this stuff out through her imagination and her heart and all that
I Don't Know Why I Love You But I Do
That phase of of our lives after Chatterley and when we were moving across Birmingham, it's the period at the turn into the sixties when our children were in their teens, they hadn't fled the nest, and one thing they did, of course, was to play records very loudly
Auden, WH Auden, has been one of my favourites ever since I was a young man. ... He's as obsessed as I am for that matter, come to me. He was when he wrote this poem about the fact that this century has been, I suppose, one of the worst centuries ever.
Fidelio: Prisoners' ChorusFavourite
Orchestra and Chorus of the Vienna State Opera conducted by Christoph von Dohnányi
And then I and then you bounce back and you think, Well, there is more to life than that. There's love and there's affection, there's loyalty and fidelity and neighbourliness and all that. And when I think of that, I think of Beethoven's Fidelio and that great. Marvelous tune when the the prisoners are let out from their underground prisons.
Larkin, Philip Larkin, in that lovely poem on a Rundle Tomb, and surprisingly enough, says something similar in poetry instead of in music. ... Against everything there is love, and uh whatever happens after that I don't know.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:31When you warned of those [mass entertainment] influences back in the fifties, the worst examples you could quote were The Gang Show, Tit Bits, and The Daily Mirror. Now there's a plethora of such stuff. Do you feel entirely defeated?
No, I don't feel defeated. I feel depressed, but I'm depressed by the the weight of the material that's coming on now. I mean, I wrote before television, and if you look at the worst of television, and I believe it's getting worse all the time, then uh it reinforces, I'm sorry to say, what I was saying all those years ago.
Presenter asks
6:21Did having a first-class brain make you very unhappy as a child? Did you sense the limitations of your upbringing?
When you're I suppose up to twelve or thirteen, you don't notice you're you're naturally happy, cheerful, you're you're in good health.'Cause you don't know anything else. ... I was the first boy ever to go to grammar school from that uh s slum school. Uh the boys laughed at me a bit, but they didn't dislike me. They threw my cap off every day, so I put it in my pocket.
Presenter asks
10:14Why is it almost always the women in working-class life who see and encourage academic potential?
The keepsakes
The book
Michel de Montaigne
He's a wonderful mixture of the dry and the serious and the comical. He's extremely compact and he's very weighty.
The luxury
bird feeder with a squirrel-proof cage
I'll go for one of those nice bird feeders which have a cage outside to keep squirrels out.
The women were much more important. ... they were in the middle of the household, they managed the money, and managing money in a working class household is a is an economic miracle almost. ... the wife, either with or without the husband's consent, said, Well, if he's clever, he must go on.
Presenter asks
16:09Why did you spot this consumerism coming [when writing The Uses of Literacy]?
Immediately after the war, a whole group of us went into adult education, university adult education, because that was expanding. And we all went in teaching our subject and we were immediately faced with an extraordinary discrepancy between the academic view of our subject ... and the lives of the people we were persuading in the evenings to come and listen to us
Presenter asks
20:40You were given a walk-on part in the Lady Chatterley trial. What do you mean when you say you were a sort of 'Ebar Gum' figure?
They were very clever, uh the solicitors for Alan Lane. They decided not to bring on all sorts of arty bohemian types ... and they were looking out for different types. And I think I was the provincial lecturer, a sort of plain man's DH Lawrence, or something of that sort.
Presenter asks
27:36I wonder, in the light of the deprivations of your childhood, what kind of father you've been?
I'm a bit soft, I should say, as a father. That's one consequence. as my wife will tell you. ... [My son] said, Look, come on, get forget the back streets of Leeds and just give me the money. Which I thought was at least a sign that he'd uh he'd not been overborne by that.
“And if to be an elitist means that you say some things are better than others, yes, I'm an elitist, but that's a good one, not a dirty one.”
“I think I would have had a hard time surviving without being unhappy if if I hadn't known that in the in that arm chair by the side of the fire there was there was this figure [my grandmother] who who exuded love”
“I am very, very thin skinned about slights like that, slights to do with snobbery, and I think therefore I was pleased to to be on various committees, to be asked to be on them.”
“if you put the most important cultural elements in a society into the hands of commercial people who want to make a profit, they will bring it down to the lowest common denominator. It's their nature, they can't help it.”