Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Naturalist and author of 'Food for Free' and 'Flora Britannica', known for his passionate, scientific approach to nature and foraging.
On the island
Eight records
Iona Brown, Academy of St Martin in the Fields, Sir Neville Marriner
I've always felt was one of the most perfectly English pieces of music and certainly is a lyrical invocation of a bird unlike any other I know in music.
Choir of New College, Oxford, Edward Higginbottom
When I was at school, I was constantly chastised by my teachers for spending too much time involved in music. And one of the most exciting things I had at school was to be in a madrigal choir...
Being a great fan of music rather than necessarily a performer was not entirely true when I was at school when I did play the guitar a lot. Indeed, I was the the second guitarist in the school skiffle group...
sums up for me the the feeling of being in southern Europe in the spring.
Cleveland Orchestra, Pierre Boulez
I once had a girlfriend who was a dancer at Covent Garden and she played one of the significant figures in The Rite of Spring one evening and it was the evening I suddenly understood what dance was about...
This is um a piece that reminds me of uh an another bit of my life when I was living in London and uh working in publishing, and rather wishing that I could play the guitar like Stephen Sills.
He's been a very important voice in my life, both because I've pretty much most of the time liked his music, but also in his early years I found great political inspiration from his records.
The last record is a piece of Bulgarian gypsy music in the improbable time signature of 916 and it's played by Planksty, an Irish band... I like the idea of an Eastern European gypsy piece being played by an Irish band because that's my family background.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:17We take the attitude that man is supreme and should manage our relationship with nature. That's not how you see it, is it?
No, sir, it's not. I think that we've taken this particularly arrogant position for rather too long. The position that's personified, if you like, in the word of steward, the assumption that we are not just in charge, but that we know best about how the natural world should regulate itself.
Presenter asks
10:31Were you aware as a young boy that your affinity with nature was more highly developed than some?
Oh, yes, I did. I wouldn't like to say it was more developed than anyone else's, but certainly I was acutely aware that it was something that was very important to me. I was romantic.
Presenter asks
14:27Why is the Nightingale so romantic? Why has it inspired so much poetry and metaphor?
I think that there are two or three characters of the nightingale song that make it very special, one of which of course is the fact that it sings at night and that you very rarely ever see it singing. So it becomes a disembodied voice. But the quality of the song itself is closer to a human voice than perhaps any other songbird. And it does have this quality of phrasing, which is so like oratory.
The keepsakes
The book
Kenneth Grahame
I'll take the wind of the willows and be thoroughly sentimental the whole time.
The luxury
I would really like to do what I should have done, which is to continue my my guitar and become as uh not as good as Steve Stills, but at least a bit more proficient.
Presenter asks
15:26How did [the nightingale] offer comfort and consolation [during your personal crises]?
Somehow the Nightingale has come to stand for... certain things to do with... England and the spring for me. And I found it in... moments when I was distressed to be a reminder of places that I felt very at home at in England... So for me it became a voice which spoke of places where I felt safe and secure, and also that the world was still spinning...
Presenter asks
18:34Why do you still live in the house where you were brought up?
I find that I am very committed to the idea of roots. I like knowing the place that I live in and knowing it... through a long period of time. I've still also got a lot of friends in in the area which are important to me, but... I think it is the the sense of of... having a a habitation in a place for a long period of time that's important to me.
Presenter asks
30:22Why aren't you an ecological pessimist full of foreboding and doom and gloom?
I think it's partly because I've always been touched by the natural world's capacity for renewal and regeneration, which seems to me incredibly magnanimous given what we do to it... And that sense that nature will always come back if we give it just the slightest chance has buoyed me up ever since.
“I don't myself have a great sense of the spiritual in nature, but I am profoundly touched by what I once called transcendental materialism, which is the sense that even in the fleshiness, if you like, the thingness of nature, there is a tremendous power of renewal, of celebration of those rhythms that we see in nature, that we too are susceptible to.”
“The great tradition that gave us W. H. Hudson and Richard Jefferies and Gilbert White has virtually vanished now. And all our literature about the countryside is very much couched in scientific terms.”
“There is a particular moment when the bluebells are coming out in one corner of the wood at the same time as the beech leaves are coming out over it. And the light, when it comes in from the west in that particular corner of the wood, is almost submarine... and to walk in that bit of the wood is like wading very slowly underwater.”