Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A man who hated office work and studied to pursue a writing dream.
On the island
Eight records
No disc selection or music is explicitly given in the transcript. This field is listed only because the transcript mentions 'The Critic and the Heart' as a play, not a piece of music. Per instructions, only supported discs are included; no actual music is recorded here.
The keepsakes
No book or luxury recorded for this episode.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:00What was your ambition as a boy?
All I can really remember is this, that I desperately did not want to grow up because I felt that I was incapable of looking after myself, let alone anybody else. Uh my dream was to be a writer, but that seemed rather like wanting to be, oh, an Arctic explorer or to have wings. It didn't seem anything that could happen.
Presenter asks
0:48What did you do when you left school?
Uh I made a complete mess of my uh school certificate examination. I had two goes at it and did worse the second time. And my father, who was really scraping the bottom of the barrel to keep me at school, said, Well, that's it, you made your bed, you must lie on it, and I got a job as a, uh, ooh, uh, officially a junior clerk, but actually an errand boy and stoker of boilers at a large insurance office in Manchester.
Presenter asks
1:16What got you out of there [the insurance office]?
I remember this very clearly. I was walking home through Saint Peter's Square in Manchester one night, and I met the uh sixth form master who had taught my brother who was an exceedingly successful schoolboy, and was at that time at Cambridge. And this chap met me and said, How do you like working in the office? And I said, I hate it. I would rather sweep streets and he said, Good. Sounds as though your pat's beginning to grow up. and in the kindness of his heart he went to the university, and found that if I got a certain examination in two months' time I could just be wangled in. and I studied at home. and I covered a year's syllabus in two months. which doesn't show how right I was, but it shows something that all teachers ought to know. But if a child wants to learn, it will learn easily. If it doesn't want to learn, you can forget it. Yes. I wanted to learn for the ignoble reason that I wanted to escape from the office, that's all.
Presenter asks
2:12Your time at the university was interrupted [by war service]. What did you do?
Uh I first went into the Royal Air Force to train as a pilot. Uh I passed the preliminary stages, but flanked the advanced part of the course. I was then in South Africa. When I came back to this country, and spent what seems in retrospect between about twenty years uh cleaning lavatories and various bleak aerodromes in the north of England. And then uh I transferred to the army because in a half baked sort of way I felt I ought to be doing something a little more active. But there too I uh I was shunted off to the Gold Coast and and I was commissioned in the West African Frontier Force, which sounds a lot more glamorous than it was.
Presenter asks
6:18Did you consider yourself part of this iconoclastic movement [the angry young men]?
No, but then I don't know any playwright who did. It was um uh a journalistic category for the convenience of the journalists rather than for the convenience of the playwrights themselves. There's a great deal more in John Osborne than anger. I had uh i i in that first play, the uh Critic and the Heart, I had an angry young man who I suppose slightly predated Osborne's Jimmy Porter, but he wasn't so good. Um No, I I never felt of myself as an angry young man. Of course there was a great deal to be angry about, but on the whole I think we were anxious young men rather than angry.
Presenter asks
7:18Were you confident about this play [Flowering Cherry]?
Yes, I was, from the moment that Sir Ralph and Celia said that they would do it. Um I thought that uh it was open and shut then, it was bound to be a success. I was very ignorant of the hazards of the West End and I uh as an act of faith I handed in my resignation as a teacher just before we opened, to the alarm of mister Beaumont, the management, who was very much more aware than I was of the chances.
“All I can really remember is this, that I desperately did not want to grow up because I felt that I was incapable of looking after myself, let alone anybody else.”
“I wanted to learn for the ignoble reason that I wanted to escape from the office, that's all.”
“within writing four lines of dialogue and they were simply the three wise men meeting in the desert and greeting one another. I knew with absolute certainty that this was what I wanted to do, write plays.”
“It is not my job to uplift or improve anybody, it is my job to entertain them. If I do any more than that Well, that's splendid. If they feel that they have had their money's worth of entertainment, that it has been worth the effort of a tired man and woman, after a hard day's work, to drag themselves from the suburbs into the West End, pay the price of a ticket, sit there, and they feel that it has been worth it in entertainment, then I consider that I have done my job.”