Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Broadcaster, journalist and author, best known as a radio critic and columnist for The Sunday Times.
On the island
Eight records
Clarinet Concerto in A major, K. 622: II. Adagio
I think it suggests... As well as anything that Mozart writes, his feeling towards life that it has infinite disadvantages, but somehow all the disadvantages are better than any possible alternative. It's what I call what he does He offers us a kind of grave optimism.
It's really a fantasy vision of Europe. When I was about 16 or 17, this is what I thought Europe would be like, smelling of all those Galwa cigarettes, that kind of thing. And the section I choose is Lust, and it's Lottie Lenya, who sings it.
The keepsakes
No book or luxury recorded for this episode.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:35What would be the worst thing for you about being on a desert island?
Well, I think it would be the loneliness. I think I should be panic stricken. I think it would be like being caught in a lift halfway down, that it jammed. It would be agoraphobic, I suppose, since all the world would be around me. But it would feel that way to me. I should be intensely frightened.
Presenter asks
0:43Is music important to you?
Well, it is, but people who claim that it is, you know, claim a special niceness when they say that. And I like playing over and over the sort of music I've always played over and over. And I don't know that that would be said to be important. I mean, it's like pepper and salt condiments, that kind of thing. I could do without it, but I'd be sorry to.
Presenter asks
3:49Are you a Londoner?
Well, I I am by adoption. I my native place is Liverpool, and I always feel that uh there's a kind of umbilicus between me and that place forever. But uh yes, I suppose I am a Londoner.
Presenter asks
What was your first ambition?
Well, I think I always thought I'd like to write something. I suppose I wanted to see my name over the top of something. I was just rather good at what we used to call composition at the elementary school. Yes.
Presenter asks
4:04What did you read [at Oxford]?
Well, I read English there. It seemed a pity to take the money I should have paid them, you know, as it were. But great pleasure.
“He offers us a kind of grave optimism.”
“Well, every paper I seem to have worked for seems to have sunk. It's as though I jumped aboard and they went under gurgle, gurgle, under the water.”