Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Shadow Chancellor and Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, who would rather have played football or cricket for Yorkshire.
On the island
Eight records
Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis
Sinfonia of London, conducted by Sir John Barbirolli
It's a memory of all sorts of things rolled into one, a sort of kaleidoscope. It's actually played by John Bob Raleigh, who was a very energetic conductor of the Halley in the days when I used to watch it. But it's a piece of music which is about England in general. It's a fantasia on a theme by Thomas Tallis by Vaughan Williams. And it seems to me to encapsulate all the things that I think about England, particularly one bit of England, Elizabethan England, which fascinates me.
It represents a side of my character which I perhaps would only confess to on a desert island, namely an enjoyment for certain sort of cheap, sentimental, romantic music. But this is a very high quality cheap sentimental romantic music. Smashing lyrics, lovely tune, nice ladies singing it, and really rather more to it than some of the snobs I bump into from time to time realise there is to this sort of song.
Frederick Harvey with the Philharmonia Orchestra, conducted by George Weldon
It's a combination of an absolutely stupendous tune with a piece of poetry.
It's another one of the silly songs, I think, and this, unlike Sun Time, is genuinely silly. But it's a mock of hope. I'm into my fifties, which I don't enjoy. Half the things I write are complaints about not being twenty five. And it seems to me that if we can have an eighty year old lady singing Blame It on My Youth, there may be some life left for those of us who are into fifty.
It's another American show song. It's from Rogerson Hart, and I think Hart is the greatest of all the popular lyricists. It's a marvellous combination of rhymes and sentences.
Absolutely bogus title. Nothing to do with South Sea at alls. Nothing to do with the Pacific. It's English music. It's about the West Country. It sounds like England. And this is Janet Baker sounding exactly like England now.
In Praise of Limestone (Excerpt)
This is to remind me of limestone country in Yorkshire, not the bit of industrial Yorkshire where I was brought up, but the um north west of Yorkshire, Ingleton, Wernside, Pennygent, Malum Tarn, Malum Tarn, a lake on top of a mountain, which seems to me to be like heaven. And uh Auden here is describing limestone country as exactly that.
JerusalemFavourite
Recorded at the last night of the 1982 Proms, conducted by James Loughran
It adds up to me for all the family associations of my mother and father and of the Labour Party. It is also the most uplifting piece of music it's possible to listen to. If you hear the thing, you've got to be uplifted at the end. You can't avoid it.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:55Was there much music in your youth?
Not until I went to grammar school, I think, there was a lot of broadcast music with a sick grandmother at home and me having some sickly years when I was a small boy. There was a lot of listening to the radio. There was that sort of music, but I wasn't sent to violin lessons. That wasn't the sort of thing that happened to the likes of me in Sheffield. But by the time I got to the City Grammar, there was a great encouragement to take music seriously.
Presenter asks
3:19You once described yourself as belonging to the emergent working classes with respectability above their station. What exactly do you mean by that?
Well, I was brought up in a Labour household, but despite our strong Labour beliefs, there was a absolute conviction that I had a duty to get on. Now, get on didn't mean earning a great deal of money, fortunately, otherwise I would have been a great disappointment to my family. But it meant doing a number of, I suppose, worthy things, getting an education, getting a job which had some security and stability.
Presenter asks
5:23Could it have been shame for them [that they did not tell you your father had been a priest]?
I think it was one very specific thing. When I found out, I didn't talk to my mother about it for some months, because I thought if she wanted to keep the secret, why not? And one Christmas Eve, she and I had lunch together, just the two of us, rather boozy lunch, I fear. And at the end, I talked to her about it, and we had a very frank conversation. And she said, you know, in those days, leaving the church, as my father did very quickly, to marry a lady with very pronounced left-wing opinions, very active in the Labour Party and on the left fringe of the Labour Party, was a great scandal. And she said, not a word ever appeared in a newspaper. And they were enormously proud of that, and I understand why in 1930, and I think because of that they just blocked it out of their minds.
The keepsakes
The book
A. C. Bradley
I want to take A.C. Bradley's Shakespearean Tragedy because it seemed to me the best way of spending my time ... to be able to go through those tragedies with Bradley, writing in the margins.
The luxury
A boy writer's set (lined paper, pens, and correction fluid in a canvas bag)
my boy writer's set is a lot of lined paper, a lot of pens and a lot of that white material with which you paint out words. And I hoped I could have all those combined in a little canvas bag and an indefinite supply of all three and I could write and write and write.
Presenter asks
11:47Where did the politics come into? When was the political ideal shaped?
Well, they were never really out because right at the end of the war, the 45 election, my parents and the one uncle who had just briefly come back from the Middle East at the end of the war, were involved in the 45 campaign. And they'd always been Labour. ... I found politics exciting. And I also found it a tribal thing. As I say, I didn't begin to develop an ideology of socialism until I was 18 and I worked university. A theory of socialism came to me in my late adolescence and early manhood. But in my 11th, 12th, 13th, 14th year, I knew I was Labour.
Presenter asks
18:25In the twenty odd years that you've been in the House, you've held a high post in most departments. Which has been the most satisfying for you?
I think the three and a half years in the cabinet, being in the cabinet is different from any other job. ... That is the important thing in politics. That's where the decisions are collectively taken. That's where the real business is done. And even though I was in the cabinet during difficult years, 76 to 79, I enjoyed those three difficult years enormously. I think there have been three periods that I've been particularly happy. One was my last two years in Sheffield when I was chairman of the housing committee. ... Then the three years in the cabinet. And now being shadow chancellor and deputy leader. I'm enjoying what I'm doing this minute.
Presenter asks
22:16Who have been the people that you've worked with, that you've observed, who've represented the reason why you came into politics. In other words, the giants?
Well, I've been deputy to nearly all the big figures in the Labour Party over the last ten years, Callahan, Crossland, Healy, Castle. I think the man who I admired most and certainly liked most, I mean in a sense loved, was Tony Crossland. ... He stood for the sort of socialism in which I believe. He believed in equality, and he believed in promoting equality, and he believed in making the sacrifices on his own behalf and the people like him, which brought socialism about. ... The politician who I enormously admire in my party today is Dennis Healy. Dennis Healey seems to me to be the last of the giants.
“I have a tribal relationship with Labour Party, a tribal relationship with Sheffield Wednesday, tribal relationship with Yorkshire cricket. It means I'm enormously partisan.”
“I have an absurd capacity for happiness. It makes people very angry sometimes to discover that I persist in enjoying myself no matter what's happening. I just am a happy person.”
“I think political journalism is now in a very dangerous position in Britain because newspapers are in so few hands and those few people who own them have got a very strong political position, which doesn't happen to be mine.”