Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A businessman and former chairman of the BBC, knighted for services to the Health Service, now chairman of BT.
On the island
Eight records
Symphony No. 5 in D minor, Op. 47
National Symphony Orchestra of Washington DC, conducted by Mstislav Rostropovich
I pick this because I heard it at a July prom about five years ago when Slava Rostropovich conducted it brilliantly. And Rostropovich came more or less straight from the rostrum and he was on a terrific high and warmly embraced me several times.
It's a slightly pooterish reason. At the age of twelve I sung it on Jamaica radio in exchange for a I think a fifteen shilling book tuck.
That's because I'm Anglo-Irish, my wife is Irish, and I'm in the middle of the Irish Channel in terms of my sentiments.
Band of the 5th Royal Inniskilling Dragoon Guards
my regimental band playing the regimental quick march
Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, accompanied by Gerald Moore
which is both lovely and also quite a gloomy song.
Various Artists (Children in Need)
It was the BBC's theme tune, the the children in need version of it. And whenever in my early days as chairman I gave a speech, if there was any excuse, I'd play the perfect day recording for about a minute and a half because it put people in such a wonderful mood
I'm Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a LetterFavourite
I can play on the pianola.
String Quartet No. 15 in A minor, Op. 132
I first came across this when I was uh an undergraduate in Oxford in Aldous Huxley's Point Counterpoint.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:55I suppose if you're bossy, Christopher, it's best to be the boss, and you've been the boss of an awful lot of things over the years, haven't you?
Yeah. … The great thing about being Chairman, there are two really good things about it. One is that you pick the diary dates so people can't muck you about … And the other thing is the avoidance of being bossed about by other people.
Presenter asks
5:41How did you make your first million?
I was out of work. I'd been fired after a takeover of a little construction company that I was the managing director of. And I was in a merchant bank where a friend of mine was working and he showed me a balance sheet of a printing company and said, What do you think of this? … So I looked again and I said yes, I'll do it if I can buy … a significant share of the of the equity.
Presenter asks
11:49What do you think you suffered as a result of that parental absence?
It's hard to tell, but I know I wouldn't. Like it for my own son. … Actually what I think w was what must it have done in particular to my mother, you know, seeing me off and my brother off at the airport, knowing they weren't going to see us for a year and a half. … I I find that very, very Hard to understand.
The keepsakes
The book
John Donne
I'd want to take some poetry. I think I'd take if I had to pick a a single poet, I'd take John Donne, and if it was his collected works I'd get the sermons thrown in.
The luxury
Two and a half miles of Hampshire Chalk Stream, the upper Itchen
It would be very expensive. It would be two and a half miles of Hampshire Chalk Stream, the upper Itchen.
Presenter asks
19:00Would you do the same again [putting golden handcuffs on the top management of LWT]?
Yes, I would, because I didn't promise them millions. I said, here are the handcuffs, here are the shares, which you have to pay for … But there was no promise. I mean, shares do go down as well as up. So there was no guarantee if we'd lost the franchise. We wouldn't have made any money at all.
Presenter asks
24:48Hand on heart, do you think the licence fee will survive beyond two thousand six?
Absolutely.
“I have actually said bollocks in the council chamber.”
“I'm more diplomatic now than I was when I was in my thirties and forties. I've grown older and wiser, and You learn things. You may not. internally be any more patient, but you know it's wise to Mask irritation and impatience.”
“I was penniless. My first flat in London was what they call a cold water walk-up, six pounds a week, no bath, shared loo. And I got paid twenty pounds a week, and six pounds of that went in rent. So I was scratching along, and I scratched along for a long time.”