Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Director of the British Museum, custodian of one of the world's richest collections of historical objects.
On the island
Eight records
The Choir of Westminster Abbey
the first choice has to remind me that the British Museum. So why not a piece of music Written for the British Museum written in seventeen sixty nine, within a few years of its foundation, by Mozart, who visited it as a boy of nine.
I think my next one is the sort of fun music which I rather enjoy. It's not very old, but it is a thing that I think people ought to do when they're young, is to sing and to make fun with music.
When I was a student in Sweden, a postgraduate student in Sweden, we used to have seminars which we all talked very seriously about things which we were interested in. And after them we used to have wine and cheese and drink fair amount and sing.
Well, my next one is uh person I listen to all the time, Fat Swallow. And because I'm not a very good archaeologist, I'm choosing.
The Heavens Are Telling (from The Creation)Favourite
The Choir of King's College, Cambridge
Well, the next one is one of my favourite pieces of all time from Haydn's creation, The Heavens Are Telling.
See, the Conquering Hero Comes! (from Judas Maccabaeus)
The Choir of King's College, Cambridge
Well, let's not be too downhearted. How about Handel, whom I always listen to? Julus Maccabeus, see the conquering hero comes.
Well, I like very much the music of the lesser composers of the eighteenth century, and I've chosen Richter's trumpet concerto in D.
Et Resurrexit (from Mass in B minor, BWV 232)
The Munich Bach Choir and Orchestra
Well, I'm almost too frightened to mention it because it's perhaps the greatest piece of music ever written. Bach's B minor Maas, and I think perhaps the climax, the X resurrects it.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:40Is it possible to estimate just how many objects the British Museum contains?
No, we try to guess all the time. And some people say eight million, some people say ten million, some people say twenty million. Anywhere between ten and twenty million. Give or take ten million.
Presenter asks
2:43Was there any likelihood you were going to follow your father's profession?
I don't think I could have afforded to do that. It's a fairly poor background. A middle-class poor background in the thirties and forties is not altogether very funny with three children. I think that on the whole it was saved by the fact that my parents read a lot and there were always books in the house.
Presenter asks
4:38Was there a precise moment when you knew what you wanted to do [for your career]?
I think I know where my interest in what I later became started. That was about nineteen forty four. My father moved to the Isle of Man, and I got very interested in the history of the Isle of Man. ... But then in 1944 we moved to the Isle of Man and I became conscious of some people called the Vikings and I was determined to find out more about these.
The keepsakes
The book
Samuel Pepys
No doubt at all about that. Pepys's diary can go back to it all the time.
The luxury
a refrigerator with a lot of ice trays
because I would be able to make fruit juice, if nothing else, and before I got to alcohol, and I could then have ice in my drink.
Presenter asks
5:33What fascinated you about the Vikings?
Strangely enough, it's not what you think, rape and pillage and all that sort of thing. I think it's something entirely different. And I've never thought of this before, but I think it was because they had a secret script. They had their runic alphabet, which I was trying to interpret, and I learnt the runic alphabet.
Presenter asks
16:49How much of the treasure at the British Museum is concealed?
Well, a lot of it is not displayed, obviously. For example, we have two million prints. Now, you can't display those. ... But the museum is partly, of course, a display place, but partly an archive, and it is the archive element which is well worthwhile stressing.
Presenter asks
27:47What about the vexed question of objects in the British Museum from overseas countries that perhaps want them returned?
We are a universal museum ... We show the cultures of the whole world to the whole world. ... But if you start to take one thing away from the British Museum, it's not very long before you take another thing away and send it back to another country. And soon you will have no British Museum. Now that would be a greater tragedy, in my view, than the destruction of the whole of the Parthenon.
“I think that they were actually a reasonably sophisticated people, living a fairly marginal existence. The country was not very nice at times, but they had quite a lot of extra cash available and could get around. And of course they wanted more cash, and that's why they went out. They were traders, and then they became raiders. Not a very uncommon thing even nowadays.”
“I always say that, you know, it's a filthy habit, I gave it up when I was young. I'm not very good at excavation.”
“I marched into my interview, and there were half the peerage of England sitting with their coats off, because it was a boiling July day, on the other side of the board table in what is now my drawing room, because I live in the British Museum. And I was the only candidate who took his coat off. I think that's probably the only reason I got the job.”
“But if you start to take one thing away from the British Museum, it's not very long before you take another thing away and send it back to another country. And soon you will have no British Museum. Now that would be a greater tragedy, in my view, than the destruction of the whole of the Parthenon.”