Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Former Sony CEO and Emmy-winning TV producer; first Westerner to run the Japanese giant.
On the island
Eight records
because I have a long relationship with the franchise and it captures the zeitgeist of James Bond and really gets it right.
Au fond du temple saint (The Pearl Fishers Duet)
Bryn Terfel and Andrea Bocelli
It's an opportunity to hear Bryn Terfel, who, one, is Welsh, two is someone I've tried to lure to Sony music and I've failed, but the duet makes your hair stand on end because it's so special.
Alastair Miles with the London Symphony Orchestra
because it was almost a triumphant moment of my teenage years and it turned out to be a rather catastrophic moment. I uh played the solo in the Handel's Messiah that the school performed in front of several hundred, maybe a thousand people. I started boldly, played the first minute of it and then My lip went dry and I ran out of gas. I still feel it. I it was the first public failure I I'd ever experienced.
which she sang on a one-hour special and I was answering viewers' phone calls. All the fans called in and so forth. But there was also a strain of anti-Semitism. People were saying how dare they put a Jewish singer on, how dare we devote time on the air to her. So it was shocking to me. And I didn't listen for very long. I mean, I hung up on them.
We Gotta Get Out of This Place
this was a song that was popular in the army at the same time I was there, which is The Animals, We Gotta Get Out of This Place. And it was something we sang while marching. It was something we sang whenever we felt truly irritated, because it reflected how we felt. The difference between a draftee and a regular army is we didn't want to be there. We had to be there and we did it. But we really wanted to get out of this place.
Symphony No. 6 in B minor, Op. 74 'Pathétique'
Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Seiji Ozawa
Because if I'm on a desert island, I'm going to want something that sweeps across the oceans and takes me out of myself. And This piece of music has a relationship in two separate levels. One, it's what the Boston Symphony played when I made a documentary in China. They were the first orchestra into China just as the Cultural Revolution had come to an end. And then, years later, the Sony Orchestra, which is one of the few companies that had its own orchestra, picked this to play at Carnegie Hall. So I thought, well, there are bookends to my life that are rather endearing.
At the BalletFavourite
Kelly Bishop, K. Cold, and Nancy Lane
It's composed by a very good friend of mine who died this summer. I don't know what to make of him dying. It's it's it's two people died that I'm very close to this summer, Nora Efren, the screenwriter and director. and Marvin Hamelish. And these are two giant talents, really irreplaceable. And Marvin was still writing musicals in his late sixties, still composing, and I loved him, and um his death is still a shock to me.
Song to the Moon (Měsíčku na nebi hlubokém)
this is a kind of a tribute to my wife, because if I'm going to be alone on a desert island, I need memories of the love of my life and um and this is a song that on a desert island would probably reduce me to tears, but it would create emotion in me instantly because it's so achingly beautiful.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:35When Sony appointed you chief executive, they were taking a risk, weren't they?
They were and I said as much. And actually I said, Well, I'd better learn Japanese and everybody said, No, no, no, because it'll take up too much time. You've got to learn the other stuff and if you're staggering with early Japanese, you'll irritate everybody and it'll slow you down and I said, Well, all right.
Presenter asks
4:23What was it about those very difficult subjects that gave you the appetite for them?
Yes, I believe because I'd been in Vietnam, Northern Ireland didn't seem that big a deal, and Southern Lebanon didn't seem that big a deal. It was all actually more dangerous than Vietnam. But I liked the exotic nature of overseas locations, and every time I shot a documentary in the United States, it was dull as ditch water.
Presenter asks
5:37Dan Rather said you had a coyote-like ability to sniff out power. Do you think he was right?
I think that's a bit of an exaggeration. I'm stumbling along like everybody else.
The keepsakes
The book
The Diamond as Big as the Ritz and Other Stories
F. Scott Fitzgerald
I'm going to take a book of short stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald, including The Diamond as Big as the Ritz. And the reason I would take it is I love his writing and somehow that era can never be captured. You know, they're still trying to remake the Great Gatsby, and there is no resonance in American society for that peculiar period of American history.
The luxury
I want a daily edition of the New York Times and the London Times, and I'm very happy sitting there on that desert island. If you want to give me a luxurious chair, that's fine.
Presenter asks
15:19What propelled you to America in 1965?
I'd always been captivated by the sense of transformation in America because it was the Kennedy period and the civil rights movement and all the Rhodes Scholars that I was at school with were rushing off to join the campaigns to solve civil rights, to work in the Justice Department. And I thought, this is so much fun. These people are making a difference in their early twenties. And I couldn't imagine doing the same thing in the UK at the time.
Presenter asks
18:45You could have dodged the draft. Why didn't you?
Because it would have been the end of the adventure, and that's what it was about. It was a great adventure, going to the United States, which to me was larger than life.
Presenter asks
30:55When you look back, what do you make of this extraordinary and varied life?
I've just been very, very lucky, but I've charged full speed ahead without ever knowing exactly where I was going. And I often say to people when they ask me why the how did I get such and such I say the truth is the job you have is more important than any future job and I was lucky enough to have jobs even answering phone calls that I found enjoyable. Jobs fell towards me, I didn't go towards them.
“Yes, I think the whole Apple transformation, the transformation from the analogue world which Sony dominated to a digital world in which everybody can copy everybody else, steal ideas from everybody else, has transformed the business in a way that makes it exciting if you like change, but every so often you say, oh my goodness, is there any a sanctuary in this ever-changing world?”
“Well, I'm not exciting so much as fulfilling. We were second in the ratings when I took over, and we went to number one by a huge margin. And it was the last time, really, that the White House watched the Evening News every night. Our audiences were so big. Those days are gone. And I knew that that would happen. But for a moment, we were front and center on the news excitement. And it was scintillating.”
“Because it would have been the end of the adventure, and that's what it was about. It was a great adventure, going to the United States, which to me was larger than life.”
“It was like having lunch with Henry VIII. I mean, he was profane and funny, he had great anecdotes, he'd be taking beans and dripping them down his bathrobe and doing imitations of President Nixon, and it was an amazing experience which has never been captured in public, never captured in public, but I but I saw it, you know.”