Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Writer, broadcaster, ex-foreign correspondent, and ex-director general of the BBC, brother of novelist Graham Greene.
On the island
Eight records
In the nursery at home, dancing with my sister's governess, who was twenty eight, I was fourteen, and I was very much in love with her, to the strains of The Cabaret Girl.
Just Once for All Time (Ganz auf dem Weg)
She sang the what I suppose is almost the theme song of Congress Dances about how the most beautiful things in life only happen once.
ForefathersFavourite
Edmund Blundon reading what is in fact my favourite poem of his.
If I was recalling my time in Germany. I would need a sound of that era. And I chose that very good tune, even though it was the devil's tune.
Sang a parody of Lala Anderson's Lily Marlane. Which ends with the order to hang Hitler on a lamppost. And that's one of the records you've chosen to bring back those years.
My next record is a Beatles record. which seems to me to be really rather beautiful poetry. The Beatles, after all, were one of the trademarks of the sixties.
That Was the Week That Was (Theme Song / Lance Corporal Wallace Sketch)
Millicent Martin, David Frost and Roy Kinnear
An excerpt from That Was the Week That Was, with Millicent Martin singing the theme song, The Voice of David Frost, and then Roy Kinnear as Lance Corporal Wallace AJ Royal Signals.
In Search of a Character (Extract)
My last record uh is my brother Graham reading an extract uh from his book In Search of a Character. I chose that because I thought in one shape or another I should like to have his company on the desert island.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:38How musical are you? How important is it in your life?
Music has never been uh very important in my life. I'm not exactly tone deaf. Certain songs and tunes stick in my mind, but musical I am unfortunately not.
Presenter asks
4:07As the headmaster's sons [at Berkhamsted School], were grievances taken out on you by the boys?
No, I wouldn't put it like that. One felt at times a bit awkward. It was difficult to have this division in one's life between home on one side of what Graham has called the Green Bay's Door, and when one went through that one left privacy behind and was uh among crowds of other boys.
Presenter asks
4:31Why Germany [in 1929]?
Well, the year was nineteen twenty nine. That was probably the best year of the Weimar Republic. Strasemann hadn't yet died. Germany at that time had a very great attraction which um even my parents must have felt. I can't think of any other reason why they chose Germany, but I'm very glad they did. Because Germany has meant ever since a great deal in my life.
The keepsakes
The luxury
I would like to have a portable typewriter. And if you will allow it, lots of paper.
Presenter asks
In those early days was Dachau bad?
Dacquer was not as bad as it became. It was a very unpleasant feeling. The people were standing around, of course, very depressed, very thin. The SS guards were the most brutal types. I wrote a letter to my mother about it at the time, so I can still reread that letter and bring that impression back into my mind.
Presenter asks
13:44On what ground [were you expelled from Germany in May 1939]?
Well, uh obviously they didn't like me, but the actual ground was as a reprisal because a German journalist had been expelled uh from London uh for Nazi party activities. And I remember at a farewell lunch given for me by the Foreign Press Association, I said that I hadn't been leader of the Berlin section of the English Conservative Party.
Presenter asks
28:39Why a biography and not an autobiography? Why didn't you write the story yourself?
I started to. I think I had written about twelve thousand words about my early life. And then I realized that the time was coming when I'd have to spend months in the B B C archives. Turning over dusty and boring papers, and I just couldn't. Bear the idea of spending my life in that way. And I just put it aside. And about a year later this young man, Michael Tracy, turned up and wanted to write my biography. So I thought, Ah, this is my release.
“I never respected the efficiency of the German secret police too much.”
“I have been as close to Hitler as I am to you at this moment. But I never was, so to speak, introduced to him.”
“I thought that in some ways the BBC had got a bit uh stuffy. It was not appealing to the nation as a whole, but more to the respectable middle class. And I thought the BBC should be everybody's BBC.”