Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Lawyer and writer, best known for creating the television series Rumpole of the Bailey and for defending free speech at the bar.
On the island
Eight records
Symphony No. 4 in E minor, Op. 98
London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Neeme Järvi
the first thing I really remember him playing on a grammar phone where you had to sharpen this wooden needle, if you remember, and that it played the Brahms Fourth Symphony, and that that was the beginning of music really to me, proper music.
when I was a child, all I wanted to be was Fred Astaire. I wanted to wear white tie and tails and I wrote up for a monocle and I had a little stick with a silver knob and I wore a dinner jacket at a very, very early age.
Turin dot is an opera which excites me enormously. It excites me so much that I can't listen to it when I'm working, which is I get just over excited. But I think one of the most beautiful things in it is is Little Liu's love song.
Dio, che nell'alma infondereFavourite
I've been quite good at at friendships with women in my life, but not terribly good at male friendships. The sort of male best friend buddy is something perhaps that's the only child in me I haven't really relished or enjoyed, I don't think, as much as it should be. So this is the great friendship Aria from Don Carlos, Don Carlos and his friend swearing eternal friendship, and it's moving and triumphant and tells me about something I've missed.
I thought I'd I'd have um Our Love Is Here to Stay, because in fact I'm talking about marriage. I first met my present Penny thirty years ago and it's here to stay.
Soave sia il vento (from Così fan tutte)
I could of course fill the whole of these records with Mozart because we are on an island and because we want the wind to be sweet and because Casey Vantuti has perfect music. I'd like to hear Suavecia Ilvento.
Louis Armstrong with the Sy Oliver Orchestra
I really like this song, which is uh C'est bon, which is means uh everything's okay and Louis Armstrong tells tells us that it is.
The last record is uh Rosen Cavalier, the marshaline, who stopped all the clocks'cause she didn't want time to pass, finally being reconciled to handing her lover over to a younger girl, finally being reconciled to time passing, being old, and doing it in the most beautiful way possible, which is uh more than I could hope to do.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:30What are they, John, these painkillers and placebos [for the fear of death]?
Well, I think mainly work. I mean, you know, living at home is a huge pleasure, watching the children grow up, being married, Benny. But I think work is the thing which produces events and I I have a very low threshold of boredom.
Presenter asks
2:35You were quite lonely in many ways, weren't you? And [your father] didn't like people coming to the house, did he?
When he went blind, he didn't want people coming to the house because uh they might be sorry for him, and he didn't want anybody feeling sorry for him. And even when he could see if if visitors appeared at the gate, he used to rush and, you know, hide down at the end of the herbaceous border and go into the undergrowth for cover.
Presenter asks
12:24Whether you ever felt compromised once you got into that freedom of speech area, because in a way you must have been emotionally committed in a way that a barrister's not supposed to be?
Well, I know. That's that's the that's the great uh The great thing about embarrassing, you mustn't believe once you start believing in what you're saying, you lose all judgment. I did believe in it. I found it much easier to defend all those things if I didn't read them.
The keepsakes
The book
The Oxford Book of English Verse
Arthur Quiller-Couch
what he likes is the Quilla Cooch edition of the Oxford Book of English Verse. I could learn my way through that.
The luxury
A painting: 'Old Woman Frying Eggs' by Velázquez
there's a picture by Vera Squeers in the National Gallery of Scotland. And it's an old woman frying eggs. And I think it's Perhaps my favourite picture in the world because the eggs and the oil and the old woman are so real and so Down to earth.
Presenter asks
15:51You've written a lot about your father, but very little about your mother. Is that a reflection of the balance of their influence on you?
In a way my father and I had some unholy alliance, which I think slightly left her out, which I now feel sorry for and and slightly ashamed about. But she was a very interesting person.
Presenter asks
24:09What do you believe their motive is, if that is what they do [in government]?
I think their main anxiety, and I suppose that's a war politician, is to get re-elected. As soon as they're elected, they think about being re-elected. They don't do things which might be unpopular.
“My father had more inf certainly more influence on me than anybody else. I think that because we were an isolated family, really, And because he treated me as though I was a grown up person all my life, and because he taught me about the plays of Shakespeare and the stories of Sherlock Holmes and all the things which are important to me, My life has been tremendously influenced by him.”
“The greatest feeling to me, better than any drink or drugs or anything that you could have, stimulant, is when it ends. And you're so relieved it's over and you've done it and you get in the car and we drink champagne out of the bottle and eat garage sandwiches and drive home in a state of complete happiness.”
“I think that's the only child syndrome. I mean team spirit is something which I have never had any of it. So all the things that I was taught at school just went off m all the sort of moral which at those times were the British Empire, the British Raj and the Conservative government and so on, all of that just went off my back like Walter Opadu's back.”
“If I wanted one sentence, I thought I'd put the defence rest.”