Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Industrial designer known for iconic creations including the Intercity 125 train, razors, irons, and pens.
On the island
Eight records
I come from a very ordinary, very happy, not very well-off, but a very happy family. And my mother, a remarkable woman, I think to the day she died, she didn't really know what I did for a living, but she was a great encourager. And in her generation, in those years, popular music was everything. And so she would have heard it perhaps on the radio, more likely in the music hall. She would have been introduced to popular songs. And particular artists got to perform particularly well. Balboli was part of our life.
I danced every Wednesday and every Saturday, mostly at Wembley Town Hall. Grand life, grand life.
I've grown to be alert to and very mindful of the quality of the spoken word. I think Burton nailed this particular piece of poetry absolutely perfectly.
Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong
I'd landed a very big job and in order to get it done and I was working all hours that came but a friend from the tennis club a typographer by trade he'd leave his work come home stop with me we'd have something to eat and work until 12 o'clock every night and through the weekend we had one record one disc a 33 record and we took turns to turn it over all night and all the weekends this one record was worn out almost and that was the record so I have to play that
Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse
It sort of summed up my introduction to popular music, but presented in a more and more thoughtful and more and more sometimes ingenious, but wholly rich way.
Vissi d'arte (from Tosca)Favourite
This is the beginning of my introduction to opera. And this is one of the greatest singers of our time, of course, the Maria Callas, singing her classic aria from Tosca.
I've come very much to admire the huge range of skills that go into making what we call musicals. And I think this particular one, Money Money, and Lisa Minelli, I think, singing, the lyrics are worth listening to as much as the music.
Onegin's Aria (Lyubvi vsye vozrasti pokorni)
My wife April and I, we really have come to love opera. It's one of our greatest pleasures. We're going to listen to a particularly famous Aria from Onegin.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:21What do you think has been, to date, your most enduring creation?
I think without a doubt it's the train. It's given me the greatest pleasure, and it'll see me out.
Presenter asks
7:01When you walk into a new environment, are you always assessing it for the standard and capability of its design?
You just can't help it. It's like the air you breathe. You know, you wake up and whatever you look at is there to be looked at and considered. And particularly remark upon how everything is made. One of my favourite little tricks is to ask a bunch of students or any group to tell me how they think everything in the room is made. Really quite fundamental things, carpet, table, lights, whatever. And of course, there'll be complex answers or complex reasons behind a lot of things. But underneath it all, many, many things start with a very, very Basic Principle of Construction
Presenter asks
15:48What's your strongest memory of that wartime period?
I left college one afternoon and it was a beautiful day and my journey home meant I had to walk from the college to a particular busy road. Now we know North Circa but in those years, those days it was very little traffic and from where I stood on the bridge I had a long, long, long view into the distance, perhaps a mile or so away and out of the sky came a rocket. And I'm probably one of the few people ever to have seen a V-2 rocket actually land. It was so far away, like looking at a big aircraft in the sky today. They're going very, very slowly. So this rocket came out of the sky, slowly, slowly, slowly into the ground, and then a sort of lots of smoke, and pieces of railway engine would go up into the sky, and there'd be wheels on the end of an axle, like a diabolo, just winkling their way up into the sky, all silent from where I was standing. And then, of course, the time lapsed, and I then got the sound and got the impact of this explosion. … No, no, I think you're not scared. It's just an extraordinary moment. But to a child in those years there was an awful lot going on, and you you weren't aware of the news and and you didn't get anxious as they make you anxious to day. You didn't eat terribly well, but you didn't eat badly, and life was pretty good for a kid.
The keepsakes
The book
I thought very carefully about this. I my sort of practical nature c kicks in and I've therefore decided it should be a book about the Bauhaus. Plenty of pictures and it's huge book. It's I don't know nearly five hundred square, big bo thick book. It comes in a case. So very heavy, so it could be very useful as a tool. I could use it as a mallet.
The luxury
My luxury item is going to be a trombone. Apart from anything else, of all the musical instruments, it's probably the easiest maintained, apart from the slide you just spit on to make it work. If you asked earlier about my thoughts about living as a boy in the wartime, well, it was in the end of the war, I was thirteen, fourteen, and I um joined the boys' band in the Salvation Army, and I tried various instruments, and I wound up with the trombone as my favourite. So I'd like to pick up where I left off.
Presenter asks
20:44What were the circumstances of the divorce? Was it because of how hard you were working?
Well, I'd go to work looking forward to going to work every day, and it becomes an addiction in all sorts of ways. And um there's no doubt about it, a selfish beast. Just drifted apart and and uh we we parted uh amicably. But there's a tale to tell um and in those days divorce was by no means easy. We were absolutely s satisfied with w what we were doing. Yes. Money and this, that, the other. Um and the lawyer sent me to Brighton. and booked me into a hotel and I go up to my room and take my topcoat off and jacket and I'd been told to get into bed and I did. After a while a lady knocked on the door and took her coat and hat off and so on and got into the bed and a moment later in came a photographer, took the pictures and that was the evidence and that was the highly organised but you can see a pretty effective way of proving adultery.
Presenter asks
30:15Do you ever ponder what you'd like your legacy to be?
If somebody has something that that I had something to do with, and it's gone on beyond a reasonable expectation of its life, that cheers me up no end.
Presenter asks
30:35Is it true you've designed your own coffin?
Yes. Yes. It doesn't seem so peculiar to me really. But um well it's a bookcase. It's apparently a bookcase. When I'm done. It's a bookcase. It stands up. It's full of books. And when the time comes, I hope, April will take out the books, my wife, put me in it and shut the lid and off we go. … It started when my mum died. I'm in this awful sort of shop, dark velvet curtains, and we're looking at a catalogue of coffins. They're awful. They're so banal, it's so predictable, and so expensive. And I know my mum would have wanted me very much to choose the cheapest. But of course, as the son, you have to think what your uncles and aunts are going to think about it. So you tend to sort of steer your way towards something a little bit more elaborate. Silly. But I thought on that day, you know, I really don't want this. So I started making my own.
“I think without a doubt it's the train. It's given me the greatest pleasure, and it'll see me out.”
“I'm probably one of the few people ever to have seen a V-2 rocket actually land.”
“If you just work a lot longer and you have the opportunity to work and you're reasonably good, you don't have to be brilliant. You just overhaul everybody else.”
“I shall be king, there's no doubt of it. I shall probably annex the nearby island.”