Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Right-wing newspaper columnist, known for his colourful style and for being denied the Sunday Telegraph editorship after using a four-letter word on TV.
On the island
Eight records
It reminds me of the story of my mother going into labour during Paderewski's performance of this piece, and my older brother being born to the background music.
I suppose I've got a sort of Walter Mitty fantasy that this is what I've done, done things in my way, and tried to puncture the trendinesses of the age.
Dooley Wilson (from the Casablanca soundtrack)
It reminds me of my daughter when she was young; I used to hum it to her and it became a family joke.
It reminds me of my first wife, who was French and a Free French exile; she loved it and it brings tears to my eyes.
Sanctus from Requiem in D minor, Op. 48
Choir of King's College, Cambridge, English Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Philip Ledger
I associate this piece with the joys and sorrows of love.
Sarabande from Partita No. 1 in B-flat major, BWV 825Favourite
I think Bach is the only composer that I would never get bored with. It both soothes and stimulates.
Che farò senza Euridice from Orfeo ed Euridice
It reminds me of my mother and my new wife Lucy; Lucy sang it to my mother shortly before she died.
Arcadian and the Zydeco Brothers
It was played at my wedding to Lucy; my daughter and grandchildren danced in a circle.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:16So comment columns such as the ones you've been writing for thirty years are really simply a public convenience, are they?
I think that uh it's useful for readers to who haven't got, who are doing other important or, in any case, other jobs, to have somebody who thinks about the common market for them and suggests opinions that they can either like or dislike, and if they dislike them, therefore they are forming an anti-opinion, see, or provoking opinion. And this is how, in fact, people reach their decisions in a democracy. I think without strong opinions, there can be no debate, and without debate, there can be no political freedom. So I think that we do play a part in the political process.
Presenter asks
5:30Your family background is very unusual. You and your brother, after the age of nine, lived in your own house with your own staff, butler, chef, and governess. How did that come about?
It wasn't quite as grand as that. My mother and her first husband, my father, divorced, and my mother remarried Montagu Norman, who was then Governor of the Bank of England, which he'd been for many years, and he was much older than my mother. and had been a bachelor all his life, and it was felt that the sudden incursion of two little boys I suppose I was eight and my brother w uh uh ten might put him off his stride of controlling the gold stand and that kind of thing that governors did, and it wouldn't be to the national interest if we were there getting under his feet. So although we lived with him in London and uh I hope to interrupt the financial decision processes too badly. In the country we had our own house quite near where he and my mother lived and our own staff. But anyway, we did have yes, we did have our own servants.
The keepsakes
The book
Evelyn Waugh
even Waugh hated the modern world, and he hated particularly hated the modern Britain. And I think if one read him, it would one would think, my goodness me, perhaps I'm lucky to be out of it all on a desert island.
The luxury
a limitless supply of hallucinatory dream-inducing drugs (laudanum and LSD)
I'd like to take an a limitless supply of all those hallucinatory dream-inducing drugs which I've read about all my life and the younger generation have told me all about my life, laudanum, LSD, and which I've resisted ever taking so long as one has to be active and keep one's end up in the struggle of life. And on a desert island with no hope really, if anything, except just making life tolerable for the few weeks that it lasted, I would like to indulge in in in these and I think that it would be the only way actually, going to sleep and dreaming, perhaps dreaming of some of the things which I've been reminded by the other records, would make would make life tolerable. It would be a short life for me, but in any case it would be one spent in happy hallucinations.
Presenter asks
8:54What do you regret?
I don't think I have regrets in my public life, although I think the only one there would be. that uh I committed really, I think, a grave gaffe on uh television some years ago when I used uh a four letter word. I think quite justifiably in the sense that it was the right word to use, but it was quite the wrong word to use at that time on a television where it was before the sort of children were meant to have gone to bed, and it caused an enormous ruption. Not that I object to causing ructions, but it enormously upset the non-conformist conscience of many of the readers of the Daily Telegraph. And I think this is an unforgivable thing to do, because there is no justification really for unnecessarily upsetting people's sensibilities.
Presenter asks
11:07What was it about you that inspired such brutality [at school]?
It's very difficult to say why people take against you, because obviously if you knew what it was, you'd do something to reform it. I think um I was probably rather in those days, rather a dandy, and uh I used to wear rather sort of foppish clothes when I could get away with it, and I wore my hair uh very long. And I was rather affected, I think, and gave myself airs and graces. And I particularly provoked, for example, George Melly at the time, who was uh I'm not going to choose one of his records, and he describes me as being a sort of uh rather ostentatious aesthete. When I say I I think he actually rather enjoyed it, but in any case, I do see that I probably didn't fit in um perfectly to the sort of public school idea of how how a boy ought to behave.
Presenter asks
21:39Can that entirely have been because of this gaff, this four letter word on the television [that Lord Hartwell passed you over for the editorship]?
No, I don't think of course there were other what might be called gaps which led Lord Hartwell, possibly rightly to conclude that uh although he thought And he was always generous in saying this, that I was quite a good writer. I wouldn't be suitable to be in charge of a newspaper, not only because I might commit gaffes, but also because administration, and there's quite a lot of that in the editor's job, wasn't my forty, and that in any case, if I did become editor, that would stop me. Me writing. So, I mean, I was passed over for a whole multitude of reasons, some of which seemed to be understandable, but others I thought were thought were unjust, until um the Hartwell family, the Berry family did get into financial trouble with the paper and had to sell it, and Conrad Black and Andrew Knight, to whom I owe a great uh debt of gratitude, suggested that perhaps I wasn't as unsuitable as Lord Hartwell had thought, and I got the job.
Presenter asks
26:15You wrote very movingly at the time about your grief [after your wife's death] and how distraught you were. Did writing about it help?
It was a it was watching someone die of cancer is of course extremely painful and uh when the final thing death came it was a it was your your paperwork a d a dreadful blow and I did write about it and I was uh in a column in the Daily Telegraph. I'd always tried to. write about personal things when they seem to be apposite. I mean, I don't think that it's right just to write about p your views on public affairs and readers have a right, if you've had a uh a a very profound personal experience, that they should know about it. You shouldn't go on writing as if nothing had happened. And I suppose in a way writing about it to some extent did help to alleviate the the shock and the pain.
“I think without strong opinions, there can be no debate, and without debate, there can be no political freedom.”
“I do look back on those years as being the happiest one of the happiest of my life.”
“I think I'd take the bark really because um i it it would be something I could play and play again if I lasted that long, wouldn't get bored of uh and would go on uh soothing and tranquilizing my troubled spirit.”
“I'd like to take an a limitless supply of all those hallucinatory dream-inducing drugs which I've read about all my life... and on a desert island with no hope Really, if anything, except just making life tolerable for the few weeks that it lasted, I would like to indulge in in in these and I think that it would be the only way actually, going to sleep and dreaming.”