Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Historian, gardener, and diarist best known for being the youngest-ever director of the National Portrait Gallery and later running the V&A.
On the island
Eight records
Crown Imperial (Coronation March)
Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra
I'm a monarchist, I always have been, and I'm deeply honoured to to hold the office at Westminster Abbey of High Bailiff in Search of the Sanctuary, and been present at so many services and things and to be just part of that, have the honour of being part of that.
This I adore operetta. In 1949, I was taken to see Ivor Novello's King's Rhapsody. We very rarely have ever went to the theatre... And so this is a song sung by Vanessa Lee, and it was romantic, and I've never lost that taste for operetta.
Lakoda (Coda) from The Sleeping Beauty, Act III
Kirov Orchestra of St. Petersburg
I always loved the ballet and at that period I was always first at art and I wanted to design for the stage and of course there was one great production after the war which I ache to see and that was The Sleeping Beauty at Covent Garden which opened the Opera House in 1946 with the scenery and costumes by Oliver Messel. And the next bit I've chosen is the coda of The Sleeping Beauty because at the end suddenly the whole cast turns towards the audience. Well really they're turning towards the imperial box with the czar and the whole family there and this is very stately music as they move forwards and bow to them.
Gloriana (end of Act One, Scene One)
Welsh National Opera / Josephine Barstow
Benjamin Britten's Gloriana. It has all the splendour and the poignancy and tragedy of Elizabethan England and of this great woman. And to me it is the the greatest modern evocation of that period. And I've chosen a bit at the end of that one where you hear her speak. It's as though England had gained a voice.
Sybil Thorndyke remembers Ellen Terry
One of the things we did in 1973, it was my last year at the Portrait Gallery... and we did a series of readings... The one I remember most was Sybil Thorndyke remembering Ellen Terry. It always brings tears to my eyes, because it it tells of the death of Ellen Terry, and also of her funeral, and I thought, That's how I want to go, and that's how I want it to be.
Enigma Variations (Theme) — opening sequenceFavourite
This is very special. I wasn't there the first night. It was, I think, 1968. It is the opening sequence of one of the two ballets my wife did with Sir Frederick Ashton, based on Enigma Variations. It's a wonderful story because my wife, when she was at the Royal College of Art, had typhoid fever and she almost died. And as she came to she heard Elgar's music and she did a plot for a ballet and designed the scenery and costumes. And this magical, magical ballet, which always brings tears to my eyes whenever I see it.
After my wife died I always kept everything I wore labelled with the date, and it was all piled up in the attic, the whole lot down. And the VNA picked some things, and the Fashion Museum Bath took everything. Entire room full of my clothes. And it covers everything from, you know, I had a great friendship with Versace, wonderful things from him, and then things from Next. So it's not a bad idea to collect what one very fashion conscious man wore throughout his life.
Liverpool Cathedral Choir and the Mass Choirs of Merseyside
I'm a Catholic variety, and this is just a hymn out of the English Hymnal for all the saints who from their labours rest, just sung by an ordinary congregation. It means a great deal to me. I have a lot to do with the cathedral now in Hereford, where I'm an altar server. And I mean to be basic, the Christian faith has seen me through a lot in my life.
In conversation
Presenter asks
5:04Why publish diaries?
Well, I allowed ten years to elapse before I published those diaries. I don't know whether they were written with the idea of publication or not. And they went back to someone saying to me, you're a very young man and you occupy a very important position. You'll meet all sorts of interesting people. You ought to write it down. Then, of course, 1967, I became director of the Portrait Gallery at 31, and Cecil Beaton entered my life, and his diaries always absolutely fascinated me. So I began to keep a diary. But why published in 1997? Well, I'm not going to shy away from the fact there was to a degree a financial motive because when I resigned the V&A when I was 52 I was left with £12,000 a year to live on and the diaries of course caused a sensation and they're basically less about the museum than somebody from nowhere who suddenly entered a brilliant dazzling social scene and as Beatrix Miller the great editor of Vogue for the 60s said to me darling you're just like a child that's never been in a toy shop before
Presenter asks
6:31During your time as director of the National Portrait Gallery and the V&A, if I were to press you to pick out just a couple of highlights from your time professionally at those places, what would they be?
Well, I think from the point of view of the portrait gallery, the most important thing I did was to get them to begin to collect portraits of living people. And that has absolutely transformed the gallery. Together with the Beaton exhibition was a landmark. It was the first time there'd ever been a major exhibition of a living photographer in a national museum or gallery. Those are two things for that. In the case of the V&A, the heritage series of exhibitions, of which the first in 1974 was called The Destruction of the Country House, it went down as a landmark. It told the story of the loss of a thousand houses, of the threats that were besieging them, and really created the notion of heritage and that such things weren't just the products of rich affluent people in the past, but also part of a kind of communal heritage in a way that we should care about and love.
The keepsakes
The book
Patrick Goode and Michael Lancaster (eds.)
It would just give me a memory of a joy I never knew that I was to have.
The luxury
I love doing new things. As you get older, why shut down? Start something new.
Presenter asks
8:59Tell me more about your father. [He] would sit at home dominating the radio dial.
Something happened with the outbreak of war which absolutely kind of broke him. He was in the First World War, and he just became a kind of sleeping reclusive. I mean, I think things like this stick in my mind. He would say to my mother, Take your children out of the room. I don't remember a single note of affection ever being extended by him. He was a hypochondriac. He sat there by his desk and he controlled the radio. Fortunately he liked the the palm court. So I got lots of Some Day Your Heart Will Awake and everything akin to that. But I mean the marriage had obviously gone on the rocks by then. And divorce, I think, in that kind of circumstance was unwell, you know, with the dreadful social stigma then. And don't forget, my two brothers were evacuated during the war into the countryside, so I was just lonely, cripplingly shy child. Um in that house.
Presenter asks
10:19As a little boy growing up, how conscious were you of the class system and your place in it?
I think you couldn't get anything more class-ridden than what I call the suburbs. I mean just going along the road of shock horror and a taxi driver moved in as though it was lowering the tone. I mean the whole thing was preposterous. It's probably all vanished now but I remember it very much. And certainly at school for instance the grammar school I went to certain parents could afford elocution lessons so that their children would speak better. And I remember doing what was it, Radio London with that wonderful man who looked at me, narrowed his eyes and said, you changed your voice didn't you? And I just looked back at him... And he was he got a first at LSE, and I said, Yes, if you had come up when I did. You would have had to.
Presenter asks
19:07How did the trustees look upon you? [You had] all the kit on, you know, the flouncy shirts and the...
Well, yes, for a time I kind of conformed and then I thought, No, no, no, no, I want to be myself, this is what's going to work. So I wore flowered shirts, regency jackets, jackets that had side vents practically up to the armpits.
Presenter asks
24:53You were director at the V&A for thirteen years. When you left, do you think your career was fatally damaged by the fact that you had implemented such cuts and caused such ill feeling?
You know, oh goodness me, there's hardly anything that goes on at the V&A that I didn't touch in the midst of it all. In the end I got government, thanks to Margaret Thatcher. I got the V&A by Act of Parliament out of Government and got it free. We could do what we liked.
“Looking back, the whole of my life has been fleeing my family, struggling to detach myself, get as far away as possible, and make a life and a home full of the old fashioned virtues I was never surrounded by as a child.”
“I said, My old age is going to be exactly the reverse. More house, more garden, more absolutely everything.”
“Once my career took off and I was sitting in the royal box at Covent Garden next to Lady Diana Cooper and Lord Drogheda, I just sat there and I thought this is really rather awful of me, but I actually feel I'm actually where I should have been from the start.”
“I know that she would wish only one thing of me, that I should be happy.”
“As you get older, why shut down? Start something new. It's great.”