Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Playwright of powerful TV dramas; won BAFTA for 'Caught on a Train' and Pre-Italia for 'Shooting the Past'; Dennis Potter Award winner.
On the island
Eight records
I Close My Eyes and Count to Ten
The sound of Dusty Springfield, which is I've listened to all through my life, is a free spirit. Also, it has an extraordinary connection for me with the Wednesday Play.
Clarinet Quintet in A major, K. 581Favourite
Gervase de Peyer & Amadeus Quartet
It's one of the first um records I bought because um my my parents weren't very interested in classical music. My father listened to Russian music most of the time. And fortunately I bought one of the most beautiful pieces of music I think ever composed, one uh totally by accident.
I've chosen the Ipcrest file'cause it sums up the extraordinary atmosphere of the sixties, the Cold War, Michael Caine making coffee during the credit sequence and the twanging music sums up that sort of sixties paranoia.
I, as a young writer, used to write to music, often to the same record, going round and round and round... And one of the records I ruined during the seventies was Fleetwood Mac.
Never Was a Child Like Him (from The Lost Prince)
I've chosen um this music from the end of the Lost Prince because it's beautiful music but also it it reflects a very important side of my work and what I really enjoy doing at the current time.
The Fairy Queen: 'O let me weep'
Jennifer Vyvyan & English Chamber Orchestra (conducted by Benjamin Britten)
From that moment in Cambridge I spent a lot of my life in the theatre writing plays... I wanted to express that and choice. So I've chosen a piece of Purcell's The Fairy Queen
I often turned to Joan Alma-Chading because of this extraordinary limpid simplicity of the way she sings her songs, the directness and the wisdom, I think, and I still find this song incredibly potent.
The Sixteen Choir and Orchestra (conducted by Harry Christophers)
I l I love the sexiness and boldness of Vivaldi's music. And I also think that one probably on this island needs a bit of sacred music for the good of the soul, so I've combined the two with Vivaldi's Gloria.
In conversation
Presenter asks
9:57Did your mother's obsession with you getting into theatre feel like a pressure?
A little bit. I remember seventeen. When I was seventeen, I'd had one play professionally accepted and then cancelled at the Hampshire Theatre Club. She said, You're seventeen and your career's going nowhere. I remember thinking, That's a bit steep, I'm only seventeen Even though I thought, surely there she shouldn't be saying that to me But I learned to live with it and to shout at it when it's only got took it on, yeah.
Presenter asks
10:38How did your father's ferocious Russian temper manifest itself?
Um well, he was very obsessed with manners, being from old Russia, and if you started eating your peas with your fork the wrong way up, in other words, scooping them up, he suddenly would scream, I'm going to turn the table over, how dare you? and all the glasses would rattle. I can still hear that sound rattling on the table. He would grip the table so that his knuckles shone and he would literally lift the dining room table a few inches off the floor. It never ever completely turned over, but um cutterily would slide. You know, that was a frightening sound.
Presenter asks
27:23Why did you write about a world that you didn't really know, like concrete walkways and wimpy bars?
The keepsakes
The book
Gerald Durrell
Since I'm on this island and there'll be lots of delightful animals on it and fish of course, my chance to become Gerald Darrell is complete. So um My Friendly and Other Animals is I think one of the most delightful books in the English language and the book that's probably influenced me most of my life in a funny way.
The luxury
Well, it probably is a necessity rather than luxury, but because as anybody knows who's worked with me that I fiddle all the time, it's sort of genetic thing that all my siblings fiddle, I would have to fiddle with. I fiddle with plastic straw. I used to fiddle with anything, barrows, um, paper and uh I used to leak ink like blood coming out of my mouth chewing on a barrel. And an actor changed my life, said, Why don't you try plastic straws? And I've fiddled with plastic straws ever since. So I would have to take one of those sort of boxes that you have at parties or plastic straws on the island and then I would never run out,'cause they last a long time.
Well, because we all share the same culture. I wrote about disc jockeys, I I wrote about eating at Wimpy Bars, about what was then called shopping precincts, now shopping malls that were t you know, all sprouting up all over um Britain. I was writing about a landscape of the mind really as as well as not real, literal social realism. And I I do feel that as a writer that you should be able to imagine yourself into most situations, especially as a playwright.
Presenter asks
30:18If it's big audiences you like, why haven't you been tempted by Hollywood and big films?
Yeah, well I mean big audiences but artistic control is is the thing. And of course I like making my own work, you know, and I'm I'm great admirers of people um like Ken Loach and Mike Lee and things who just do their own work and just consistently do it. And eventually you reach you know, it's taken both those guys a while to reach a world audience, but eventually you you sort of hit a a sort of critical mass and the work go goes global.
“Never underestimate your audience. I think the great tragedy was that not just in television but all through the media, people underestimated the audience at various stages in the eighties and nineties and are still doing to a certain extent.”
“It's often easier to imagine, say you're writing about Tony Blair, to catch a whiff of power through the eyes of a chauffeur or through the eyes of a secretary than it is if you try to enter the head of because most people aren't Prime Minister, but to see how power works just at a slight angle, and the small details often reveal an enormous amount, I think, and also imagine the audience can connect with it.”
“I've left me, I think, that experience of prep school with um yeah, a great suspicion of authority. If I'm told, whether it be by BBC executives or indeed we are told by the government, you know, it has to be this way. I I suppose my rebellious streak comes from seeing authority so misused.”