Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Writer of spy stories and former intelligence officer.
On the island
Eight records
I hope everybody notices the beautiful piano bit in the middle, which was the tiger ragamuffins Ivor Morton and Dave Kaye, who once pushed me aside at the stage door of the Hippodrome and made the whole of my next three months glamorous.
Love Is the Sweetest ThingFavourite
Ray Noble and His Orchestra with Al Bowlly
Not only do I like this very, very much indeed, but my aunt and my mother were very fond of this and I was always very pleased that they had moved onto something more modern because they used to swoon around about Harry Welchman and the desert song and I felt they'd made a a definite big step forward onto getting to Love is the Sweetest Thing.
I haven't heard it for a long while. I'd love it on a desert island.
Jack Waller and Joseph Tunbridge
This is one that I hadn't heard until fairly recently. I think it's absolutely beautiful.
Because of what we've been talking about, Three nine O, the first piece of music I insisted that the very first piece of music that was played both in the trial period and when it officially went on the air on Three nine O was Glen Miller's Moonlight Serenade, and uh as they say, I think it knows needs no more introduction than that.
Let's Say Good Night Till It's Morning
Jack Buchanan and Elsie Randolph
I wonder how many people will remember Jack Buchanan and El C. Randolph as an elegant, nice man, perhaps not the best singer in the world, but sang in that nice musical comedy thing, and it's called Let's Say Good Night Till It's Morning.
Sag' beim Abschied leise "Servus"
Record number seven is uh a nice Viennese song, very old-fashioned one. It's called Sach beim Apscheet Leiser Servus. It's Viennese. Oh, it's when you say goodbye, say Servus. Servus is a Viennese word, which means you're not saying goodbye forever.
Anneliese Rothenberger and Nicolai Gedda
It's from the Schadas Fürsten, the Gypsy Princess. Uh it's called Thausenkleine England Zingen, Thousand Little Angels Singing, which i isn't a very good title of the song. It goes with a real swing.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:53What did you want to be as a boy?
Left alone, I think, is the only thing I can think of. I had no ambitions. I I… If anything, I wanted to be a band leader.
Presenter asks
7:18What other sort of aptitude tests did you take for intelligence?
Oh, you took all of the normal psychiatric things where they flash pictures up on screens and you have a picture of a naked lady on a bed and a naked man and you have to write down immediately what you think it is and you've got all these healthy young men busy writing down, you know, this is a nurse attending the wounded and things like that. As you go through the ramifications of things like the intelligence score, you you get to know what what the desired answers are and you give them to them.
Presenter asks
10:35Did you sicken of the [intelligence] work?
Yes, it was jolly interesting, and it sounds a bit pious or something or other if you say you did get sick of it. Obviously, in the beginning, it's jolly interesting reading other people's letters and dashing into people's houses at two o'clock in the morning. But um it rather changed when we got to Germany… when you got to Germany it was really rather more real there. It was all being done in earnest.
The keepsakes
The book
Cyril Connolly
Cyril Connolly was a very fine writer... it's personal reminiscences.
The luxury
Packet of ten W H Smith jumbo pads and twenty-five 4B pencils
I write very quickly, yes, and I have'em already sharpened so I can sort of throw'em on one side and then have a big sharpening session.
Presenter asks
15:21How did your first book come about?
It came about because something very dud had happened in my private life. And I was very depressed and uh you know, in a proper, I suppose, medically depressed sort of stage… Gave up bothering about work because I was so unhappy. Had to do something that I could do sitting down. I wrote four chapters of a book. I never particularly wanted to be a writer, or thought that I could be one… And my partner in the public relations company took it away and showed it to a friend of his who was in publishing, who passed it on to an agent who a week later phoned me and said, Would you mind finishing that book because we've sold it to an American publisher?
Presenter asks
18:56Doing two seemingly full-time jobs, how do you plan your week?
I go into the office every day. I don't travel around as much as I used to and I don't do things that I don't like doing any more. I'm home generally by half past five or perhaps a little before… I've got a shed up the garden in in which I write… And I write from then till, say, about ten… And uh then I'll write on till one o'clock, and all day Saturday and all day Sunday.
“It is a big step I'm sure from The Rover to The New Statesman but that's the step I made and that started me reading a much wider variety of books.”
“One of the things that always used to haunt me was sitting around before going out on a raid to arrest people. That you knew they were wasting their time. They were probably arguing the toss with their wives or something, or reading some trashy book. And you felt it it ought to be possible to say, Look, fella, you know, you only got three hours left before you go in the bag. Don't waste it.”
“If you come from The less posh parts of Birmingham. You tend to feel that two incomes is better than one. Uh if you're a writer you always have the fear that you'll dry up and if you uh stick to the PR you always feel that your fellow directors might vote you off the board or something. So I I've stuck to this.”