Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Fantasy author best known for the bestselling Discworld series of satirical novels.
On the island
Eight records
Symphonie Fantastique (5th movement: Dream of a Witches' Sabbath)
London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Sir Eugene Goossens
the first time I I heard Symphony Fantastique I got that icy shiver. Which which it tells me that I'm listening to good music. and uh when the Diaz Eere rings out and the witches begin to dance, by then I was just sitting there in the chair, transfixed.
Thomas the RhymerFavourite
I've always been a bit of a folky. The first folk album I ever bought was a Steel Eye Span one and I've collected everything of theirs ever since. And I was particularly thrilled when I heard their version of Thomas the Rhymer, where Thomas the the Bard is taken away by the Queen of the Elves.
The Race for the Rheingold Stakes
I heard this record when I was about eleven or twelve and and It it is probably in it in its in a sense one of the ancestors of Discworld. It it is just a beautifully drawn-out joke which initially appears to be going on for too long, and and then merely because it's going on for so long, becomes even funnier.
Voi che sapete (from The Marriage of Figaro)
Petra Lang, with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra conducted by Nikolaus Harnoncourt
When I heard the Arieta Voce Sepete for the first time, I just burst out laughing. It it just sounded so right. I have no musical vocabulary to describe why I like things. It's just you get that white hot line searing across your brain and you know you are listening to genius.
All I can offer the court is that one day I was driving along the motorway, this came on, and by the time it was over, I was considerably further along the motorway and wasn't quite certain how I'd got there.
Many years ago there was a a series on television very late at night called The Silk Road, and I very much enjoyed the music from this. And I remember sitting down one day putting the C D on and just sitting back and and and for three quarters of an hour I simply unraveled.
It took me a long time to discover this, but I love deserts. And Three or four years ago, I went on holiday to Australia. And the piece of music which says Australia to me is Great Southern Land by Icehouse.
Itzhak Perlman, with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra
And I remember when I first heard Itjak Pearlman playing Vivaldi's Four Seasons. And there's a point in summer where he makes the the violin sing like an angel and then curse like a demon. I I got into Vivaldi just because of a few notes of music.
In conversation
Presenter asks
3:16Did you know in your bones, somehow, that you were writing about something that other people would find attractive [when you wrote the first Discworld book]?
No, I didn't. I wish I could say that I that that I did. I I wrote it as an antidote to to what I called the belike he will wax wroth school of fantasy. At that time there there was a lot of fantasy written by the people who had been influenced by the people who had been influenced by the people who had been influenced by Tolkien. … And much to my surprise, what started off as a parody of fantasy became a a a fantasy series in its own right.
Presenter asks
13:53Why do you think you attract those kinds of terms [like fatuous and amateur from critics]?
The odd thing is, bad reviews normally attack my readers rather than me, you know, Anorax and and and uh … Nerds, that sort of thing. As if nerds are a bad word. I mean, nerds are the only people that know how to operate the video.
Presenter asks
14:19Isn't there a certain disdain for the genre of fantasy?
Yes, I think so. And I I think I'd have done better had had I declared that I was writing magical realism, because magical realism is fantasy in a collar and tie. But I've said I write fantasy, and it's and it's the it is the oldest literature. It is the literature that underpins all the other genres of which Booker Prize-winning books are a particular type of genre.
The keepsakes
The book
Edible Plants of the South Seas
Now I know you disapprove, but I'm a fairly practical person and I realize that behind every plant that we now eat there are all the unsung cavemen that proved that the other ones were poisonous.
The luxury
Cheating, I know, but the Chrysler Building from New York, built in nineteen thirty, it's a marvellous piece of Gothic art deco with Eagles' heads and gargoyles and a summit which looks like some kind of Isoldo cinema and just this marvellous silver creation. It's the ultimate skyscraper.
Presenter asks
15:50When did you decide to become a writer, Terry? Was there a moment when you thought, I could do that?
I became a reader fairly late in my childhood when I was about 10 or 11 and I discovered science fiction and fantasy and that led me into other things. When I was thirteen I persuaded my parents to let me go to a science fiction convention. … and not long afterwards I was in the gents and standing next to me was Arthur C. Clarke … And I realised that writers weren't some distant beings on a cloud somewhere and very soon afterwards an opportunity arose at school. When a teacher asked us to write short a short story for English, and I wrote one, which she liked, and it got put in the school magazine, and the kids liked it.
Presenter asks
17:22What did your parents think of this very bookish son they seem to have given birth to?
I oh, yes, I I I I conned the library staff. I worked there on Saturdays for no reward, at least so they thought. And what I used to do was was write myself out hundreds of free tickets, and I think sometimes half the books in the library ended up on my shelves at home. … But no one was telling me what I should read and what I shouldn't read, and my parents weren't. that they thought if I was reading that was a good thing.
Presenter asks
28:57Will you miss the fame and the material comforts that all of this success has provided?
No. I hope it's a nice warm desert island with plenty of opportunities for just sitting there and looking out at at sea. I think for a writer, fame is something that happens on the outside. It it doesn't affect you very much because you you're always sitting down and things are taking place in in the space behind your eyes and the reviews and and all all the rest of it happen to somebody else, some kind of outer shell. So no, I don't think that will um I don't think I'll miss that at all.
“It's very hard to get across the Terror. with which you sit down and tackle that first page. And it doesn't matter how many books you've done. Before. Every new book is a first book.”
“I don't know what literature is, but literature is clearly a vote taken probably after you are dead. I don't think I write literature. I think I write I hope I write entertaining books that are good value for money.”
“I think I'd have done better had had I declared that I was writing magical realism, because magical realism is fantasy in a collar and tie. But I've said I write fantasy, and it's and it's the it is the oldest literature.”
“I enjoy writing. I really do. And I would get in fact I do get very neurotic if I am not writing. So I I'm not doing it out of of some kind of stern Puritan ethic. I'm doing it now as a as a a reflex action, as as naturally as as putting on my trousers in the morning.”