Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Founder of JD Wetherspoon, runs around 900 pubs and employs 37,000 people; a publican and prominent Brexit advocate.
On the island
Eight records
This is a brilliant Mickey take of someone who drinks too much in a pub.
The keepsakes
In conversation
Presenter asks
3:03What's your advice about building a business and taking the team with you? About people not saying 'Oh God, here he comes'?
I think what we've learnt over the years is that what we, the directors and senior managers, know is far less than the collective intelligence of the customers and the people who work in the pubs. So it's our job to go in there, not peeve them off with our authoritarianism, speak to them and get ideas from the coalface.
Presenter asks
8:02How surprised were you at the result of the EU referendum?
I was pretty surprised. This is a egotistical story, but I was asked to be on David Dimbleby's referendum show and I dipped out at the last minute because I thought we were gonna lose.
Presenter asks
17:13You visited eleven different schools. How do you think your rather robust childhood affected the way you then parented your own kids?
It's very difficult to say. I think there's so much a natural instinct in what you do. But I never fell out with any of my children and I never even got angry with them really. But I did tell them what to do and I'm so pleased that I've got on so well with them.
The book
Anthony Powell
The luxury
I was hoping I could take a boat building kit, but I didn't think you'd allow that, so it might have to be a surfboard, I think.
Presenter asks
20:47How did you go from being a qualified barrister who didn't want to practice to opening your first pub?
Well, I'd got the absolutely insane idea after leaving university that I could become a great squash player. I read an article about a guy called Jonah Barrington, and at eighteen or nineteen he decided he was going to practice twenty four hours a day and become world champion, and he did. So I tried this and got absolutely nowhere at all. … I went back to doing my bar exams, but I had no intention of being a barrister. I thought it was a good qualification. And cutting a long story short, someone had converted a bookies into a pub just down the road, and they said you should go there for a pint, it's really good. … I started going there while I was doing my bar exams, and the guy decided he wanted out, and I took over his eight year lease of a pub that was the size of your studio.
Presenter asks
26:17What would be your one or two bits of advice to young people who want to start their own business?
A lot of people tell young people it's a great thing to do, but it's only a great thing to do if you've got the right personality to do it. If you haven't got the right personality and you're not a bit of a maniac, it's probably best to give it a miss. But if you do do it, the main characteristic is persistence and listen. It's not what the guy who's running the business thinks, it's what everyone else thinks, and that needs to be absorbed and distilled by successful business people.
Presenter asks
29:37What was it like for you stepping back from work and focusing on something so entirely, intensely personal [caring for your disabled grandchild]?
Well, nothing can stop me thinking about pubs. So even when I was lying on the floor rolling with my grandson, I was still plotting and planning. So yeah, it's nice to do something different like that.
“Immigration is a good thing, but you don't need to give your democracy away in order to have what you want.”
“I had this feeling from when I was a kid, slightly nutty feeling, that if I wanted to do something, I definitely could do it.”
“I was just such a pain for the teachers in Campbell College. I blush when I think about my balshy behaviour, but I was the only guy they had who was six foot six and sixteen stone in the rugby team. So they needed me.”
“I'm sixty two. I'm hoping to work for another forty, fifty years and then have a long retirement. I've been accused of not being realistic.”
“I would struggle on an island. There's no pubs.”
“I'd want to get the hell out as quickly as I could.”