Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Comic novelist, best known for his satirical fiction.
On the island
Eight records
I just I like Southern Jazz, I like New Orleans Jairs very much.
The African National Congress Choir
It is a song actually of the African National Congress. And I knew President Letulli, Chief Letully ... And it means God free Africa.
Johnny Dodds and the Dixieland Jug Blowers
It's one I play at home over and over again.
Because without Woodhouse's Performing Flea, a series of letters he wrote to Bill Townsend, a friend of his, I doubt if I'd written anything after the first two books. It is a wonderful book. I think it's a wonderful book about how to write.
Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor, K. 466Favourite
Alfred Brendel, Academy of St Martin in the Fields, conducted by Neville Marriner
I play a lot of Mozart. Were I to be stuck on this island for forty years? I'd want some mozzare, but I wouldn't want too much, because by the time I came off it I'd have come to loads of men, if I ever got of it. I'd never be able to listen to it again.
It's that one where that woman blatters on about love.
In conversation
Presenter asks
3:24Did your father's [Nazi] ideas influence you?
Yes, horribly. Oh, yes.
Presenter asks
6:44Did the discipline [in the Royal Marines] worry you?
Well, it only worried me in so far as I went always went on the flank ... Because your uniform wasn't smart enough. It wasn't that. I was the only public school boy in in fifty men ... and they were just knocking the hell out of me, which was a very good thing to do. I see. I was an extremely arrogant young man.
Presenter asks
10:27What did you do when you got a job [in South Africa]?
Because I'd been to Cambridge, I was obviously an educated man, and they put me on the current account books ... Well, after the first month I'd lost thirty six thousand five hundred and fifty five pounds.
Presenter asks
11:10What was the Non-European Affairs Department in Johannesburg?
The keepsakes
The book
The Oxford Book of English Verse
Arthur Quiller-Couch
The old one. The one you can learn things off by heart and repeat to yourself as you stalk across the moors.
The luxury
I thought about this and I ought to give up snuff, but I think I'd take a ton of snuff.
It's the organisation which runs the black townships ... social work, yes, but I mean they were doing a great many other things. Yes. Collecting rents, uh, sending people back to where they'd never come from. implementing a part type. about which I knew nothing.
Presenter asks
13:59What did the Special Branch do to you [after your play was performed in London]?
Well, they didn't do anything to begin with. They raided the house and they went through all the books that I had there, turned everything upside down ... I mean they were trying to put the frighteners on. Yes.
Presenter asks
14:34What were the conditions like in the jail?
Well, very interesting ... my advice if you do go to jail is do pick a murderer, because a murderer is, first of all, he's very clean, and he's not a professional criminal, is he? ... And I was in a cell with four other men in Cape Town, two of whom were murderers.
“I saw the Belson films, and I discovered that Hitler was not the man I had been led to believe that he was. I mean, you know, in other words, my my mind was blown, really. By the horror of what what what had been happening.”
“You see, one's opinions are implicit. In the situation they're not explicit, if it's explicit, it's propaganda.”
“I say throw the book out the window. A book and a and a film are two different things. Totally different.”