Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
A distinguished playwright.
On the island
Eight records
Careless LoveFavourite
Bessie Smith with Louis Armstrong
Blues was the first kind of music which was more than background to me. It's the first music I ever felt emotional about. I've chosen Careless Love, but I could have chosen forty others.
On Friday nights, I think it was, a band called the Avon Cities Jazz Band used to play in a little kind of hut stroke house on a hillside somewhere near Bristol... I remember sitting underneath Ray Bush's clarinet, quite happy that the spittle should be dropping down onto my head. I was so carried away by the lovely noise they made.
I've always loved The Beatles. And I wanted one Beatle number. And I think that I ought to choose Love Me Do, which I associate with an interesting time of my life.
Original Broadway Cast of West Side Story
This is a record which encompasses mixed feelings about America, mostly positive. It also encompasses my great liking for the American musical, and it also encompasses my liking for deft wit, and finally my friendship with Stephen Sondheim, who wrote the lyric for this
In the case of Travesties, [Peter Wood] had the thought that ragtime music would work very well with a play... One of the pieces we used was a piece called Graceful Ghost, played by William Balcombe, who I think also is the composer of it.
Every Good Boy Deserves Favour
London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by André Previn
I've chosen some of Andrei's music. It's the part which I liked most in Every Good Boy.
Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis
Academy of St Martin in the Fields conducted by Sir Neville Marriner
I try to think of the most English sound one can possibly have, and... quite quickly got to Vaughan Williams... I would solace or torture myself by having the most English noise I could think of musically.
I'm not actually keen on modern jazz, and I have to say that I've never heard of this chap until his music was provided for my play. He's called Keith Jarrett, and this is a piece of his Cologne concert. And the moment I heard it, I loved it.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:35Could you adjust to loneliness?
I don't have to adjust in a sense because I I like being on my own sometimes and I'm not somebody who I think would go mad being alone.
Presenter asks
3:12How much of this [childhood in Czechoslovakia, Singapore, and India] do you remember?
Not at all. My first memories, and they're very slight, are of Singapore. My real memory begins in India.
Presenter asks
4:47Did you take to the prep school system?
Yes, I mean I'd been boarding since I'd gone to school... And I took to it well enough. I didn't enjoy either prep school or my subsequent school all that much... But actually I was quite glad to leave school finally.
Presenter asks
12:48What was the Ford Foundation scheme in Berlin for?
Well, the idea was that um Berlin being cut off from the civilized world had to be kept culturally alive and various institutions would pay well known artists to live there for a year and and paint in Berlin rather than in New York. And they also had the scheme where young writers were brought in in small groups.
The keepsakes
The book
Dante Alighieri
I'd like one of those books which has the English text on one page and the translation on another page, or vice versa, as it were, because what I thought I'd do is I'd I'd have something like Dante's Inferno in English and the original, and that way I'd go some way to learn a language.
The luxury
I tend to go into the garden and kick a plastic football around, not at random. The idea is to kick it up and down without the ball ever touching the ground. And I think my record is about 22, you know, from one foot to the other. And I'd like a plastic football, and probably I'd get into the hundreds by the time I'd left the island.
Presenter asks
28:41How are you going to be able to look after yourself practically [on the island]?
Yes, I could do that. They'd fall down after a while. I was in the scouts, come to think of it.
“I played the triangle in a percussion band in the main square of Darjeeling in northern India around nineteen forty four.”
“I have an intense empathy for England, landscape, architecture, language. I feel Very English. I wouldn't want to live anywhere else, and I love England.”
“I think death by water is worse than death by sand and sun.”