Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Actor, humorist, artist, cartoonist, and broadcaster who co-founded the satirical magazine Private Eye.
On the island
Eight records
It's a wonderful showbiz noise. I think it would sort of remind me that many years ago, before I got wrecked on this lone strand, that I actually was in the theatre.
The one that would, I think there's a moment of mawkishness required on my desert island. I won't listen to these records all the time, very rarely, probably, but there may come a moment when I would like a bit of deep nostalgia.
My great love in life has always been Broadway musicals, I will admit. I will go and see anything that comes out of the American musical stage. And one of the great ones, I think, was um The Music Man
Bing Crosby and Louis Armstrong
It's a very pleasant, relaxing one. It'll be good to lie on the beach and play this once a year.
I think probably the best musical ever written, I think, was Guys and Dolls. I love it madly. And this was really a sort of keen contest between either the overture again... or a marvellous song, which is very rarely sung by anybody.
Benjamin Weisman, Dorothy West and Marilyn Schack
One of the ones I do hum quite frequently, and I actually once sang this to a room full of startled women at Girton College, Oxford, I think at a cabaret night. I thought I can't be funny all the time, I'll be sexy for once.
I've never really heard all the way through. It's seven minutes long, but I've always liked the tune I find it extravagantly catchy, and the words cheer me up enormously.
I Guess I'll Have to Change My PlanFavourite
Last record is the first song I could ever sing in my life. Now, you may think this is going to be something silly like Mary Mary quite contrary, as I mean, in factual fact, it's Ambrose.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:36William, what are your feelings about a desert island?
I'm frankly terrified. I mean, the thing that really worries me is how I got there. I think I mean, I don't take ships, so it has to be a plane crash. So I see myself now, having done a Robinson Crusoe, alone on this beach, with six hundred plastic lunches.
Presenter asks
3:27Was [the school magazine at Shrewsbury] the official magazine, or some jelly press job that was private enterprise?
No, this was a before we got at it, was a very proper magazine, purely sort of sports reports and um reports of the debating society and the literary societies and visits by field marshals and that sort of thing. And um Richard Ingrams and I and Christopher Booker and Paul Fotu ultimately. moved into private eyes, had about sort of two years at it, and did change it to some degree. It became a rather livelier publication.
Presenter asks
6:14After Shrewsbury, did you go to university?
No. I would have liked to, but you required mathematics and I took O-level maths, I think. seven times and I'm I'm mathematically dyslexic, there's no doubt about it. In my last term they said, if you take biology they said um this will count. So I did a quick crash course in biology. I went into the examination, and there was a terrible thing in a bottle. And the first question was, What is this? And I put vile. And at that moment my university career is ending.
The keepsakes
The book
The Napoleon of Notting Hill and other works
G. K. Chesterton
I've never read enough of G. K. Chesterton, and I love him madly... I could work on a one-man show of Chestertoniana... everything else he wrote: The Pony of Notting Hill, the lovely books he wrote. Very funny man. As much as we can cram between two covers.
The luxury
I think the thing I would like, given a lifetime's ambition to be a Hoagie Carmichael figure in some low bar somewhere on a Pacific Island. ... I would actually try and learn the piano.
Presenter asks
8:19Did [being an articled clerk to a solicitor] interest you?
Not a lot, but what it did give me, I think, which was quite useful and everybody should do it, is some idea of how offices work. That actually you can get away with murder. I discovered being a solicitor really was just keeping up a bold front while people spoke to you about their wills or their conveyancing. And the moment they'd left the office, you rang for your managing clerk or you looked in a book on a shelf and you then sorted out what you had to do.
Presenter asks
17:31So you became a telefigure, but you threw it all up to fight an election. Was this political idealism?
This was a terrible error of judgment, actually. We were sitting in the pub, saying, What a dreadful thing Sir Alec Douglas Hume taking over. We must do something about it. He was g he was going out to Kinros in West Perthshire to um Stand for Parliament, so he can descend from the Lords back among the minions again. And while I was thinking, What on earth could we do about it? somebody threw in that somebody ought to go up there and stand against him. Then I realized all eyes were upon me, and I said, Well, all right, you know. Oh, I'll I'll do it, vaguely. I thought I'll talk about it when we get back to the office, and the drinkers worn off, and the moment we got back to the office phone rang to the evening standards, saying, We hear you're standing for Parliament against and it was too late. I said foolishly said yes.
Presenter asks
25:41Have you any manual skills that would help you [on the island]?
I'm all right. At black and decoring. And light bulbs and electric switches, but I'd be absolutely useless on Desert Island. Hopeless. I I ca I once caught a fish. I never felt so awful in my life, and I finally let it go and... I think I'd have to go vegetarian.
“I sing, I think, almost better than anybody else on earth, but there are disagreements with this. But I have rather a good bathroom baritone and an amazing repertoire.”
“I've always drawn more than I've written... I definitely committed myself then to um black and white and caricature and I still call myself a cartoonist to this day, never an artist. I'm a cartoonist, and it's a proud label to mm wear.”
“I still don't know what I'm going to be when I grow up, I don't think.”
“I think basically because I'm sort of cheap again and unscripted, I work quite well without a script. So I'm good for programmes. I don't want to expend a lot, but just fill the screens for half an hour. And my excuse for doing them is it buys you time to do all the other things.”