YouSaid · the spoken record

Barry Humphries

lines on the record: 36
first: 2009-05-24
most recent: 2009-05-24
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“The luxury has to be my paints because there'll be some very good subject on the island. And it's the thing I enjoy doing most.”
2009-05-24 · Desert Island Discs · Barry Humphries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I was amused to learn that when James Joyce was in Triest He took with him only one book, and that was the Street Directory of Dublin. So I will take the Melbourne Street Directory, and each page will have a memory for me. An old girlfriend, a school chum, a bicycle ride, a That will be my companion, and since I am unlikely ever to find my way back to Melbourne from that desert island, that will be my spiritual companion.”
2009-05-24 · Desert Island Discs · Barry Humphries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sitting there in Melbourne before I ever came to Britain. I would listen on my wonderful grammophone, and I would play very often the music of Frederick Delius, who seemed to me the most English composers. And what he did I discovered was to set to music in a song cycle the poems of Ernest Dawson, one of my favourite poets, and the last song, a very brief one, they are not long The Weeping and the Laughter, Love and Dire and Hate I think they have no portion in us after we pass the gate They are not long the days of wine and roses. out of a misty dream our path emerges for a while then closes within a dream This is Delius' setting of that verse.”
2009-05-24 · Desert Island Discs · Barry Humphries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it would be pretty well a catalogue of excessive compliments. It would just say what a very nice person I am, and what a generous hearted person, a sentimental person I am. And it wouldn't make any reference to Edna at all.”
2009-05-24 · Desert Island Discs · Barry Humphries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No suddenly about fifteen years have passed too quickly And I've not done certain things But I hope that I'll write a few more books. And I hope That they're not too nasty in the telegraph when they write my obituary. I really would like an opportunity to write it myself.”
2009-05-24 · Desert Island Discs · Barry Humphries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, they do say It's a sign of insanity if you do the same thing and expect different results. Well, of course I am slightly insane, but I'm very, very happy with my present situation.”
2009-05-24 · Desert Island Discs · Barry Humphries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I lived in a flat sometime in the early seventies in Mount Street Mayfair. And as I walk down Mount Street, I passed a bell in a door and it said Spolliansky. and I knew that Misha Spolyansky was a famous composer of popular songs and shows in Berlin in those very creative years before Hitler. I pressed the doorbell, and indeed it was the flat belonging to Mishus Bolansky and his wife, a wonderful guy, and I said I'd like to commission you, Misha, to write a song for Edna. So there'd be a very nice bookend, wouldn't it, to your career? You wrote for Marlena Dietrich, and then late in your career, you wrote a song for Demetna, the Marlena Dietrich, after all, of the seventies So he said, what kind of song? And so I sang him a song, and he said, Look, that'll do, you don't need me so that was that, unfortunately.”
2009-05-24 · Desert Island Discs · Barry Humphries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As I did in the old days, look through a whole moth hole in the curtain and see if there are enough people sitting there to start the show.”
2009-05-24 · Desert Island Discs · Barry Humphries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I had a bit, but they too had grown more receptive to what is called strangely enough, British humour. So I had a failure there and reminded me of my failure at the establishment club years before. But it didn't I didn't take it to heart. I just thought I'll never perform in America again. And you know I waited nearly twenty five years before I went back there. And then I booked a theatre in San Francisco for two weeks. The season when for four months I went to Broadway, I won the Tony Award, and now I have this strange experience of being popular in America. I can fill theatres, I don't have to go anywhere else. I can just tour the United States”
2009-05-24 · Desert Island Discs · Barry Humphries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of my favourite composers is Francis Poulanc. He is the spirit of France and of joy. has also in his beautiful music a whiff of melancholy, which I like very much in art, and you hear it, I think, to perfection in this second movement of Poulanc's sonata for flute and piano.”
2009-05-24 · Desert Island Discs · Barry Humphries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I probably realised it, I think at the end of that decade of the sixties. And I just realised there was no future in it for me, you know, it was sort of I'd done all you could do with alcohol, except die. And thereafter, you know, things really took off in a wonderful way. It was as though I'd been driving. a car with a handbrake on.”
2009-05-24 · Desert Island Discs · Barry Humphries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nearly all of this. Going, and I look back on it, some of the things that I did during my drinking years with fatuous self satisfaction. But to other things I avert the memory. Luckily, of course, if you drink to excess, you have what's called occasional blackouts where you don't remember anything, probably just as well nature's way of protecting you from the full horror and consequences of your actions. So it's been part of one's life I don't ever think I would want to change my own history. Luckily I survived it. So many don't. But remember in the nineteen sixties, as I said, everyone seemed to be indulging in something or other someone's behaviour one thought was not conspicuous.”
2009-05-24 · Desert Island Discs · Barry Humphries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I was addicted to alcohol for about fifteen years of my life. And everyone seemed to be doing it, you know. But I persisted giving alcohol a second chance in my life so many times I sometimes think alcoholism is a disorder of the memory. You wake up in the morning groaning and you say never again and by lunchtime you're on to your second Beaujola or whiskin soda or not even soda.”
2009-05-24 · Desert Island Discs · Barry Humphries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My next choice is rather dark, very dark and bleak. I am a war child in a way because I remember vividly the Second World War, and in devastated Berlin Right at the end of the war, with Russian tanks entering the centre of the city. Recording studios were at least one of them was still operating. Peter Anders A Great Tenor Recorded Shubat's song cycle The Winterizer The Winter Journey The last song in the cycle The organ grinder is perhaps the most tragic of all Schubert songs. And it reminds me of that other side of the German temperament the other side from brutality from the insanity of war was a profoundity which this song exhibits, I think.”
2009-05-24 · Desert Island Discs · Barry Humphries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was very lucky to meet the people I did, particularly Peter Cook. We became friends, Peter and I saw more of each other, and he invited me to appear in his new club, cutting edge it was. It was called the establishment, and it was the most outrageous, fashionable place to be. And I was a terrible failure at the establishment, because I did my Australian act. I even did a bit of Edna. She wasn't Dame Edna then, and it didn't go down very well. So I thought that's it. That's my London career over. And then Joan Littlewood, who was then very famous theatre director, invited me to Stratford East. her little theatre and spike ask me to join his company. So I was established, and I had two young children, and a new, lovely wife, and all looked very rosy.”
2009-05-24 · Desert Island Discs · Barry Humphries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We had pictures of Winston Churchill behind the kitchen door on the calendar. There wasn't a single Australian tree in our suburb. They were all silver birches, elms, oak trees even. So everything good came from England.”
2009-05-24 · Desert Island Discs · Barry Humphries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, there was a hankering, of course, for England, the old country, or home, as it was often called, because I had grandparents who were English, my paternal grandfather came from Lancashire. He went back for the coronation, he and my grandmother sailed back to England for the coronation. And I just wanted contact with antiquity, with something that was old. You see to have been brought up in Melbourne in those years well, it was just also nice. It was all so spotlessly clean, orderly and proper. I wanted to forsake, if possible, respectability and cleanliness and all those mod cons that I've been brought up to believe were so important. In my heart never quite. And you know, I still feel nostalgia for those days which I found so oppressively dull. Back in my hometown,'cause Melbourne pretended to be part of the home counties.”
2009-05-24 · Desert Island Discs · Barry Humphries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I first came to London, the first theatre I went to was the Metropolitan Theatre in the Edgeware Road. There on the bill were many of the artists that I'd listened to as a child on old records. Still doing their acts but at a great age. The audience were ancient, mostly women, many of them had taken things with them do like knitting. One woman next to me was shelling peas into a colander. We joined this crowd, and the act that impressed me most was an old guy called Randolph Sutton, who'd been in the music hall for many, many years, and when he sang his great hit number Mother Kelly's doorstep, the whole audience joined in. It was like a prayer”
2009-05-24 · Desert Island Discs · Barry Humphries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I think you can call it performance art because I felt I had to somehow influence people's lives as art should, or at least give them another view of life, and so I used to do stunts. These usually took place on trains. I realized that this was a captive audience if they're sitting in the compartment, and there's a strange man in the corner eating breakfast. Then the train would stop at the next station, the window would open, and an accomplice of mine would hand in the grapefruit at the next station the toast, then the eggs, finally the coffee before we got into town. There would be no explanation for this, but people were stunned at the sight of this little gesture of mine. It was attention seeking, but it was also, of course, very private. It was a private joke. between me and my accomplice”
2009-05-24 · Desert Island Discs · Barry Humphries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it was there was very stern disapproval of that step that I took which I think was totally stupid, but it seemed to be the only way I can get out of living at home. So I had a young wife, the beginnings of a career in comedy, and I was living in the big, wicked city of Sydney.”
2009-05-24 · Desert Island Discs · Barry Humphries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I think if I do caterish figure, Kirsty, it's because I am a bit rakish. The more I struggle to be respectable, the more disreputable I seem to look. I've always had quite long lank, fine hair. Luckily it's only going grey in bits. I have about five grey hairs on my left nipple. and only three on the right A woman said to me the other day that she found a man with grey hair in his nostrils rather distinguished. I wrote it down immediately and just put it in a book.”
2009-05-24 · Desert Island Discs · Barry Humphries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A third piece of music is a most beautiful tune. It's nothing subtle, but it's a beautiful tune called Love Song. And it's by Joseph Suk, a Czechoslovakian composer, who happened also to be the son in law of Vorsac. So I suppose this was composed in the early years of the twentieth century, and we'd hear it now in all its beauty”
2009-05-24 · Desert Island Discs · Barry Humphries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, there was the word disappointment was used a lot where disappointed in your father is very disappointed in you. You've disappointed us. She was very good too with theatrical reviews. For example, if I'd done a show which got very good notices, she would find the negative one. She would be chastening. I look back on it now and laugh, but at the time I realized that she was impossible to please, and so for some time and every now and then I would project this onto the women in my life and feel you know, this is one of those another one of those unpleasable beings.”
2009-05-24 · Desert Island Discs · Barry Humphries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, my mother was a strong personality, she was an intelligent woman, wasted, really, because she lived in this Melbourne suburb in a big house with plenty of domestic help. And yet unfulfilled. So her sense of humour was rather a cynical one. She was also extremely shy, I think. and attempted to conceal this, and I feel that she had a sad and unfulfilled life, though of course she had four children. with whom she didn't properly connect.”
2009-05-24 · Desert Island Discs · Barry Humphries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it was some kind of primitive compulsion to express myself in some way, to find a voice for myself. I didn't have one. In spite of my cleverness I was very apprehensive about growing up, about living in the world of adults.”
2009-05-24 · Desert Island Discs · Barry Humphries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is a Very spoiled I just had to look at something and my parents would buy it for me. I don't think it was good for me that every request was granted. It made me seek in later life instant gratification. And that did me no good at all”
2009-05-24 · Desert Island Discs · Barry Humphries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I consider Fred Stare to be one of the great artists of the twentieth century. Fred Estare was not just a great dancer, but he was also a splendid singer, and he interpreted the songs of Gershwin, one of my very favourite composers perfectly. Things are looking up lyric by Ira Gershwin recorded in nineteen thirty seven. A year in which the clouds of war were already gathering.”
2009-05-24 · Desert Island Discs · Barry Humphries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When you did have an audience, I must say that I usually had an audience of aunts. I had a lot of aunties, and I suppose inventing a character like Dame was instigated by these all these women who began by peering into my cot and ended up clapping and applauding when I sang at a little family gathering. But I did say to my mother I'll sing if I can hide behind the curtains. So I would stand behind the drawing room curtains and to use my own phrase pretend to be the wireless. That was my initial acting performance.”
2009-05-24 · Desert Island Discs · Barry Humphries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was in the cheer up business. Well, that came to me. I didn't really seek to please people. People were absolutely delighted. by my existence. I must have radiated something. In fact, I was very nervous as a performer, as a child performer. I was very rarely in plays or shows because I was too nervous, and even today I am frightened. Excessively nervous before I go on stage. It's an inexplicable life it's one I didn't choose. It chose me. I stumbled into my theatrical life. And I suppose I wouldn't have it any other way. But I do enjoy the other things that I do privately.”
2009-05-24 · Desert Island Discs · Barry Humphries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, my kind of art, if you could call it that, is cheering people up. To be in the cheering up business is very gratifying. I always love the work of comedians in particular. I was first exposed to them as a child in Melbourne because during the Second World War we had programs on the radio where comedians, old British comedians generally speaking, did their acts, and they were played in far off Melbourne and listened to avidly by little Barry crouching beside his parents' radio.”
2009-05-24 · Desert Island Discs · Barry Humphries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Make you cry Oh, I think I am, probably. I wouldn't have the funny job that I've got if I didn't have strong emotions of one kind or another. I really love art of all forms. I think this is the great expression of the human spirit.”
2009-05-24 · Desert Island Discs · Barry Humphries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My first piece of music is an extract from the most wonderful opera De Rosen Cavalier of Richard Strauss. It's my favourite opera and my very favourite pieces of music and two great friends of mine, Kiri Takanova and Renee Fleming, both sung the major role of the Countess And It's a spine tingling moment in the opera the presentation of the rose and no I very rarely cry but whenever this happens and I'm at a performance of this opera I for some reason burst into tears I can't explain it's just an emotional overload”
2009-05-24 · Desert Island Discs · Barry Humphries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I really am a compulsive bibliomaniac. And it really represents my desire for ballast, you know, have something that will finally be so heavy I'll have to stay in one place”
2009-05-24 · Desert Island Discs · Barry Humphries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no, if I were offered one of my own paintings by an art dealer, I never speak to him again. But good for me, it's good therapy for me. My book collection since you last counted it has gone up by about five thousand.”
2009-05-24 · Desert Island Discs · Barry Humphries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, an accomplished painter if I remember rightly, I added that epithet accomplished to my own. But I look at my own works with tremendous profound, unashamed admiration. And people buy them.”
2009-05-24 · Desert Island Discs · Barry Humphries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I went down to Cornwall Most wonderful place, not England at all. I went out walking with my wife on a February morning across some frozen fields, stepping across a very cold little brook, I slipped on a stone, and I found myself almost laughing as I slid down this icy stream, which unfortunately flowed over a cliff. I found myself seconds later sitting on a ledge with a disticated shoulder and a broken arm. I stayed there for half a day until I was rescued by what seemed to be the entire cast of the pirates of Pensax. So I've had the grim reaper very close to me, which is important to remember when I'm feeling too pleased with myself.”
2009-05-24 · Desert Island Discs · Barry Humphries · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source