YouSaid · the spoken record

Gyles Brandreth

lines on the record: 45
first: 2011-01-09
most recent: 2011-01-09
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

“So we could toss for that. I would urge you to take the Michelangelo. Would you? I would. Would you Okay, since it's you and like to please other people, I'll take the Michelangelo, but my gosh I shall miss the cappuccino. All right. And if I had to ask you to just pick one of the eight discs to see, which one would it be? Well, as I arrived this morning, it was definitely going to be Lawrence Olivier giving the speech to the Senate from Othello, but listening to it again, it's going to have to be my friend, Simon It's yours. Charles Brandt, thank you very much for letting us hear your desert island discs. Thank you very much.”
2011-01-09 · Desert Island Discs · Gyles Brandreth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was John Reid from the Doily Cart Opera Company and the High Aesthetic Line from Patience by Gilbert and Sullivan. So then, Charles, I'm going to give you, of course, as you know, the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare. You're going to make good use of both of them, I gather. What's the other book going to be? The complete plays of Anton Chekov because I fell in love with the theatre I think properly seeing the production of Uncle Vania with Laurence Olivier and Michael Redgrave and Chekhov's plays well they're just wonderful so I want to read them and I want to learn them by heart It's yours and the luxury The luxury I am torn. I've just come back from the Vatican and I came face to face with Michelangelo's Pietar in St. Peter's. It's either going to be Michelangelo's Pieta or a Cappuccino machine.”
2011-01-09 · Desert Island Discs · Gyles Brandreth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Died age one hundred and one, and this lovely old gentleman had been a friend of Oscar Wilde. So I've shaken the hand that shook the hand that wrote the importance of being earnest. And this takes me back to the fifties when my parents first took me to the Savoy Theatre to see Doily Cart, I loved patience. It's the opera that satirizes Oscar Wilde and the aesthetic movement.”
2011-01-09 · Desert Island Discs · Gyles Brandreth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think maybe now I might be able to play I mean I did Malvolio at Edinburgh a couple of years ago and enjoyed it and found it a satisfying thing to do so I think probably on your desert island that was my plan to do the great Shakespeare parts have the repertoire ready and to have one of the books of the New Testament learnt by heart so I'd come back from my time on your desert island fully prepared Yes I don't doubt you could manage it. Let's hear your final disc then, Giles. What is it? My final disc in a way takes me right back to the beginning. It's John Reed with the Doycart Company singing from the Opera Patience. I'm a huge Gilton Sullivan fan. I'm now writing a series of Victorian murder mysteries featuring Oscar Wilde as my detective at the school where Simon Cadell and I were boys. The founder of the school was an old man called John Badley born in eighteen sixty three and we knew him in the nineteen sixties.”
2011-01-09 · Desert Island Discs · Gyles Brandreth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I'll fare extremely well, because you're going to equip me with the complete works of Shakespeare, with which I'm quite familiar. I shall be learning a number of roles, so that I'm ready when I'm rescued the ship going back. I know I'll have to work my passage by doing my traditional stuff, you know, on the cruise back, but when I return, I shall be turning up at the National saying I have now mastered these parts. I know you think I'd be an excellent polonius, but I could actually do Claudius and I have learnt it. Do you think you could be a great actor? I could be a better actor now. When I was young, I couldn't have done it, and I may be still don't have the great actors have such technical gifts the precision. But I think there is something fascinating about becoming someone else. I wake up in the morning thinking I would love to be able to play Uncle Vanya. That's if you want to know what I would like to do. I would like to play Uncle Vanya.”
2011-01-09 · Desert Island Discs · Gyles Brandreth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was Andrew Wadsworth and Schoner White singing with so little to be sure of from sometimes anyone can whistle as you say the cast recording of Zip. I'm going to send you away, of course, to the island, all on your own. I mean you'll have the words, you'll have a little bit of music. How will you fare?”
2011-01-09 · Desert Island Discs · Gyles Brandreth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was adequate, he was adequate. And then I thought I don't just want to be in that. I wouldn't mind being in, as well as my affiliate, I wouldn't mind doing a bit of Saturdays. And what about a bit of Andrew Lloyd Webber? And then I thought, I could be Judy Garland. And so I created this show called Zip, and we did a hundred musicals in a hundred minutes, and if we didn't succeed, we gave the audience their money back. And every night during the show, we had a sondime moment. And here is Andrew C. Wadsworth, who was our leading man in the show from the start, and Shona White, I heard this time and again hundreds and hundreds of times. And I think I've never been happier.”
2011-01-09 · Desert Island Discs · Gyles Brandreth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh good, as we move into the third hour of the programme. When I lost my seat as an MP, I my wife said Do whatever you want to do now, do all the things you'd hope to do, and one of the things I'd always wanted to do is I'd wanted to play Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady. And unfortunately, I think Jonathan Price was playing into the National Theatre.”
2011-01-09 · Desert Island Discs · Gyles Brandreth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, and what is interesting is that I'd completely forgotten that until I reread the diaries, rereading the diaries for publication was a horrible experience, in fact, and I'd completely blot it out that this had happened. You know, you don't actually remember the truth, and the truth was, and clearly I observed it at the time, that my father, through the nineteen fifties and nineteen sixties, was really very oppressed by money worries, and I would be in the same position myself, I think, were it not for my wife Michel, and she sorts out all the financial side of things. So I have avoided that by having a brilliant wife who, beautiful and brilliant wife, who is also a brilliant manager. My father didn't have that, so my parents were financially pressed all their lives, and my father died with next to next to nothing.”
2011-01-09 · Desert Island Discs · Gyles Brandreth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My father died quite a few years ago. My father had been told by a gypsy fortune teller when he was a teenager that he would die at seventy one, and he talked a lot about this and when he was seventy one he died. He also died at seventy one because he smoked all his life, and he was a wonderful person. And a gentleman of his generation, he was a successful lawyer. He wasn't good with money, but he was.”
2011-01-09 · Desert Island Discs · Gyles Brandreth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do you think she has. That's exactly what she was at some of them. Get on with it. God almighty, realize how old you are. Realize how young she is. For goodness sake, put yourself together, man.”
2011-01-09 · Desert Island Discs · Gyles Brandreth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She was quite a challenge and I'm still trying, you know. Forty-two years later, here we still are. She has an interesting view of me. She keeps me in my place. She thinks, and she's right that I am the world's most spoilt and self centered person. All of that is true. She feels I've had everything and haven't really appreciated it enough. And she may be right, but that's possibly why one is still questing, wanting more. One's always looking somewhere else. Someone should actually enjoy the moment more, which is why I'm loving sitting here.”
2011-01-09 · Desert Island Discs · Gyles Brandreth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is Laurence Olivier speaking a speech from Othello, the speech to the Senate. I saw Olivier perform Othello several times in the early nineteen sixties, and this is him. In fact, this was recorded, I think, while he was still rehearsing for the part of Othello. It's the speech to the Senate where Othello is explaining to the senators the kind of witchcraft he used in seducing young Desdemono.”
2011-01-09 · Desert Island Discs · Gyles Brandreth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And of course, with a lot of these superficial things that seem, and that are superficial, there was a commercial imperative. Yes, I found the National Scrabble Championship, but I ended up as a director of Spears Games. I mean, the teddy bear museum in Stratford won everyone's a delightful teddy bear museum, but I've also been selling my teddy bears on the home shopping channel down in Florida. So there are advantages to it for me.”
2011-01-09 · Desert Island Discs · Gyles Brandreth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In some ways people would say that, of course, there is a commercial imperative. When I was writing children's books, I was really quite a successful children's writer and wrote a lot of them. How many did you write? Oh, hundreds.”
2011-01-09 · Desert Island Discs · Gyles Brandreth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Did I write that? That wasn't a bleak day. I think greatness would always have eluded me because I don't have physical courage. I think probably there are days when I think, oh dear, look all these missed opportunities you were the golden boy, you had everything when you were a young man. I did have literally you could not imagine anybody with the advantages that I have had, a middle class English child born in the middle of the nineteen fifties has it all. So maybe I should indeed have achieved even more. And I think actually in terms of politics I could well have gone on and done more. I don't think necessarily gone the ultimate prizes, but I think I could still have been of more service if time hadn't been against me.”
2011-01-09 · Desert Island Discs · Gyles Brandreth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I say to him you can do both. He's got something that I haven't got. He has physical courage He served in the army, he is a very physical person, and I don't have physical courage, I'm aware of that. That is my weakness. I wouldn't be over the top first. I know that. My son would be. Physical courage is important.”
2011-01-09 · Desert Island Discs · Gyles Brandreth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I hope he's not going to give it all up. That would be madness, but he has a gift as a stand up comedian, a racantur, a storyteller, very, very different from mine, but he is, I have to tell you, sensational. I have a daughter who's a novelist, another daughter who's an economist, a son who's a barrister, and having these beautiful and gifted children obviously makes people wonder about their paternity, but makes people really realise that my wife is a truly remarkable individual.”
2011-01-09 · Desert Island Discs · Gyles Brandreth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh gosh Well I love this disc, and this is going to take you into my area of weakness as I perceive it this is a number called warning man in uniform it's from a show called The Vacies which I saw at Godolfin Elatima School where my daughter I've got three children, a boy and two girls called Bennett Cythrid and Afra why they have such amazing names because they're such amazing children. And Afra, my youngest daughter, was in this show, which is why I went to see it. But I just fell in love with the show, and I was bowled over by this particular number.”
2011-01-09 · Desert Island Discs · Gyles Brandreth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I think I was a good MP. I was a very I believe I was a good MP. When I lost my seat in nineteen ninety seven having been a member of Parliament in the great Blair clear out of Conservative MPs, I lost my seat. The people spoke. In my case they spoke in no uncertain terms, and my wife said to me, Listen to the people, Giles. They have spoken they don't want you. So I decided not to go back into politics.”
2011-01-09 · Desert Island Discs · Gyles Brandreth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, absolutely. And yet it was fascinating because to see a government collapse is also interesting. I mean, I love being an observer. I had a ringside seat. Look, I have no complaints. My life has been one long series of, you know, tomato and marmite sandwiches. I've always had what I wanted.”
2011-01-09 · Desert Island Discs · Gyles Brandreth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, I probably would have ended up as Secretary of State for the Arts because that's the way the world wags if I'd been lucky, if not Minister of State for hair pins. But in fact, if I hadn't lost my seat in 1997 and we hadn't been going into opposition for many years, I would have still been there. It was the overriding ambition of my life, not to make a noise, genuinely, but to make a difference.”
2011-01-09 · Desert Island Discs · Gyles Brandreth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Quite the reverse that's part of the job, but of course the more important part of the job is to be liked. I'm much more likely, Kirsty, to persuade you to vote with me on my side if you like me, know me, trust me, love me a little. than if I'm just some fierce barking person who twists your arm, it was the happiest experience of my life being a government whip. I loved that job, and I loved.”
2011-01-09 · Desert Island Discs · Gyles Brandreth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We shall I have many friends who are politicians, and Michelle said families and politics don't mix, don't do this while and tell the children at least teenagers. And the day my youngest daughter became a teenager, I applied to be a member of Parliament.”
2011-01-09 · Desert Island Discs · Gyles Brandreth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let's raise the tone. We're going to hear the choir of St. Paul's Cathedral singing Dear Lord and Father of Mankind. I was brought up in London, and when I was a little boy I was in two church choirs, and I was also a server at St. Stephen's Church in Gloucester Road, and I was a choir boy, and I loved being a choir boy, particularly in London. We got half a crown for weddings, and very occasionally we got a funeral, and that was worth while five shillings”
2011-01-09 · Desert Island Discs · Gyles Brandreth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the way. I have to say, if my wife knew that this was happening now, she'd be shredding the photograph, she won't be listening to the program, etc But I was happy doing that. I was very, very happy, very happy.”
2011-01-09 · Desert Island Discs · Gyles Brandreth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh dear I loved that Kirsty is holding a photograph of me dressed indeed as Judy Garland in the Wizard of Oz And this Ipirina show, and we had this as the sort of finale of me doing my Wizard of Oz moment. And I have to say I did love wearing the costume. That photograph was taken by Lord Snowden, you know, Brandworth by Snowden. I don't know at the time of taking the photograph which of the two of us was the more excited. We certainly had a fun time.”
2011-01-09 · Desert Island Discs · Gyles Brandreth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably you do. Now that I'm in my 60s myself, I realize what I had when I was in my twenties. I didn't realize it until recently. I thought it was these people, you know, were so delightful to me because I was so brilliant and amusing and intelligent and interesting to be with. No, they liked me because I was young And it's a wonderful thing to be. I think I took full advantage of being young in some ways. I wasn't young like other people in the sixties were young, but I had the best of being young in the sense that older people took to me because I was young.”
2011-01-09 · Desert Island Discs · Gyles Brandreth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is testing the acoustics. I did indeed. He actually did to be or not to be, for me personally. It was flirtation by Shakespeare, but why not? Anyway, the point of the story is this, that Michael Rograve was a very nervous person. Before the performance, before he was doing this, he was in the wings, shaking, saying he couldn't do it, his voice had gone his throat. But I forced him onto the stage, and as he stepped onto the stage everything changed. The body grew, the lights came into his eyes, they sparkled, and he was golden, and he came off and then crumpled again. And that was fascinating to behold as well, so I like seeing them when they're vulnerable as well as when they're ensong.”
2011-01-09 · Desert Island Discs · Gyles Brandreth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, that makes them more interesting. When I was an undergraduate at Oxford, I put on a production of Cinderella. I wanted for the first night to have my favourite actor come to perform the prologue, and that was Michael Redgrave, and I invited Michael Redgrave found his address and was who wrote to him, and a few days later I got a telegram from him containing just two words delighted Redgrave. Get the telegram.”
2011-01-09 · Desert Island Discs · Gyles Brandreth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What's interesting about Sam Cadell, who was very much my best friend, and who died about a dozen years ago now, we were well, we were a couple of blokes, you know, we really obsessed with ourselves, but we talked theatre stories all the time. We loved the theatre, and what was fun for us, we were teenagers, and we would talk about, you know, Sir Ralph and do our Ralph Richardson impressions and all this, and we'd compete as to who could be the better Ralph Richardson, not knowing that one day actually we would know these people, and in fact I realized now, thinking about it for this program, that all my childhood heroes, I found ways of meeting them.”
2011-01-09 · Desert Island Discs · Gyles Brandreth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I went on from my prep school to a boarding school called Be Dales, where almost as soon as I arrived at the school I met the person who became my best friend for life, a young actor called Simon Cadell, later became famous in Heidi High, Hamlet playing at the National Theatre, a wonderful actor, and I knew, I think, that his father was a theatrical agent. So I honed in on this boy. I was about fourteen, he was about twelve, and together we listened to records of you can imagine what we were like, aged twelve and fourteen, doing our impressions of Noel Card, Flanagan and Allen, and we could do the whole of my fair lady. We compete as to who was the better Henry Higgins.”
2011-01-09 · Desert Island Discs · Gyles Brandreth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yet I was an extraordinary caricature. I mean I looked like Rex Harrison from my fair lady in the nineteen sixties. Others, you know, had the dreadlocks, the curly hair, and the dope and all of that, and there I was, like a middle aged man. I notice only often in retrospect that all my choices for these records, and indeed all my references in my life are to people, personalities who would have been contemporaneous with my father, not with me.”
2011-01-09 · Desert Island Discs · Gyles Brandreth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Essentially, my father went to Oxford in the late nineteen twenties, and when I turned up at Oxford in the late nineteen sixties, I really tried to recreate the Oxford of his time. My father in the nineteen twenties at Oxford, the things to be were president of the Union, editor of ISIS, you had to direct the odds of the dramatic society. These were the things to achieve. I turned up at Oxford, and I set about achieving them immediately, and as a consequence of this, I just did it, and I ended up, in fact, while I was still undergraduate doing a TV show, as a student.”
2011-01-09 · Desert Island Discs · Gyles Brandreth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right from the beginning, but I was, I think, basically what I've done through all my life is, or certainly the first thirty or forty years, was trying to fulfil my parents' ambition for me”
2011-01-09 · Desert Island Discs · Gyles Brandreth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I mean, in the early days of keeping my diary, I wasn't conscious that I would ever be publishing it. Of course. So it is a kind of confessional...”
2011-01-09 · Desert Island Discs · Gyles Brandreth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I said that when I was interviewed in about nineteen sixty seven by the Sun newspaper. As I said the words, I knew that in my heart I wanted to be a sort of Laurence Olivier and then Prime Minister. But I was already observing myself from outside, and I thought actually make light of it, don't reveal the truth. As it turns out, I'm me, and I enjoyed being a Lord Commissioner of the Treasury. You can't win them all. I keep a diary, and last year I published extracts from the diary, and had to go through it and edit it, and I found it quite a depressing experience. Looking back, don't look back, don't relive. The promise, don't relive the disappointments. Live in the moment.”
2011-01-09 · Desert Island Discs · Gyles Brandreth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're going to hear actually, having said I'm quite a quiet person, this is a lively, lovely number. I was born in Germany and came to England in the early nineteen fifties and spoke German. And my parents had always got the gift of languages, and they couldn't, they thought they'd find a German school, but there wasn't one. So they sent me to the French Lysee. I began from the age of seven on my own, going on holiday once or twice a year to stay with families. I was taken a British European Airways, I do remember it, I had a sort of label around me, and I was given to a stewardess. I got out, in fact it was someone in Switzerland.”
2011-01-09 · Desert Island Discs · Gyles Brandreth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, if you're getting married it's actually about the person you're marrying, it's about the relationship, it's not about for me, it's not about the party, because my parents did it that way, I felt able to do it that way, and indeed some of my children got married in that way. And I was very comfortable with the way we got married. I liked it. And the truth is I think I am professionally gregarious. But actually at home I'm quite quiet. So out there I'm gregarious, but in here I'm quite a quiet person.”
2011-01-09 · Desert Island Discs · Gyles Brandreth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My parents met in the nineteen thirties, my father was a young lawyer, my mother had just come over from Canada, my grandmother was a missionary who rode around India on a donkey with a Bible, and she married an Indian army officer, and they went to Canada eventually for my mother to go to university, then they came to London, and my father in nineteen thirty seven, Christmas nineteen thirty seven, bought the first set of monopolies sold in this country, came back to his digs, and the landlady said, Well, there's a young Canadian student who's just moved in with her mother on the ground floor. Maybe go and meet them, and my father went, introduced himself, met my mother for the first time. They played monopoly, and a matter of weeks later they eloped. They ran away.”
2011-01-09 · Desert Island Discs · Gyles Brandreth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My wife would tell you that I've never left my Rupert Bear childhood. Yes, I had a lovely childhood. I was born in nineteen forty eight in Germany in a British Forces Hospital. My father was part of something called the Allied Control Commission. He was in the army, but he was also a lawyer. My mother was a housewife and later a teacher. I had three older sisters and a younger brother, and I had a perfect nineteen fifties childhood.”
2011-01-09 · Desert Island Discs · Gyles Brandreth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do recommend, if I may, no cards diaries. They are wonderful. I just love reading them. And his constant refrain is rise above it, rise above, and really nothing ever goes wrong in my life. You know, I'm just the most spoiled person on the planet. But when anything goes slightly wrong, I just say to myself Rise above it as Noel would do.”
2011-01-09 · Desert Island Discs · Gyles Brandreth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're beginning with Noel Card, who has been part of my life ever since I can remember. Music I don't think has entered my soul, my soul, my heart, my brain, my life is full of words, and Noel Card is a master of the English language. In the nineteen fifties when I was brought up I was listening to records like my fair lady's salad days, and Flanagan and Allen, and particularly Noel Card. This song written about sixty or more years ago, seems as relevant to me now as it was when it was first created.”
2011-01-09 · Desert Island Discs · Gyles Brandreth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I think, funnily enough, I've always been happy with where I am on the day. I'm quite good at living in the moment. In a sense what I try to do is whatever I do at the time I try to do it properly. So the jumpers began in the seventies and eighties when I was appearing regularly on TV, and I read somewhere that what people recollect of what they see on television is about eighty three percent what they see, the visual. I thought, well, you know, what can I do? And so I began wearing these jumpers, and to be honest, it was commercially very useful. I ended up as the director of a chain of knitting shops around the country, I did knitting books, I appeared in commercials, I appeared in panto. So it was a very profitable line. But I only actually wore them until breakfast. So it was always a costume to me. So when I became an MP, I gave away the jumpers, put on a suit, and whatever I'm doing at the time I try to do that profoundly and properly.”
2011-01-09 · Desert Island Discs · Gyles Brandreth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I accept it completely. I mean it is more than twenty years since I last wore a colourful jumper on TV, but people do remember them, and the story is true that when I turned up at the House of Commons wearing a proper, you know, grey suit to look like one of John Major's men, almost the first time I rose to speak in the commons, John Prescott clocked me, leant forward, and muttered Woolly Jumper I was thrown, he kept this up, and eventually had to point out to Mr Prescott that the joy of a woolly jumper is that you can take it off at will, whereas the blight of a woolly mind is that you're lumbered with it for life. But of course Mr Prescott got the last laugh because he became Deputy Prime Minister and is now in the House of Lords, and I am here. But I'm very happy to be here, and I don't mind the woody jumpers at all. It's just a reminder that actually once people see you in a certain light, it's very difficult to shift an image, but I don't mind, and it was fun.”
2011-01-09 · Desert Island Discs · Gyles Brandreth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source