YouSaid · the spoken record

Jill Balcon

lines on the record: 52
first: 2007-10-14
most recent: 2007-10-14
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 reason I'm laughing is that on New Year's Day a lot of us get together who are friends. And one particular person who comes who's called Terrance Albright. We were playing the game round the table on New Year's Day about the luxury, and before I could speak, Terry said, Oh, I know what Jill's going to choose. I couldn't even open my mouth. He said scent. Well, I can't let him down, so what I'm going to ask for is a barrel of Gerlin's Jiki.”
2007-10-14 · Desert Island Discs · Jill Balcon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh my final piece of music is the glorious glorious Ella Fitzgerald and Cole Porter. I love her voice and co porter Cecil always thought the same. I mean he's such a poet, I mean the worse it's not just the music which I adore which I do and tune after tune after tune how do they do it? And I wanted something that was fun So here's Ella”
2007-10-14 · Desert Island Discs · Jill Balcon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“style they're so stylish he was on very little money one of the most elegant people he was Not just beautiful to look at but stylish and both of them, I mean it can be a t shirt or whatever it happens to be, they have such elegance. And so many gifts”
2007-10-14 · Desert Island Discs · Jill Balcon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of both of your children. That is so sad, I mind about it so much and I know they do. It's so sad he never saw his grandchildren, there are six of them. It is sad.”
2007-10-14 · Desert Island Discs · Jill Balcon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I went to see a movie in which my son had played the lead in a film of the unbearable likeness of being, and the score of the film was all Yanacek, different works, and I was not sideways I came out into Leicester Square was still daylight I was absolutely knocked sideways it was so exciting and that's how it began and it was a great experience”
2007-10-14 · Desert Island Discs · Jill Balcon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There were times when I felt am I just another in the chain, I just happened to be lucky in that I was married to him and had two wonderful children, but It's very difficult, being exposed and exposing him and trying to be truthful. which I have tried to be.”
2007-10-14 · Desert Island Discs · Jill Balcon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, because a lot of other people had kept letters, had archives. said words which may not be true but which hurt me very much but the affair or the affairs and of course I can't ask him He would have been very reassuring, I'm sure he wouldn't have wanted to hurt he never did That's what happens.”
2007-10-14 · Desert Island Discs · Jill Balcon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The sense To both, you are absolutely right. I mean, it's a mixture. It's a comfort and it's very painful. I've just worked for three and a half years with Peter Stanford, who's written the biography. I couldn't have been luckier with a biographer, but I've had to trawl through my past and It is difficult The biographer begins by going round everywhere and tapping everywhere for information. And in the end that biographer finds out things that the family don't know and which are extremely painful.”
2007-10-14 · Desert Island Discs · Jill Balcon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've tried to, I don't know that I've been very successful, I've edited the posthumous, the complete, and the selective book. whether it makes any difference, I don't know”
2007-10-14 · Desert Island Discs · Jill Balcon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know that he was ever happy, but he realised how ill Cecil was and eventually what was going to happen, though it was not to be discussed at first, and he was wonderful to me, and we were friends.”
2007-10-14 · Desert Island Discs · Jill Balcon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, it was terrible for them. Really terrible. I mean, he'd been ill for so long. And I don't think I think I was so stricken that I don't think I did all I could have done for them.”
2007-10-14 · Desert Island Discs · Jill Balcon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Daniel had just had his fifteenth birthday just had it, and Tamzin was, I think, nineteen He lived long enough to know she got a place at King's College Cambridge, but never lived to see her go up”
2007-10-14 · Desert Island Discs · Jill Balcon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, very much so, and also looking after him because he was not well, I mean, for the last eight years of his life, but I still had to make chocolate pudding to make seven puddings a week I had to make.”
2007-10-14 · Desert Island Discs · Jill Balcon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But this has to be French. Charles Trunet, singing La Mer. A lot of my heart is in France and always has been A country I love, a language I love, like my own. I think I might cry while this is on because I miss France every day of my life, but anyhow let's have it.”
2007-10-14 · Desert Island Discs · Jill Balcon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He was a tiny table writing his poetry. That was, well, the studio we had had had a gallery in which we slept, and the downstairs was a big studio. But when I was in the theatre a lot then I had to go into the bathroom because the gallery was open to the studio, so I would, yes, you're quite right.”
2007-10-14 · Desert Island Discs · Jill Balcon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They were wonderful I had a lot of work, and we shared all the expenses, and we found somewhere to live until the first child came, and we worked together a lot, you see. We did masses and masses of broadcasts and platform performances together. That was really exciting. He was really wonderful company.”
2007-10-14 · Desert Island Discs · Jill Balcon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My father didn't, nay. That was a pity But it was, of course, it was a wonderful day, and we were very fortunate that it happened.”
2007-10-14 · Desert Island Discs · Jill Balcon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not at all I just thought if we can't be married we'll spend the rest of our lives together and I loved him so much I would have done anything in order to spend my life with him.”
2007-10-14 · Desert Island Discs · Jill Balcon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. Oh terrible you know divorced man, a poet with very little money the whole thing. And never once did my father say, Oh, I'm so glad you're happy, but my mother, who, as I've said, was interested in poetry in her youth, realised that I was, of course, interested, and had given me several of his books. What more can I say? It happened.”
2007-10-14 · Desert Island Discs · Jill Balcon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a very good question. I'm not answering it directly because I can remember thinking well I have no expectations. and that was very difficult for him, and”
2007-10-14 · Desert Island Discs · Jill Balcon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would make you laugh on the island. Ah, I should need that terribly, I would miss laughter But that would be a great tonic to me.”
2007-10-14 · Desert Island Discs · Jill Balcon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think I would I know I'd miss my friends very much, and I know that I would miss laughing. Laughing by oneself isn't all that easy, as you know, but I would like to have Peter Cook, who made me laugh so much ancestral when we went to beyond the fringe, we went twice, I laughed so much that I threw my head back and hit the knees of whoever it was in the row behind, and then we bought the record that whereabout here”
2007-10-14 · Desert Island Discs · Jill Balcon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“he listened he listened a lot. We didn't have television Kirsty, remember, so those of us who had radios listened in a lot.”
2007-10-14 · Desert Island Discs · Jill Balcon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I found him profoundly attractive, of course, but I mean it was more remote than you can imagine there was no question of I mean the idea that one might marry him was Lygius”
2007-10-14 · Desert Island Discs · Jill Balcon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I knew the whole story because we had a lot of mutual friends, and I'd always hoped to meet him, and that was the first time. Did you know?”
2007-10-14 · Desert Island Discs · Jill Balcon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I once asked when I was speaking about him publicly I asked for the word charm to be reinstated so that it wasn't something superficial but magic, because that's what charm is, I mean enthrall one's enthralled. I listened to him a lot on the air, and I didn't know it, but he'd listened to me a lot. He had many troubles in his life at the time. And well that's how it began, and I did so want to impress him remembering that twelve year old girl who couldn't speak at school, you know.”
2007-10-14 · Desert Island Discs · Jill Balcon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The poetry program was called Time for Verse and went out on Sunday nights at ten thirty eight on what was called the BBC Home Service, I was booked to do time for verse with Cecil.”
2007-10-14 · Desert Island Discs · Jill Balcon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“God I'm paralyzed every time I think I mean I do a lot of this platform stuff and every time I think why am I doing it still? Oh heavens I mean the more you do it the worse it becomes because you're not a promising newcomer They have expectations.”
2007-10-14 · Desert Island Discs · Jill Balcon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. It was a society formed by the man who became my husband, C D Lewis, Peggy Ashcroft, Stephen Spender, Natasha Litvin as she was then, for doing readings of poetry and music. I mean it sounds old hat now, but there wasn't a lot of it done. We felt like missionaries, and I'm not sure I approve of all that now, but we went out and about all round England and around.”
2007-10-14 · Desert Island Discs · Jill Balcon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My next piece of music Well, this is part of the final movement of Beethoven's sonata number twenty one in C major, the Walstein performed by Now I use this word to Very, very seldom in its past. Around one all the time have a great time, have a great day and all that Paul Lewis. is a great pianist, I think. He's already great, and he's still quite young, and he has the same quality as Clifford Curzon in that he is the music speaks through him.”
2007-10-14 · Desert Island Discs · Jill Balcon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was frightening. It was very frightening. Yes, I mean I was on duty on D day, for example, and it was a very exciting time. But as you say, I mean, I've been bombed so much by then, and I remember coming up for air from this place to get a it was a summer day and the V ones were around, and I went to lie on the grass in Regents Park, and one fell very nearby, and I used to cycle through the bombs. We all did. We just went on living in some extraordinary way.”
2007-10-14 · Desert Island Discs · Jill Balcon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I did. I slept I can smell the army blankets now and those either in bunks with terrible army blankets which stank and then in the end I was so sick of being a mole literally living underground that I slept in my office and thought well to hell I'd rather have the glass fall in than be buried alive in the way”
2007-10-14 · Desert Island Discs · Jill Balcon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In fact, that was temporary. I'd been with Enser endeavouring to entertain the troops known caustically by most people now as every night something awful and I got ill, and so I went in for an audition just for the fun of it and found myself in this place”
2007-10-14 · Desert Island Discs · Jill Balcon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is the romancer from Vaughn Williams' fifth symphony. It was a great revelation to me this. I was in the lower depths of the BBC, having been bombed, bombed, bombed all the way along the war and machine gunned and the whole lot, and someone put on this symphony, and at the time the V ones were falling all round. Here and I just felt everything was going to be all right.”
2007-10-14 · Desert Island Discs · Jill Balcon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh he would have watched it, he watched every single thing that ever came out of the studios he watched, but he never said anything, and it's not the same if somebody else says oh your father liked that or no, he wasn't able to do that.”
2007-10-14 · Desert Island Discs · Jill Balcon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which Well, at first I didn't want to do it because he was in charge of ealing, but Cavalcanti who directed it insisted, and he was such a wonderful director, and it was a way back after the war when I was released to do the job I'd begun by doing.”
2007-10-14 · Desert Island Discs · Jill Balcon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I think the chief escape, ghastly as it was, was the war, because I had to get out, then I was called up. He did let me go to drama school. He didn't stop me, he just didn't want me to do it, and he never actually said one word of praise ever. And I've often thought about this, and I sometimes think that Being a performer is really asking for parental approval.”
2007-10-14 · Desert Island Discs · Jill Balcon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very strong, very powerful. wanted to control, and he wouldn't have been the man he was at Eling or anywhere else if he hadn't been a remarkable producer. Sometimes one has to get out from underneath, as I said to you before, I think, and make one's own small way.”
2007-10-14 · Desert Island Discs · Jill Balcon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think so I think it was I think it was probably genetic in some way, you know, through my mother. But I don't think it was because of them, I just always wanted to do it. And I suppose I was a show off in my little school. I soon learnt not to be later, but That's how it was”
2007-10-14 · Desert Island Discs · Jill Balcon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh yes, I mean Hitch had been, Hitchcock had been with him in Gomont, British before long before Eling, so they'd been colleagues years beforehand. Yes we met them all. I mean they came to the house, we went to theirs. What did you do?”
2007-10-14 · Desert Island Discs · Jill Balcon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My second piece of music is part of the piano concerto in B flat K five ninety five of Mozart, played by Clifford Carson. A really exquisite performance. He came to my school. And I got to know him later I was very fortunate he became my friend, our friend. I've heard so many wonderful performances of this. But the witness and the elevation, if you like, I mean, would just raise my spirits I'd be simply off the ground with delight listening to him.”
2007-10-14 · Desert Island Discs · Jill Balcon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I could never forget him. I could never forget it. I was fuming at the back of the very large hall because I was only twelve and was not allowed to enter for the competition.”
2007-10-14 · Desert Island Discs · Jill Balcon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“outside the doors Absolutely Yes, and I have I was very aware of the hunger marches, and I was very aware as a child of being in if you like in the shadow of the first war men without legs selling sweets with rows of medals, and I was perfectly aware of that. and I felt at a very early age I felt guilty about privilege.”
2007-10-14 · Desert Island Discs · Jill Balcon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I could yes I just had a great love of words from my mother rather surprisingly in those far off days used to allow me into her bathroom into when she was having a steamy bath and she would recite to me and that enthralled me and I think that had a lot to do with the early influence of poetry and words she'd been a child actress herself”
2007-10-14 · Desert Island Discs · Jill Balcon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We'll round and about the eight years, and I remember Always being called on when there was a crisis at the school concert, and I remember being hauled on in a ridiculous pink georgette party frock to say once more under the breach, dear friends. And you could find”
2007-10-14 · Desert Island Discs · Jill Balcon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, serious in that I loved work, I think I was precocious but very early on because I loved Shakespeare makes me sound such a prig, but my mother bought me a little tiny revolving bookcase with the complete works of Shakespeare in rose pink suede which I used to read with a torch under the bed covers.”
2007-10-14 · Desert Island Discs · Jill Balcon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I didn't have to be instructed I loved it. I had my first lesson when I was five, and I went on playing until I was sixteen when I reached a rather low peak, if you like But it wasn't.”
2007-10-14 · Desert Island Discs · Jill Balcon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From the age of eight I've never looked, I won't say I've never looked at anyone else, but I fell in love with Schubert when I was a child pianist and I couldn't live without him. And I knew”
2007-10-14 · Desert Island Discs · Jill Balcon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My first piece of music I would like to wake up to on my island because I think it would put me in a good frame of mind and it would be two people who I love very dearly Graham Johnson and Felicity Lot who are great friends and Graham has he's well Schubert is a passion I must say first of all my early passion from the age of eight but Graham has recorded all the Schubert Lieber So I would like him in a little boat with Flot. Waking me up to a new day, and I wouldn't be depressed on my island if I heard them first thing.”
2007-10-14 · Desert Island Discs · Jill Balcon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I think so, and I think although perhaps people were willing to see me when I was looking for work, they thought I was a little rich girl, and I had to try to prove I had some talent. It was hard.”
2007-10-14 · Desert Island Discs · Jill Balcon · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source