YouSaid · the spoken record

Joan Bakewell

lines on the record: 44
first: 2009-08-09
most recent: 2009-08-09
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

“I recently published in my first novel, and I do think that everyone has in them a creative instinct which often doesn't get fulfilled, and mine is always nudged away at my life, and never had room enough to expand, so I would like to take an abundance of paper and a series of pencils. Then I could both draw, I think I could derive dyes from the various vegetation around so that we could transfer that into painting if I needed to, but I think I could also write, so I could indulge what shreds of creativity are left.”
2009-08-09 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Joan Bakewell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I thought about this a long time. I thought it had to be something that I know so that I wouldn't be disappointed, so I'm not going to take Don Quixote Ordanti's comedy. I'm going to take Tolstoy's War and It contains everything. It contains family contains war, contains philosophy, it contains domestic life, ambition, everything. So it will continue to reward me throughout my stay. How long will my stay be”
2009-08-09 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Joan Bakewell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've always enjoyed going to Aubor on the coast of Suffolk, which has become famous for its music because it was the home of Benjamin Britton where he lived I was for many years on the council of the Aubrey Productions. I visit every year to the festival. I've chosen an interlude from Peter Grimes I regard Peter Grimes as probably the greatest post war opera. There are certain interludes in this magnificent piece of music, and I'd like to hear the opening one, perhaps the most famous and the most lyrical.”
2009-08-09 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Joan Bakewell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Only in my heart, I mean I just am open to life and to friendships and to people. I mean, the interesting thing about living on your own is it does give you a great sense of your own identity and confidence in the direction that you're taking. So you do live life entirely on your own terms. You don't have to offer compromises or concede at all. You can paint the walls any colour you like. I'm having an extremely good time having my own way”
2009-08-09 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Joan Bakewell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I continue to behave as I always have, I just refuse to think that oh goodness me, I'm past a certain age I must behave in a certain way I've always tried to be consistent in my life, so I continue to be interested in clothes, even in high heel shoes. I go out and about, I take exercise, I go on holidays, I mean, I just go on living the life I led in my forties, fifty six. What's different? For that.”
2009-08-09 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Joan Bakewell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am very insistent, grandmother, yes, I have them stay with me. I like to have them to stay with me one at a time so that for something like three days I set aside all work and two people have a very good time and now”
2009-08-09 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Joan Bakewell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It will be terrible I shall miss my family so much, and I shall reminisce about all the good times we've had together and I shall miss my whole circle of friends.”
2009-08-09 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Joan Bakewell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I should miss the human voice if I were on this island. The human voice is so important I spend my time talking and enjoying conversations I would just long to hear the human voice. I know that I am being given a volume of Shakespeare to take with me, but to hear Shakespeare spoken by a distinguished actor, I think, would be enormously inspiring and consoling, and would bring back, of course, all the memories I have of decades of theatre going and enjoying talk. So I've chosen one of Shakespeare sonnets.”
2009-08-09 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Joan Bakewell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I just thought it was a bit of male flattery. It was seized on by the more militant feminists as an outrageous insult to womanhood, for which they tended to blame me, which I found a bit complicated, so I ignored it, but what I have been amazed at is how it's hung in there, and I can only think it's a tribute to the unoriginality of male editors no one who's ever interviewed me who has not said, particularly if they're women. I'm sorry to have to mention this phrase, but my editor insists. And so this has been passed down through the decades. And it's still around, and it's flattering. It's quite fun. It's nothing more than that.”
2009-08-09 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Joan Bakewell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How am I to choose from the great swathe of classical musical music with which you know we're all familiar? But I thought I would go for a quintet of Schubert, as I get older I like chamber music much more. I love the focus it brings and the Schubert quintet in C major is just sublime and again focused, concentrated and just purely beautiful.”
2009-08-09 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Joan Bakewell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We always said, even until his very last years, that we had a damn good time. We looked back on it with a good deal of pleasure, and a sense that it had been very important, and it was over and it had moved on, we'd both moved into a different world, so I had to I smile when I think about it.”
2009-08-09 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Joan Bakewell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't forget that I spoke about the society in which I grew up in which there was a good deal of hypocrisy, and people very rarely spoke about their emotions or what their emotional life involved. I also learned as a student that actually the thing to do was not get caught, and that you needed to defy the rules of society at that time in order to have the things you wanted, which seemed reasonable. So, in a sense, the nature of an affair and the point of the betrayal was, of course, that there were internal betrayals between those who were the protagonists, and it seemed all at one with my attempt to be truthful to myself. rather than being truthful to the conventions of the time.”
2009-08-09 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Joan Bakewell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that small part of his life I was an important part, and his plays are very, very important to him, and That play was very close to our life, and he wanted me to comment on it. The long friendship over decades, in a sense, was more important and sustained by me than the few years of our affair. So the criticism of the play and the appreciation of the play became part of the friendship rather than the affair.”
2009-08-09 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Joan Bakewell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I found it a great shock when he showed me the script, and decided really that there was nothing for it but to get over my shock and live with it. People have said since that it was a kind of tribute. I tried to see it that way. He was very eager that I should like it, and indeed always wanted me to see productions. He would always tell me there's a new production of retail, it's in Leicester, he'll be able to go.”
2009-08-09 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Joan Bakewell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I first met Harold in nineteen sixty, and I knew him over forty five years as a very good friend for seven of those years we had an affair, and I began to know him well, I suppose, about sixty four, sixty five, which lasted till about nineteen seventy.”
2009-08-09 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Joan Bakewell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it was wonderful, it was a program that had an open remit to interview anyone who fancied really. I interviewed people like Stockhausen and Berrio and poets at the time, Kingsley Amys and John Arlot, and I found myself in this really quite important programme talking about television, the future of television, the nature of television, the nature of art, creativity, and so on. And it began to fit me like a glove. I began to feel that something worthwhile was being said”
2009-08-09 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Joan Bakewell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“After the war the Americans arrived tall, golden, healthy, and then we learnt to our surprise that back in America there was something called the Civil Rights Movement and a whole race of people were completely exploited and that southern America was contorted with social distress and we became very passionate about the civil rights movement and then subsequently the Vietnam War and we took we absorbed a lot of our culture from America and Bob Dylan was at the forefront of that his music and his style and his lyrics and all that he stood for has always been important to me.”
2009-08-09 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Joan Bakewell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, Bob Dylan has to be here, really. Bob Dylan is the sort of sound of the generation that lived through the sixties in their twenties. The impact of America on my generation was very strong. Basically, we'd learnt it from Hollywood, which we'd relied on during the war to keep us cheerful.”
2009-08-09 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Joan Bakewell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh very much so I mean of course having a baby brings you close to your own mother at the time because you need her help and advice And so that did. My mother did early on use a phrase when I was tangling with my children at the toddler stage, and my mother said the important thing about bringing up children is you must break their will. And I remember thinking no, I do belong to a different generation. My generation do not believe that that's what you do with children, which is why we had noisy, troublesome, creative, lively, assertive children, and not obedient little robots, which was my mother's ideal.”
2009-08-09 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Joan Bakewell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I remember being very joyful at being deliberately pregnant, and it was the early days of natural childbirth I went along with my husband to the classes and did all that and thought I was enormously progressive. I bought doctor Spock, and did all the relaxation, and then when it came to the actual labour, I remember thinking finding that all that went out of the window because the pain was so great, and would they please give me as many drugs as possible?”
2009-08-09 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Joan Bakewell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I probably am. I think I take that for granted. It's probably just in my nature I moved by lyrical poetry and music, and indeed by love affairs, I just think It's very important to be upbeat about romance, love, attachment in your life.”
2009-08-09 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Joan Bakewell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Minds a generation that love jazz, jazz was very much the thing in the late fifties, so Peggy Lee always sums up that era for me, and she sings with such amazing concentration, and so simply you wonder how she could pare it down, and yet keep it so enormously powerful. So here she is with Benny Goodman.”
2009-08-09 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Joan Bakewell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“we used to take benzodine because it would keep us awake so we could do essays all night. But that was about it really. Well, as far as I was concerned, I was pretty innocent, really, innocent and timid. It's amazing I had such a good time.”
2009-08-09 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Joan Bakewell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I was part of the theatre sat and there was a great deal of partying, of course, quite a lot of drinking. We didn't do drugs very much, but we did drink quite a lot. We drank sherry.”
2009-08-09 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Joan Bakewell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Her boyfriend stayed on to do his degree, she never took hers. So we were conscious that the world was loaded against us, but we reckoned that we were seeing change it would come slowly, and it would be great to be part of it.”
2009-08-09 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Joan Bakewell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“for there were two girls colleges at the time, Nunham and Gerdon. You were eager to have any attachments and you were falling in love and out of love all the time. You did have to be back in college by ten o'clock at night. Young men had to be signed in at the Porter's Lodge and then had to sign out of your room. It didn't occur to them that if you didn't sign them in, they wouldn't know the men were there, and of course we found ways round the rules, I mean, my generation was quite used to staying over in the men's colleges and not being discovered, leaving a rolled up blanket under the Idan so that if anyone looked in your room it was clear that there was somebody asleep there. If you were discovered you were in real trouble, a friend of mine got pregnant and was sent down instantly.”
2009-08-09 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Joan Bakewell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I have to say, I think that's the big breakthrough in my life was the shift from my rather conventional background to what was probably quite a conventional world of Cambridge, but it was so different from what I knew. Many, many, many friends, people of my own age talking about ideas having ideas and plans and producing plays and writing magazines and poetry and so on. I just thought it was I was delirious with happiness at this time.”
2009-08-09 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Joan Bakewell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I was I was in revolt against what I saw as a woman's lot. It was clearly that men ran the world and they have a much better time. I mean they just they got out more, they rule things, they had all the top jobs who wouldn't want to be a boy in those circumstances The nun thing was slightly more weird I think it was to do with being isolating myself from the conventional setup around me I don't think it survived very long once the hormones hit, but for a time I did see myself as really having more in common with talking to Jesus and talking to my contemporaries.”
2009-08-09 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Joan Bakewell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that doesn't give us much comfort, does it? But nonetheless, most beautiful here she is conceding to the younger woman.”
2009-08-09 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Joan Bakewell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Opera, what was I going to do about choosing opera for this programme? I thought well I would just go for a piece that gives me perpetual joy, and that is Strauss's Rosen Cavalier. It is hugely romantic, brilliantly orchestrated. It's a touching story of a woman of a certain age conceding her lover to a young woman. It was rather alarming to find that the Marshaline, who is this supposedly aging beauty, is all of thirty five in the plot.”
2009-08-09 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Joan Bakewell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She was proud of me in a rather quiet way, I think. Both my parents were proud and a bit bewildered when I got a place at Cambridge no one in the family had ever been to university before they didn't really know what universities were like. They watched me kind of drift away from the background that they knew, and An end to this other world of scholarship and bright young things and glittering prizes, all of which bewildered them”
2009-08-09 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Joan Bakewell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I was in my teens my mother sank into what we would now call clinical depression, but we didn't know what it was in those days we just thought she was being difficult really and also impossible to live with she was given to bouts of total silence and was very clearly very unhappy. I minded very much I was very resentful at that as a teenager, but as I got older and began to think about what had caused it, I did realise and it endorsed my kind of feminist instincts that she had responded to her intelligence and ambition being completely sat on, and that had turned her in on herself and caused her depression.”
2009-08-09 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Joan Bakewell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yet I was the burden of my parents' hopes they'd both been quite clever children, but a social situation was such that my mother left school at thirteen she'd got a scholarship to the girls high school but she couldn't afford the uniform. So they had huge aspirations and they got quite a lot of brains between them so I inherited just enough to mobilize that ambition for them and became a sort of standard nineteen forty scholarship girl.”
2009-08-09 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Joan Bakewell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My father was a word you don't hear nowadays he was an orphan, and then he had the good fortune to get one of the places at a school for poor boys, he went on to become an apprentice engineer, he worked in an foundry when he was about fifteen, and rose from there in the same company full about forty odd years and ended up as the manager of one of the branches of that engineering firm. So he became someone who rose from the artisan class, as it were, to the middle managerial, and that was regarded as a great triumph and result of effort which was always borne in upon me, was worth making.”
2009-08-09 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Joan Bakewell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Religious music I love religious music, and I'm very involved in the broadcasting I do with religion, so people always say Are you religious? I skirt that one by saying I'm a non believing member of the Church of England because in fact I was baptized and confirmed and I'm very fond of the Church of England. The Christian religion has thrown up most beautiful buildings, beautiful paintings and beautiful music. So I do love to hear church music, and I've chosen Thomas Tallis's Speminalium, which is one of the most sublime pieces of English music ever.”
2009-08-09 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Joan Bakewell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh very rarely heard ninety five percent of the people in broadcasting and the media are under fifty, so I regard fifty as relatively young, obviously it is for me. No, you don't hear those voices very often. It's to do with the changing demographics, of course, and the fact that we haven't yet adjusted to the notion that we will go on being in our prime in our forties, fifties and sixties. I mean, huge numbers of people now live into their eighties and are very active, and far more people live into their nineties than they did, and are available as intelligent, energetic, trained, professional working people to do their jobs, which they're suddenly, oh, you're sixty five. It's the end of the line. Complete astonishment that this is how life has been configured for them.”
2009-08-09 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Joan Bakewell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I carry I do not resuscitate I do. And I think it's better to look these things squarely in the face and consider what might happen. Otherwise, you leave your family with all sorts of dilemmas. What would she want? She's lost the power of speech. What are we to do?”
2009-08-09 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Joan Bakewell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, no. I've made a living will, and I've talked to my family, and I've talked to my doctor, so I've done as much as possible to avoid what the phrase my father used when he was very, very ill. He said Joan, don't let them mess me around. I know exactly what he meant, so I hope that I've indicated to all those who love me that that's what I want to prevail. Would you like?”
2009-08-09 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Joan Bakewell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of course, I do get a great many letters about how we are to die. How am I to die? Where do I get pills? I mean people write and say what am I going to do? I don't want to be the victim of a medical system that can keep me alive forever when in fact I'm ready to go. Well, it's very difficult to advise people about these things, so what I do is try to continue a debate with everybody and raise it in newspaper articles and programs and insist that we are going to have to discuss this matter.”
2009-08-09 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Joan Bakewell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I chose it because voice seemed appropriate to someone who'd had a lifetime as broadcaster, and it puts me in the right position between the older people who write with all their problems and issues that concern them, and government who are prepared to listen.”
2009-08-09 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Joan Bakewell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, Jimmy Hendrix mentioned the programme late night line up in the sixties, which was sort of a groundbreaking program live every night of the year, and a whole raft of young musicians were coming up through the sixties who seized the chance to come on the very late night program and play, and Jimmy Hendrix came along. A very intense person, rather beautiful, I remember, rather kind of crazy as well and obsessive, but totally dominating any room he was in, and his music is the same, it's obsessive and absolutely brilliant. The thing about the six is many, many things have been found wrong about the sixties, but one of the things you can't fault is the quality of the music.”
2009-08-09 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Joan Bakewell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is not so much popularity which really has to take care of itself, whether people like you or not. That doesn't ever concern me very much. What you will recognise in broadcasting, of course, traditional public service broadcasting is that you're meant to be impartial. So I didn't do a great deal of flag wafing when I was beginning in the 60s, although I had the good fortune to work for a very radical program called late night line up, which did flout conventions. So it's a matter of judgment at any point. I don't think there are absolute rules you can or can't do this. That's what makes life so interesting each day, Carrie's a new set of decisions.”
2009-08-09 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Joan Bakewell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I have always regarded the world as to be improved. I have this slightly, I suppose you would call it liberal do gooding attitude. It's used as a pejorative phrase, but I'm quite pleased to be considered a wishy washy liberal, when at various times in my life there have been crises abroad or in domestic policy. I've been willing to put my voice behind some cause or whatever, and I do think that it's a good thing to do. You feel you can be part of change.”
2009-08-09 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Joan Bakewell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Much better, much better people hark back nostalgically to the sixties, but I go back to the forties and fifties, and I do remember society being very closed down, very conventional, a lot of hypocrisy, a good deal of secrecy, and I grew up quite fearful of the world and wondering what it was really going to be like, because inside me I had churning all sorts of ideas and ambitions and fantasies, which didn't seem to fit any observed conventions.”
2009-08-09 · Desert Island Discs · Dame Joan Bakewell · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source