YouSaid · the spoken record

Jon Snow

lines on the record: 49
first: 2011-01-30
most recent: 2011-01-30
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“piano fabulously well and goodness knows all those hours in the island I could really get to it. But I'm afraid it has really got to be a set of watercolours and a forever amount of paper. Once you're trying to paint a picture, particularly if you paint landscapes, you get completely lost in it. Nothing else matters. Okay, that's yours. And if the waves were to crash to the shore and threaten to wash away the discs, which one would you be running to save? I take the It's yours, John Snow. Thank you very much for letting us hear your desert island discs. Thank you, Kirst You've been listening to a download from the BBC. You'll find more information on the Radio Four website BBC.”
2011-01-30 · Desert Island Discs · Jon Snow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Kiri from Rossini's petition mess Solinelle performed by the Michel Piqumal Vocal Ensemble led by Michel Piqumal. So we come to the time then, John, where I'm going to give you the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare. What's your other book? My other book is Lincoln, Team of Rivals by Doris Cairns Goodwin, and it is the book that Barack Obama took with the Bible with him into the White House, and the reason I choose it is it is the most uplifting book that I have read in the last two decades. I mean absolutely sensational book about a period of utterly troubled American history in which a truly wonderful man prevailed by doing deals with people who hated him, people who were his rivals, and bringing them to love him, to work with him, and to resolve America's crisis. We shall give you that book and the luxury then Well, I was very torn by the luxury because I'd really love to play the”
2011-01-30 · Desert Island Discs · Jon Snow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tell me then about your final piece. My final piece is an absolute beauty, it's completely irreverent mass by Rossini. It's got syncopation and a real uplift, and again it's something when I'm on my way to report. On come the headphones, up comes the curier from Rossini's pitimess Solinel.”
2011-01-30 · Desert Island Discs · Jon Snow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's one thing I worry about just before I send you to the island. I worry about you on the streets of London on your bike How many years have you been cycling? It's such a liberating thing, you know all my life I've cycled I mean all my adult life every day I cycle gets me from A to B and it enables me to do the day I do. You get people shouting at you, bawling at you and others dispatch briders coming up alongside and saying John Snow Hello I imagine on this island then you're going to make a pretty good fist of it, aren't you? I don't think you'll be intimidated by the poisonous snakes or the crashing waves. I'm not good with my own company I'll miss people dreadfully but I'm perfectly good at surviving yes I could build a shack I can do anything I'm extremely hands on I don't have any problem with that at all and I think I could find things to eat and all that but I would miss people desperately”
2011-01-30 · Desert Island Discs · Jon Snow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he said, Have you seen my boy? And the poor startled man said, I'm sorry My boy on the television and the poor man sort of got on with his job, but I think therefore that indicated that in the last year of his life when I actually made it onto news at ten he knew and was proud. Did he did he ever tell you? Did he ever say that? That's pretty well done. He couldn't tell me, but it was not the way he was, but I did sense it. And what about your mother? Has she ever put a warm arm around your shoulder at any point and said to you, well, well done, mate. Oh mummy was overpoweringly happy with me. Was she? You know that I was still musical and still speaking and doing it for money.”
2011-01-30 · Desert Island Discs · Jon Snow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a nice experience, is it? What do you like about it? Well, it's nice. I mean, were it not for the tabloid media, I'd go into more detail, but in all conscience, you know, having been stitched up a good few times in my life, I don't think I'm going to feed them with any more. Right, I've got you. And you've scooped a number of Royal Television Society Awards for reporting. You've twice won RTS presenter of the year, all very prestigious. I'm thinking your father couldn't accuse you any more of being a lazy dunderhead. Dear old thing, just before he died in nineteen seventy seven in our village in Croft Castle, he was walking along the street and he saw the local manager of the bus company.”
2011-01-30 · Desert Island Discs · Jon Snow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But this is Mara Carlyle, who is a remarkable singer of the now, and what's also remarkable is that she has been a staff member at the New Horizon Youth Centre, which is the day centre where I worked after I was sent down from university and where I'm still chair to this day. I had no idea that we had in our midst the most amazingly accomplished singer, and she's a lovely person and a friend, but just spellbinding in this”
2011-01-30 · Desert Island Discs · Jon Snow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, it'd be easy to blame it, wouldn't it? I mean, it would get me off the hook, but to be honest she was very supportive and wonderful mother, so she enabled me to travel.”
2011-01-30 · Desert Island Discs · Jon Snow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd like to say it was Why don't we say it was? Probably was But it was partly because it was a job, a wonderful job, which although I still wanted to report, in the end I knew if I turned it down I'd never get offered it again.”
2011-01-30 · Desert Island Discs · Jon Snow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it was very, very hard when they were very young, but of course, in fact, by the time my elder daughter was six and my younger daughter was three, I started at Channel Fall News, and so I was living a much more stable existence. Was that one of them?”
2011-01-30 · Desert Island Discs · Jon Snow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, my next piece of music is very filmic, it has to be said, and one of the sort of lurking desires of any television journalist is that he's really like to set his reports to music. And Pat Matheny and his band write particularly filmic music. And this piece the truth will always be something I used of migrant South African workers setting off at three in the morning for the three hour trip to work. For the nine hour day and the three hours coming back. And there was something eerie about the exhaustion, the exploitation, and the poverty of the people slumped in the bus as we drove with them to work.”
2011-01-30 · Desert Island Discs · Jon Snow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was kicked out. I'd gone back from VSO, absolutely charged with kind of African liberation, and the university I went to had big investments in South Africa, and we urged them to disinvest, of course they told us, to take a jump, and so we occupied the Senate building for six weeks, and then they picked off ten of us afterwards and said time to go.”
2011-01-30 · Desert Island Discs · Jon Snow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She was very early into Lycratites, and they would scream as she Crossed and uncrossed her legs and you could never quite forget that she was a woman.”
2011-01-30 · Desert Island Discs · Jon Snow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely true. I mean she was impossible to get one passed. I saw loads of her, especially in Europe when it was a very angry time with Europe and Britain was always on its own. You know, you'd go in and she said Oh, John, how lovely to see you And then you'd know that old Bernadingham was at the shoulder thing John Snow Frightful Bastard, Prime Minister Then the camera would roll and you say Prime Minister here we are again absolutely one against the rest Is that really a sensible way to pursue diplomatic relations with Europe? What a perfectly stupid question and I'd found myself sort of slapping the back of my hand and thinking you stupid boy how have you got yourself into this mess and by then of course she was kicking me all over the room I mean you know she just could completely dominate an interview.”
2011-01-30 · Desert Island Discs · Jon Snow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then I thought Is the gun loaded? Is he asleep? And in any case, what happens when you fire a high velocity pistol into a very fat man? Does it ricochet around inside the girth or does it go right through the fuselage and we all go after it the size of a pee? And I'm afraid in the end it's down to me, I think, that he died a peaceful death only five or six years ago behind a smoke pool on In Jeddah.”
2011-01-30 · Desert Island Discs · Jon Snow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, he still was president. I had good access to Uganda. I could come back and forth, and one day he said I want to take you to my village, and he bundled us onto his French donated presidential plane. He was wearing a Texas Rangers uniform with a Stetson which quickly fell down over his head after he took over. It was pretty certain he was asleep. And I looked down and there was a holster between us hanging off his belt with a gun in it, and I thought to myself, Should I shoot him?”
2011-01-30 · Desert Island Discs · Jon Snow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“did encounter Idiomin, I'd only ever become a journalist because I wanted to find a way to get back to Uganda, and within weeks of becoming a journalist, I've sent back to Uganda to cover Edmin now wreaking havoc in Uganda.”
2011-01-30 · Desert Island Discs · Jon Snow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well very much in mind of a love of Africa, I think orchestra Baboras pretty well sums up the beat the voice that amazing nocturnal atmosphere with no electric light but there are paraffin lamps burning and people dancing and a kind of vibrant community life.”
2011-01-30 · Desert Island Discs · Jon Snow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it did. I mean, I remember shaking his hand at the garden gate as I left, and thinking this might be the last contact I'd have with him, because he was older. You know there were no such thing as a kiss or anything like that. That was as good as it got. But I think it did impress him that I had the guts to go, and then frankly, once I did settle, I had entered the best experience I'd ever had. It was absolutely incredible.”
2011-01-30 · Desert Island Discs · Jon Snow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This was my gap year. What really took me to Uganda was trying to impress my father. I wanted to tell my father that I really was, you know, a bit of an achiever. It was a massive experience because here was this conservative boy who'd never met ethnic minorities really, had never really lived other than in the countryside of Sussex. I was suddenly two hundred and fifty miles from Kampala, on the banks of the Nile. You had to cycle fifteen miles to get the mail. I was grievously homesick, and if I had email or a mobile phone, I would have said mum come and get me.”
2011-01-30 · Desert Island Discs · Jon Snow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You came from a very privileged background. Well, naive it takes many forms, and I would think that if you asked any of my bosses, they would all say his central problem is he's a bit naive. I'm not conventionally politically left or right. There are some positions I think some people would say I was rather right wing on, and others that I'm The I don't know, I mean I'm quite interested in discipline in young people growing up in reasonably conformist conditions. You can't compartmentalize me. I'm where I am, which is simply somebody who questions.”
2011-01-30 · Desert Island Discs · Jon Snow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was. But you see, this was nothing to do with leftism. This was to do with compassion, if you like. I was in Washington, so I was well detached from what was going on in Britain, and somebody sent me a note saying, Listen, you really must help because there are these miners families who are all suffering dreadfully and they need money, and we're having an appeal, and I supported it. And of course didn't realise how utterly divided the whole country was over the minor strike, and fell headlong into a pit of vipers.”
2011-01-30 · Desert Island Discs · Jon Snow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But you see, I don't really think I am a lefted miller. Some people that I work with would say he's the most conservative man in the newsroom in a small sea, and in many ways I am very conservative. I mean, listen to my choice of music. So I don't think I am. I think I'm somebody who questions music.”
2011-01-30 · Desert Island Discs · Jon Snow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is something which, despite the fact that I'd done vondress service overseas in Africa and absolutely fallen in love with Africa, I thought Africa was utopia until I got to Central and Latin America, and I think this piece of music kind of expresses everything that you are bombarded by in Latin America. It's romance, it's life, its vitality, its poverty, its grief, it's just this amazing piece of music.”
2011-01-30 · Desert Island Discs · Jon Snow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Indeed, yeah, I set up the daily trumpet. There was only one copy of it, but it was circulated round the school. It had advertising unpaid for by the people that we advertised, but cornflakes and all sorts of things like that, and it had articles. It was a lot of fun.”
2011-01-30 · Desert Island Discs · Jon Snow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think he probably was, but you know, the fifties was still this is what made the sixties so exciting because the fifties was a pretty dim age, you know, I mean the new look was about as exciting as it ever got and I don't even remember that.”
2011-01-30 · Desert Island Discs · Jon Snow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Certainly Dunda had probably lazy, yes. The problem was that the things I was excited about were not things that excited him. He was excited by Latin. He was excited by Greek, and I was completely useless at both. And my problem at school was that I just wasn't interested in the things that people were interested in teaching me”
2011-01-30 · Desert Island Discs · Jon Snow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's much more standard of that age. In the post war era, I think people certainly of that social order had a big misgiving about Woolworths, for example. Open sweet, sweets that weren't wrapped mustn't touch any of them. A cinema was a place you would catch diseases, so I never saw a film till I was twelve or thirteen. And I was”
2011-01-30 · Desert Island Discs · Jon Snow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, you know the trouble is the day job is at the very moment when choirs are rehearsing. I'd love to sing in a choir, but I do do it yourself things. I've done the odd one at the Sheldonian and I do occasionally Albert Hall, but pretty rare.”
2011-01-30 · Desert Island Discs · Jon Snow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'd say she was a warrior, and the thing about my mother was that she, however retiring she might have been as a result of being bald and wearing a wig at her own insecurities, she played the piano like an absolute demon. You know, she was a brilliant classical pianist, and I was absolutely spellbound by it. I mean, at the age of five and six, I would begin to pick up harmonies as she was playing, and sing with her, and she would love it.”
2011-01-30 · Desert Island Discs · Jon Snow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, this is a pretty apt moment to bring in Herbert Howells, who incidentally taught my mother composition at the Royal College of Music. But that's not really why I'm choosing. I'm choosing it because it is emblematic of my life at Winchester Cathedral, aged eight, I won a choral scholarship to Winchester Cathedral, and this was one of the pieces I used to sing.”
2011-01-30 · Desert Island Discs · Jon Snow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think he was absolutely oblivious, and oblivious of what boldness meant to a woman at that time. She'd become bold at thirteen and had worn a bonnet until she was eighteen because her parents couldn't afford a wig. And I think she had suffered hugely, and it went right to the very centre of her soul, this insecurity around it.”
2011-01-30 · Desert Island Discs · Jon Snow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely hundred percent, and many women in that age that was true. But I think in her case even more true because she thought it was a modern miracle that he'd married her. He'd propose to her during the Second World War than any been together for six weeks. He'd proposed, and she said, Well, I think there's something you ought to know before we go any further. I don't have my own hair she had suffered alopecia totalis at the age of thirteen when sitting an exam for the Royal College of Music. And he's audio, oh, I think I need twenty four hours to think about that she thinking that's the end of my world. That's the only man I'm ever going to get. And he comes back and says I don't think it needs to make too much difference. And that was it?”
2011-01-30 · Desert Island Discs · Jon Snow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was six I wanted to be a conservative politician, and I certainly wanted to run the country. I thought what a great idea had a car like that, house like that, I mean, you know, the moon is all that's left.”
2011-01-30 · Desert Island Discs · Jon Snow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it was there incidentally that I got my first taste of politics because I detected this strange man appearing at the back of the chapel, and my father said I'll introduce you to him next week, and he said Jonathan This is Mr Harold Macmillan. He's the Prime Minister. Do you know what a Prime Minister is, young man? Are you married to the Queen? He roared with laughter and said No, no, no, no, I'm a conservative politician, and I run the country. And with that he got into his humble super snipe at the back of the chapel, the way outside, and drove off to Birchgrove his sumptuous villa in Ardingley Village. And that was it what I didn't know then, of course, was what I know now as a seasoned hack was that his wife, Dorothy, was off with that old rogue Boothby, having a torid affair.”
2011-01-30 · Desert Island Discs · Jon Snow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Four, right. One of three boys, the middle of three boys he was an intellectual, I mean he could read the Bible in Greek and Hebrew. He was a very devout Christian. He didn't really expect devout Christianity from us, but he expected performance from us. Prayers every morning, in which we would stand in descending order of age with my mother next to him, but the cook and the sort of houseman who was her husband at the end of the line, I never quite understood the batting order, but there it was, and Grace at every meal chapel, certainly when I was not at boarding school, six thirty every Sunday evening.”
2011-01-30 · Desert Island Discs · Jon Snow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I suppose these days you would say he was, yes, not without humanity, but he was a pretty daunting figure, extremely tall, six foot seven, and pretty big with it, very large shoes, of fourteen, fifteen, which of course strike a child more than they would strike an adult because you're nearer them.”
2011-01-30 · Desert Island Discs · Jon Snow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, this is Eric Clapton and Leila. It's a coincidence that my own eldest daughter is Layla, and she spelled differently, and she was informed by a Persian Leyla rather than a Clapton Leila. But when I was at university, this was the absolute heyday of the greatest of British rock of all time.”
2011-01-30 · Desert Island Discs · Jon Snow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think once you have children, particularly once you have small children, mine were born more than twenty years ago, but once you've had children you do see the suffering of the Of your own children in a sense expressed in the eyes of what you're reporting.”
2011-01-30 · Desert Island Discs · Jon Snow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Viewer know that this is an overwhelming emotional experience, this is an overwhelming human catastrophe, and it isn't without consequence.”
2011-01-30 · Desert Island Discs · Jon Snow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I think emotion is a very difficult thing when you're a reporter, and in a very odd sort of way you owe it to the viewer, to be honest about what the emotional impact of something you're looking at really is. It's a difficult thing to explain, but in the modern age where it's possible to get pictures from every corner of the earth and to weave together an account of something you weren't actually at. When you are at something, and you do actually experience grief, I mean I cry on location. That does happen, you know, and it's a good thing it happens. Because if it doesn't, you bottle it up and you come back bonkers. But I think you have to allow the viewer to know not crying on camera or anything like that.”
2011-01-30 · Desert Island Discs · Jon Snow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have a vote there. One of the first people to have a boat, it's an absolutely unbelievable thing. We'd flown all the way from London and we had a boat. And of course we were going out to film. But you couldn't possibly film people screaming from their house tops, begging to be rescued, so you actually had to down tools and start pulling people onto the boat and you would try and get your cameraman to shoot things which avoided it looking as if you were on some kind of mercy mission. But I was told by my first foreign editor never touch anybody, never hold a baby. Always keep yourself physically detached from what you're reporting, and he's absolutely right.”
2011-01-30 · Desert Island Discs · Jon Snow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Incredibly true of Haiti in particular, there is a smell of disaster. It's about death, its decaying human bodies, it's about sewage, it's about dust, it's about filth hanging in the air, and it clings to your clothes and however much you wash them. You usually have to throw stuff away when you come back. Very often you throw stuff away before you come back. You lose all sense of a world that is not disaster stricken. And of course you're very tempted to actually do some rescuing. When I went to the floods in New Orleans, we just happened to have the wit to get hold of a flat bottom boat through the yellow pages and get it delivered as we arrive.”
2011-01-30 · Desert Island Discs · Jon Snow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well my first choice I don't think you could possibly survive on a desert island without Bach, and so as I'm also a coral fiend as well, St. John Passion.”
2011-01-30 · Desert Island Discs · Jon Snow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I think the thing about reporting is that it's extremely painful leaving home, and then once you have, and once you're in the arena, that's where you are, and although you think of home and you think of the coming child and the rest of it, in the end the thing which is absolutely obsessing you is trying to get to the root of the story.”
2011-01-30 · Desert Island Discs · Jon Snow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, because it was a bit of a badge of honour to have your name on a death list, you felt you'd really arrived. You know, the thing is you used to put a you used to put the wardrobe against the door, said that you would at least hear the clang when the gunman came for you in the night, and one night there was a tremendous banging about, and I shouted from my dormant condition Get out, get out and then within a few moments somebody was going down the corridor saying Earthquake, earthquake We were all out like bullets, but that's all it was.”
2011-01-30 · Desert Island Discs · Jon Snow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yet I was told you must never wear bright colours on television. I was also told that I looked rather dull on our brightly new reconstructed set some years ago, and I thought, well, there's a bit of a rebel in me anyway, so I will wear something very bright, and they worked, and actually they've caught on.”
2011-01-30 · Desert Island Discs · Jon Snow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think I and the viewer are on a journey. We're on a kind of adventure. We are together trying to find out what on earth's going on, and I feel very engaged in that.”
2011-01-30 · Desert Island Discs · Jon Snow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I don't think any human being is neutral. I think it's impossible to be neutral about anything, but I think you can attempt to be objective, and you can attempt to be balanced. But I think one of the things you have to accept is that you can look at something and you will take a view on it, and that is the natural human condition, and I suffer from it.”
2011-01-30 · Desert Island Discs · Jon Snow · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source