YouSaid · the spoken record

Richard Madeley

lines on the record: 53
first: 2009-03-08
most recent: 2009-03-08
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 tried, I was awful. Awful, but I cover songs, and as you know, when you cover songs you hear them as they're meant to be sung, you know, rather than the way you sing. So yeah, I take my little six string guitar with them.”
2009-03-08 · Desert Island Discs · Richard Madeley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Probably my guitar, my acoustic guitar. I'd probably sing my own songs, remind myself, because when you sing a song that's familiar with songs,”
2009-03-08 · Desert Island Discs · Richard Madeley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It would have to be something very big and very thick and very different and unusual. And I think it would be Jonathan Strange and Mr Norell. It's about the return of magic to England at the time of the Napoleonic Wars and the descriptive force of the writing and of the magic that is done is utterly believable, and you can reread it a million times and see fresh insights.”
2009-03-08 · Desert Island Discs · Richard Madeley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's actually something that Judy and I sort of, in advance of our ultimate demises, have fought over. We both want this played at our funerals, but we couldn't really both have it played at our funerals. I guess the first one to die will get it played. It's just stratospherically beautiful. It's for his requiem, Pierzay.”
2009-03-08 · Desert Island Discs · Richard Madeley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oddly enough, you're right about my lamentable loquaciousness. I'm quite comfortable with my own company. If there's no one else to listen, I'll talk to myself. I think I'd be okay. Yeah, I'm reasonably okay in a solo environment.”
2009-03-08 · Desert Island Discs · Richard Madeley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we both feel that we've done pretty much all we can do as a partnership in terms of the talk shows and everything. We're enjoying this one, but I think probably we'll both feel the need to diversify. You know, it's been over 20 years now doing the same kind of thing. And, you know, there are tantalizing possibilities in terms of solo projects or doing one-off projects together. I'm not saying we'd never work together again. I'm sure we will. And yes, writing, you're absolutely right. I mean, I'm just beginning to write a novel, which just dropped into my head one day, and I'm really enjoying it. So writing is very important to me.”
2009-03-08 · Desert Island Discs · Richard Madeley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not at all, because we knew before we went that however it panned out, to begin with, the viewing figures were going to be minuscule. I mean, we haven't jumped into this, not knowing that, and we don't mind. The only disappointment so far, and we launched in October, and it's now coming into the spring, the channel as a whole, which is called Watch, hasn't really got traction. Overall, across the channel, people aren't watching in any significant numbers, and that obviously includes us. If I thought that the show that we're making was in a pan of old rubbish, then I would feel embarrassed, and I would feel, and so would Judy. But it's a good show. We're getting really good guests. We just have to cross our fingers and hope that the audience will build.”
2009-03-08 · Desert Island Discs · Richard Madeley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It really, really is. I mean, there are obviously areas in our personal life and within our relationship where we wouldn't tread. It would be indelicate and I don't think people would be particularly entertained by it. But essentially, the way that we react with each other and the way that we interact with our guests is very much the way it would be if you came around for dinner. We wouldn't want to broadcast any other way and it would be very wearing if the whole thing were some kind of elaborate act.”
2009-03-08 · Desert Island Discs · Richard Madeley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's very hard compiling this list, as I'm sure everybody says to you, and I really, really wanted to take a police track with me, because I think police are one of the best bands of the 80s. But in the end, I decided that the reason I love them so much is because of sting his voice. Sting's voice is just extraordinary. He's the sort of the rod steward of his age, I suppose. Only better, sorry, Rod. And I think his lovely poetic singing is never better heard than in fields of gold.”
2009-03-08 · Desert Island Discs · Richard Madeley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, that's exactly how it felt for both of us. And we had one little kind of probationary period just before we moved in together. We decided before I actually moved in that we would go to Cornwall for a week and rent a cottage for all four of us, so for the first time I'd be sleeping under the same roof. And it was just such fun. We were blessed with amazing weather. And I looked back on that week, that sunny week, August week in Cornwall, as one of the happiest in my life I can remember we'd go for long walks on the beaches and I take the boys off by myself and at night we'd look up into these warm sort of clear skies almost Grecian skies, you know, and watch the shooting stars and describe the constellations to the boys. And I remember when we got back to Manchester and I carried everyone's bags in, and I sort of had a flat and I sort of made a sort of move to go and the boys, one of them turned and said You're not going, are you? Unde. And Judy looked at him and said, Yeah, I think that'll be okay. And we were off.”
2009-03-08 · Desert Island Discs · Richard Madeley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But when I asked her to marry me, I can still remember that this kind of gimlet look that I got back, very calculated look, really, and she said, Look, I come in a three pack. I knew exactly what she meant. But I took that very, very seriously, and, you know, yeah, twenty-six is very young, isn't it? And Judy was right, not to be suspicious, but to be cautious. And in the end, I figured it would be okay, and it was. Did you?”
2009-03-08 · Desert Island Discs · Richard Madeley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It sounds really quite sort of seedy and seamy, doesn't it? It was an office affair, but it didn't feel like that at all. We both knew that we had found the right person in the other. I was by that stage. I was separated. And as Judy and I got close, she confided in me that her marriage too had been in trouble for quite a while and probably wasn't going to last.”
2009-03-08 · Desert Island Discs · Richard Madeley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I fancied her straight away. And when I accepted this job and realized I'd been working literally alongside Judy, I was really tough. Now at that point I was still married, so it was only that sort of frison you get, knowing you're going to work with a beautiful woman, nothing wrong with that. But we hit it off on every level from the word go.”
2009-03-08 · Desert Island Discs · Richard Madeley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Back to school days really, I loved the who when I was at school and I can still remember the day when my mate Chris, who looked around the corner, banged on my door and said, come round to my place, come around to my house. I've got to hear this who track, you've got to hear this who track. And it was, I think, the best track they ever laid down. Won't get fooled again.”
2009-03-08 · Desert Island Discs · Richard Madeley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's what you paid for. So we took, you know, we took the hit and had the worst reviews totally understandably of our entire careers. And I actually thought maybe our careers had come to an end. Did you? Yeah, and if it hadn't been for this morning being answered bread and butter and allowing us to show that we actually could do interviews, you know, it might well have been. I mean, it was the worst moment of my career barn.”
2009-03-08 · Desert Island Discs · Richard Madeley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not at all, no, we'd been signed up to do an experimental seven o'clock in the evening, half hour chacho, and yeah, he was going to be the first guest, and once he'd been booked, the assumption was that he'd be the whole show. And two days before we went to do the interview, ITV had a sudden sort of I don't know, crisis of confidence and felt that this, as it was the first of a new chacho series, we ought to showcase, and we needed to have four items on the first show. And looking back, if I'd just been a little bit older and wiser, and Judy too, I think we should have walked. I think we should have said, you know what, get someone else to do it, because in the end we had twelve minutes to interview AJ Simpson. So we did our best when Judy had to say twelve minutes in, she said, well, OJ, that's all we've got time for. And he gasps and the student audience gasps, and the watching world gasps, and boy did we get it in the neck. I mean, because our names were on the tin, and you have to accept that.”
2009-03-08 · Desert Island Discs · Richard Madeley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We just kicked off. Yeah, just kicked off Absolutely, it was unbelievably humiliating. But going back to your question, Dad would have found that very hard. He would have been wonderfully supported, but I think he would have been mortified that his son had got himself into that kind of a mess.”
2009-03-08 · Desert Island Discs · Richard Madeley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was, you know, some shopping trolleys have a little separate compartment at the front, you know, and that's usually where I used to put bottles and things, don't anymore. And when I got to the checkout, and it was one of those days where I had a million things on, and I took everything out of the main compartment, which cost a lot, and put it back in again, but I just didn't take the bottles out, and because I always put them back in that part of the trolley once I”
2009-03-08 · Desert Island Discs · Richard Madeley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, yes, he was certain whatever he felt about it, he would have been straight about it. I also think he would have been very troubled by the negative side of what we do, you know. I mean, I'm fine with it. You just have to accept it and not worry about it. But I think things like what happened at Tesco's when I forgot to pay for all that stuff in the front of the trolley, and a whole year of his son, you know, sort of being going into a magistrate's court to be, you know, sort of remanded and eventually going to Crown Court. I never did the whole thing last year. Yeah, but that was me because the police offered me a caution on them on the day that this stupid thing happened. But as my solicitor was quick to point out, accepting a caution means that you accept that you've intended to commit whatever the crime is, that you've been, oh, I couldn't have that. I mean, it was simply a non-starter.”
2009-03-08 · Desert Island Discs · Richard Madeley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Um, I love the eagles. I have to say, and I'm not the only person to have said this, don't take this the wrong way, but they sound very sexy. But have you ever seen them? They're like sacks of potatoes, and they were back then, but I think this is one of their sweetest compositions, and that it is. It's Newton Town.”
2009-03-08 · Desert Island Discs · Richard Madeley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I got home on the day of his death, it was a very sort of poignant scene really. His car was parked slewed sort of diagonally across our driveway at the house, and most movingly, I suppose, the carpet on the driver's side in the well had been scrunched right up under the pedals, you know, and obviously he'd been in terrible pain and he must have pushed out with his feet and the carpet had gone up. And what had happened was he'd got to the front door, couldn't get his key in the door. My mother had heard him struggling, came down. He sorted in, said I think I'm having a heart attack, and two minutes later he was dead.”
2009-03-08 · Desert Island Discs · Richard Madeley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've been married the previous Saturday. Dad and mum came to the wedding in Cumbria. A week went by, and by the Monday I was getting a phone message to call home, and I did, and it was my mother, and she said Dad had died that afternoon at one o'clock, died in her arms. So yeah, in terms of a young marriage starting out, it was a tremendous body blow to it because it preoccupied me completely, obviously, the death.”
2009-03-08 · Desert Island Discs · Richard Madeley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's absolutely true. Yes, I think it was. And it was a big mistake, and it was my mistake, and I have to carry the can for that.”
2009-03-08 · Desert Island Discs · Richard Madeley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think, and I've only realized this in recent years, it does seem weird, doesn't it, you know? Linda and I had only known each other for about a year when we got married, and I think it was as an antidote to my loneliness. And I think I desperately needed some kind of anchor and refuge.”
2009-03-08 · Desert Island Discs · Richard Madeley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, it was all very much an act, and I suspect it is for most young people starting out, you know, and possibly overreaching themselves. No, I was very tense, but you just have to crack on and hide him. It was the sort of early days of BBC Local Radio. And quite often we would break a shift and go and sit in a, there's a hotel opposite the radio station for lunch and a beer. And I felt so out of my depth, so out of my depth that I would sometimes make an excuse and take the beer and grab a paper and go and sit in the toilets and to shut the door, shut the cubicle so I didn't have to sort of engage or talk. I was very, very insecure.”
2009-03-08 · Desert Island Discs · Richard Madeley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They still talk of it in the alleys of Windsor. It was actually closed down by the police on about the fourth day, but we were there on the second. We came off and some ANR man came up to us with a card and said, Come in, make a demo, we could talk, we could do business. And Paul and I had a sort of, we took it, I'm sure, far more seriously than it was intended, but we decided I'd be a reporter, he'd be a doctor, and we went our separate ways.”
2009-03-08 · Desert Island Discs · Richard Madeley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, that's your excuse then for that. Yeah, exactly. And we covered a lot of Paul Simon. I think it's his loveliest song, Hearts and Bones.”
2009-03-08 · Desert Island Discs · Richard Madeley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, this is actually this dates back to my school days. Simon and Garfunkel were a huge inspiration musically to myself and a friend Paul. We formed a little group, a little folk pop group called Alchemy. It was the 1970s.”
2009-03-08 · Desert Island Discs · Richard Madeley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I've slowed down a lot, you know. I've kind of achieved most of the things that I set out to achieve, and when I realised quite a long time ago was what that really was was to be part of a happy family. That became, family became the most important thing.”
2009-03-08 · Desert Island Discs · Richard Madeley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is really interesting I was hurrying away from failure,'cause the plan was to do my A levels, go to university, read English, and then get some kind of graduate placement on the newspaper. I wanted to be a newspaper reporter. And when I was sixteen, I applied to the local paper in Brentwood in Essex, the Brentwood Argus, now defunct. Just for what we would now call work experience. The editor wrote back very bluntly and said no way they hadn't got the time to put up with a sixteen year old making tea. But I could come in and just have an interview one afternoon about the job. That sort of come and learn about the paper turned into an offer of a job on the spot. I was a news editor when I was nineteen, which was painfully young. I was a political editor when I was seventeen, which is absurd. But I used to reach out and grasp the challenge and yank myself up the ladder to make sure that when my friends came out of university at twenty one and some of them wanted to be reporters too, I was miles ahead, you know, otherwise what was the point?”
2009-03-08 · Desert Island Discs · Richard Madeley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, it's funny it was of strictly father son thing. It's very odd, but no, it never occurred to me to go to her and say Daddy's hitting me, will you talk to him?”
2009-03-08 · Desert Island Discs · Richard Madeley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yes, we've had long conversations about this. I mean, dad died in 1977, and, you know, my mother has nothing to blame herself for. She stopped it when she became aware of how bad it was. She wasn't there when it happened most, I think, if not all of the times. And you didn't feel bad.”
2009-03-08 · Desert Island Discs · Richard Madeley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everybody asks that question? And the answer is quite simply no. I think by 26 I was reasonably clear about who I was, you know. I'd left it completely behind, so no, I never reflected and worried that maybe I'd visit the sins of the Father on my son.”
2009-03-08 · Desert Island Discs · Richard Madeley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is inspired by my son Jack, actually. It's an American singer, John Mayer, singer songwriter. About three years ago, Jack and I were sort of having a father son Sunday morning washing our cars middle class is that. And he was playing a collection of John Mare tracks. And he put together a compilation CD for me. And this is one of them. And it's a beautiful song. Just a young man and a broken heart, and it's called Why Georgia.”
2009-03-08 · Desert Island Discs · Richard Madeley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“would happen as you say twenty, thirty times, and it finally came to an end when my mother was in the house, and it was an evening, and I don't know, he really lost it that night even more than on the earlier occasions, and I couldn't go to school the next day. We had PE and the marks were so clear, and my mother introduced my father at breakfast as the man who was about to make an apology and told me that what had happened would never happen again, because if it did, my father knew what was going to happen to him. In fact, later she told me she threatened to go to the police and leave him. He gave me the most genuine and sincere and heartfelt apology, and he gave me an absolute promise that it would never happen again, and he told me how shamed he was of himself, and I believed him, and I trusted him, and I forgave him on the spot, and I never had cause to regret that.”
2009-03-08 · Desert Island Discs · Richard Madeley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Towards you. Yes, it came out of a blue sky, actually. It started when I was about eight, and it continued until I was about ten when it stopped for good. And I can vividly remember the first time it happened. I'd never been spanked or slapped or hit, and it was a Saturday and my mum had gone to the shops, and I'd done something to annoy my dad, and he told me to go into the front room and stare at the wall. And then I heard the shed door in the garden scraping open, he used to scrape on our path, and my dad came back in the room behind me about a minute later. And the next thing I knew there was a fire burning in the grate, it was winter. I thought that the backs of my legs, my calves had caught fire, and the pain was intense, and I could hear a cracking sound as well, which I thought was some wood burning or something. And I realized I was being hit suddenly, and I sort of span round, and my father, who was the most genial of men, had transformed into this sort of gargoyle. His face was black with rage and it was contorted, spittles coming from his mouth.”
2009-03-08 · Desert Island Discs · Richard Madeley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, he was because he'd been brought up in this fairly isolated existence in Shropshire with a father who actually deep down wasn't unloving but found it impossible to express that love, and Dad Grub, actually, as he got older, beginning to wonder why it was that his father didn't appear to love him. So Dad reacted to that, he completely compensated for that and was incredibly demonstrative towards me and my sister.”
2009-03-08 · Desert Island Discs · Richard Madeley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Great War didn't help and the things that he witnessed in the trenches in France there were more betrayals, he lost a son. Yes, it was the beginning of the cauterizing process.”
2009-03-08 · Desert Island Discs · Richard Madeley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll do my best. Well, yeah, it starts in 1907 with my grandfather who was ten years old, and he was in a big family, had six siblings, and his father, who ran a very small business in Worcester, went bust. My great grandfather, Henry, couldn't really think what to do, and so he went up to Shropshire where he had two brothers and a sister, spinster sister, who tenanted a farm there, and his older brother, William, offered him not alone but a gift of money so that the whole family could emigrate to Canada and make a new start there, and the only collateral he asked for was one of the children, and that child was my granddad because at ten he was just the right age to start working on the farm. So they set off shortly afterwards, got all their stuff on a wagon, went up to Liverpool, and halfway there they stopped in Shropshire, and overnighted on the farm, and my grandfather, who was ten years old, woke up the next morning, and they'd all gone.”
2009-03-08 · Desert Island Discs · Richard Madeley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Saint-Son's wonderful piece. This was one of my father's favourites. My father had an incredible collection of classical music. And this was one of his favourites, and he played it a lot, and it became mine too. It's just a wonderful, wonderful piece of storytelling and music.”
2009-03-08 · Desert Island Discs · Richard Madeley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For them, Jack, to this day. Chloe's been quite robust about it, but to this day, if I'm... There was a pause and someone said, Well, then he will die, Jack sooner or later.”
2009-03-08 · Desert Island Discs · Richard Madeley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think gravity with me going down and her pulling up, she's very strong, her sister. Did it, and it came loose and out it came, and I got my breath back. But it was very close.”
2009-03-08 · Desert Island Discs · Richard Madeley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we were having a series of debates about something. And I was arguing with my brother in law. And he made a very good point, just as I had put a piece of beef into my mouth. And in order to get back into the game, I swallowed it whole. And you straight away it was a big mistake. Because I'd shut up, everyone thought that I'd ceded the point, and the conversation moved on. In fact, I'm gradually losing consciousness. And I probably hadn't taken a breath for about two minutes when I started to go down. And I thought, well, this is it, my sort of last sights, as I thought they were going to be, was my son, with his face turned to the restaurant wall, beating it with his fists, and my daughter just staring at me with tears coming out sort of horizontally from her eyes. It was horrendous. I mean, it really was awful. And then I had this image of my sister kind of clambering over the table, because there must have been about thirty of us in the room, getting behind me, and she's a teacher and she'd been on a health course only a week before, and she'd been shown how to do the Heinlich manoeuvre. But it still wouldn't move, and I began to completely collapse.”
2009-03-08 · Desert Island Discs · Richard Madeley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We were celebrating one of her daughters my niece's eighteenth birthday at a big pub restaurant in Essex, and our family talks for England and we were having.”
2009-03-08 · Desert Island Discs · Richard Madeley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“quite biddable, I think, certainly very happy. I had that great blessing, I suppose, of knowing and being told by both parents that I was loved. Dad's upbringing, which the very opposite to mine. He was never told by his father that he loved him ever, not once, and he resolved quite early on, I think, to be the opposite. But no, very, very content, very centered, very happy.”
2009-03-08 · Desert Island Discs · Richard Madeley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Always in a suit. Dad always wore a suit, even in the garden. He wore an old suit. Even on the beach when we used to go on holiday to St. David's and Wells, Dad would wear an old suit.”
2009-03-08 · Desert Island Discs · Richard Madeley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Classic sort of white heat of technology sixties sort of environment. Dad worked for Ford. I used to go to work looking like President Kennedy, you know, dead white shirt, sort of Christian.”
2009-03-08 · Desert Island Discs · Richard Madeley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I'd heard of Ella Fitzgerald as I sort of grew up, and my parents were very keen on her, but I didn't really sort of discover just how gifted she was, what an amazing voice she had until I met Judy, and one day we were quite early on in our relationship we were sort of swapping records like you do, and it was vinyl then, and she had a collection of elephant sterald songs, and we put it on, and I realised then just how what a gift she had, and summertime, to me just is the best template of her voice since it's just beautiful.”
2009-03-08 · Desert Island Discs · Richard Madeley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is your answer. She's used to. And anyway, I mean, to some extent, all parents are de facto embarrassing to their children. That's the job, isn't it?”
2009-03-08 · Desert Island Discs · Richard Madeley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not at all. No, that isn't true, absolutely not true. My memory of that is that they got the tape of it, the VT, and rushed it round to their friends. If the wider question is, are my kids embarrassed by the things that I do or say or whatever, I'd have to say by and large no.”
2009-03-08 · Desert Island Discs · Richard Madeley · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source