YouSaid · the spoken record

Stanley McMurtry

lines on the record: 48
first: 2008-03-23
most recent: 2008-03-23
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

“Well, you see I'm on this island, and I think most islands have got litter being washed ashore all the time, so there bound to be bits of paper come ashore. I shall light a fire, and I'll make charcoal, and I'll do some drawings on this piece of paper that I'll have allowed to dry out. Hope I can find a few bottles that have drifted in, and then I shall put these drawings into the bottle addressed to the Daily Mail, and I shall send with my cartoons in that way. It'll be a little late and maybe not quite so topical, but maybe after a while the editor will send out a search party and I'll be rescued.”
2008-03-23 · Desert Island Discs · Stanley McMurtry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, my choice would be a tenor saxophone because I'll be able to get my ambouchure right and learn how to play the saxophone, not as well as Johnny Hodges, but I'm hoping that I can get better.”
2008-03-23 · Desert Island Discs · Stanley McMurtry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I've always been a great fan of John Steinbeck. I've read most of his stuff, but what I would like is the collected work of John Steinbeck so that I can have all the time in the world to be able to read it thoroughly.”
2008-03-23 · Desert Island Discs · Stanley McMurtry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My last choice is Peggy Lee. She sang a song called Is That All There Is And I have always thought that when I do eventually pop my clogs, I'd like that played at my funeral. So when I'm on my desert island, if I've got that record there, nobody's bothered to rescue me, and I'm still sat there, and the time comes for me to go off to wherever I'm going off to the great drawing board in the sky. I'm hoping I can heave myself off my mattress and go across and put the record player on and have Peggy Lee singing this as I take my last breath.”
2008-03-23 · Desert Island Discs · Stanley McMurtry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am, I love my grandchildren, but sadly they're all split up. I've got two lovely children, grandchildren in Australia, and I love them to bits. They're lovely couple of kids. Sadly, I miss them like mad because I can't see them as so far away.”
2008-03-23 · Desert Island Discs · Stanley McMurtry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a record I'm not very proud of. I mean, I don't like the idea that I've been married three times, and I'm still very friendly with my two wives.”
2008-03-23 · Desert Island Discs · Stanley McMurtry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Piece of music is Brooks Violin Concerto. A man that got me very interested in classical music was a teacher called Mr Brewer. He used to have a wind up grammophone and a little gadget on the side though he used to sharpen the needles. And he used to play Mendelsen's Fingles Cave to us boys. For quite a few years I thought that piece of music had a very slow movement in the middle of it, but in fact it was the gramophone winding down and he'd have to come and wind it all up again. But he played Brooks' violin concerto once, and it stuck with me, and I haven't got any stories to tell about it apart from that I just love it.”
2008-03-23 · Desert Island Discs · Stanley McMurtry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, life has been hard work, I really have grafted very hard, as I said when we're talking about animation, I work very, very hard in those days, and I work very hard, and I Were so dogmatic with sending everything off to the Punch magazine even though I'd been rejected. Many times. I think perseverance is a quality I've got. But it just seems to me that I've been so lucky in my life, really, in that I've always been constantly surprised that I've got where I have done, and it just seems that somebody up there is looking after me.”
2008-03-23 · Desert Island Discs · Stanley McMurtry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The next choice is Lonnie Donnegan and the Battle of New Orleans. I love Lonnie Donnegan's music. He was a huge hit when I was a lot younger. And when I met my wife, Liz, from time to time we'd go to a function or we'd go off on holiday and everybody was expected to do a little piece, sing a song and all that kind of stuff. And Liz always sang this song from the Battle of New Orleans by Lonnie Donnegan. It's the only song that she knows with all the words to. When I'm on my desert island, it will remind me of her.”
2008-03-23 · Desert Island Discs · Stanley McMurtry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very often yes, you do have to adapt to Zlot into a serious cartoon you tend to put more black into it and make it much more dramatic. But I do do things. I remember when one of the most controversial ones I did for a few years back was when we had an IRA chap, Bobby Sands, who was starving himself to death, and the vicars and the priests were all praying round his bed. And I did a cartoon of a soldier who'd had his arms blown off and a leg blown off, and there was on one side of the picture was all these people praying for this Bobby Sams. And the soldier was just saying nobody seems to bother about the weight I've lost and they've got so many letters over that one. People liked it.”
2008-03-23 · Desert Island Discs · Stanley McMurtry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I draw to amuse me I'll draw all my cartoons I don't think about the policy of the paper I don't think about what I think it might please the readers I do it to please me so I don't really feel that I am trying very hard to make the editor happy or to make the paper happy I'm just doing something to make me happy and if it happens to coincide with what the editor wants that's great”
2008-03-23 · Desert Island Discs · Stanley McMurtry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do I'm very, very fond of the paper, and the whole feeling that you get when you're at the Daily Mail is that you're working almost like in a family business, and I know it's middle of the road, and I know an awful lot of people don't like what the Daily Mail stands for, but I think that it's it actually has a lot to say for middle class Britain.”
2008-03-23 · Desert Island Discs · Stanley McMurtry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. Well, what happened was moved from the detached house into a flat. I was on my own because my marriage had broken up. And my teacher said, Oh, you can't give up the saxophone. I said, what are we going to do? Because I'm going to disturb all the neighbors. And he said, Well, get into the wardrobe and put a sock down the horn of the saxophone and blow from there, blow there and he said then you'll keep your umbrella and that'll be fine. And I tried this for two or three weeks, and in the end I said to him, I can't do this. He said, OK, get into bed and pull the duvet over your head and just sit there and play cross legged, play saxophone. And I did this so hot. And in the end I had to give up that. So my poor old Saxon is down in the cellar unused, getting gathering dust.”
2008-03-23 · Desert Island Discs · Stanley McMurtry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have to work the muscle. And after hours and hours of practice,'cause I was working at home in those days and sending my work into the Daily Mail, and I had a detached house so I could make as much noise as I liked every children were at school, my wife was out working, and so when I'd finished my drawing or if I felt fed up halfway through I'd get this saxophone out and it's amazing how it cheers you up, you know, to be playing music. I've always loved the saxophone, and one day I heard Johnny Hodggetts playing I've got it bad and that ain't good and it sends a tingle up the back of my neck every time I hear it.”
2008-03-23 · Desert Island Discs · Stanley McMurtry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Next choice is Johnny Hodges. He's a saxophonist and the brilliant saxophonist. Many years ago I bought myself a little altosacks, and I went for lessons with a chap who used to play for the London saxophone quartet, and at first all I could get was some raspberry noises out of this thing, and lots of spit. But I persevered and persevered, and there is a thing called the Ambouchure, and your lip. If you don't play for a lot, your lip goes, it just becomes sloppy, and you can't get the right pressure on the reed.”
2008-03-23 · Desert Island Discs · Stanley McMurtry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We got on very, very well with him. You see, the thing is that we cartoonists, we go in, wearing the jester's hat, if you like. So whereas editors can bawl out writers and they shout and scream at other copy takers or whatever it is, they tend to treat the cartoonist much more fairly. I think it's because maybe there are fewer of us.”
2008-03-23 · Desert Island Discs · Stanley McMurtry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's I'm very, very fortunate and privileged that I've got an editor that has the same kind of humour that I have and seems to appreciate what I do.”
2008-03-23 · Desert Island Discs · Stanley McMurtry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think so. I think you see there's a certain form of censorship goes on in that I produce about five ideas every day. I rough them down in rough form and take them into the editor, and he chooses the one that he likes. So if there was one that was violently against the policy of the paper, I suppose that would be just put to one side. Editors like to edit, so that's what happens. And I don't have a very”
2008-03-23 · Desert Island Discs · Stanley McMurtry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well my mother tells me that my father was very proud, and occasionally he'd pat me on the back. I got the job on the daily sketch, and they took me on a kind of temporary basis, you know, they say we'll give you six months trial, and two or three years went by and they didn't tell me I'd got the job. And come to think of it, they haven't told me I've got the job yet”
2008-03-23 · Desert Island Discs · Stanley McMurtry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ah Wagner When I was started with Nick Spargo at the animation place I was in Diggs in Henley and there was a man there who was a forester I used to go on the weekends I'd go off and help him felling trees but in the evenings and the long winter evenings we'd spend a lot of time indoors and he'd play these classical records and I got very very interested in classical music and the one that we played most was Wagner. Not the whole opera, just the preludes and the overtures to various bits and pieces, but I fell in love with Loingrin.”
2008-03-23 · Desert Island Discs · Stanley McMurtry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Eventually we were living in a little semi-detached house at the time I was married with a young baby. And the post came one day and I opened this envelope and there was a letter in it saying that I'd sold my very first cartoon to a magazine called Today and they were going to pay me eleven pounds just for this one cartoon. This was a week's wages for this one drawing and I realized oh wow this is for me.”
2008-03-23 · Desert Island Discs · Stanley McMurtry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cartoon filamenter. Well, Glynn and I, the chap I was talking about earlier, we used to go to Borth in Cardiganshire for our holidays, mainly with his parents. We'd always go off with his parents and they'd hire a big house and us two lads we'd have a great time there. And there was a girl there called Julie, who we both fell madly in love with. She was very pretty. She looked like Leslie Carron. And then I found that her step brother was opening a cartoon film studio in Henley on Thames. Her mother wrote to me and said Why don't you get in touch with him?'Cause he's looking for people to train as an anime, as animators. And he gave me a job as a trainee I was taken on at seven pounds a week and lived in Henley, and the man that gave me the job Nick Spargo he was a brilliant cartoonist himself, and I used to sit beside him and watch him doing his cartoons and be absolutely full of admiration and determined that that's what I would like to do.”
2008-03-23 · Desert Island Discs · Stanley McMurtry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was open to any possibility because, to be honest, I never ever thought that I would make it as an artist until I became a trainee film animator”
2008-03-23 · Desert Island Discs · Stanley McMurtry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“his father in the eye and when his We had a couple of big blow ups together, and he wanted me to apologise and I refused, and I said look, you've got to apologise to me because I think you're just being over the top, heavy handed. And my way of escaping was that I left home and went into the army.”
2008-03-23 · Desert Island Discs · Stanley McMurtry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My mother was very supportive, but she would side with my father I used to hear them arguing up from my bedroom upstairs. I'd hear them arguing about me and what I'd do and what I hadn't done and all that kind of stuff. And she was very supportive. And even up until my father was”
2008-03-23 · Desert Island Discs · Stanley McMurtry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, a teenager. What he wanted was he wanted an academic, and I was never an academic, I was never very good at maths and never very good at most subjects at school apart from art and English, perhaps, and I was a big disappointment to him for not being cleverer than I was, and I think that he felt that art was a bit of a lowly profession compared with others.”
2008-03-23 · Desert Island Discs · Stanley McMurtry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To be quite honest, at that time I was quite scared of my father. He was quite victorian, and he was quite prone to giving me a good slap across the head if I overstepped the mark.”
2008-03-23 · Desert Island Discs · Stanley McMurtry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no, no. I was pretty broke all the time. And I used to have to wear my father's cast-off suits as well because I was about the same height as him. And he had quite a pot belly, and I used to have to kind of pull, fold the trousers over and tie them together with a belt. I must have looked terrible.”
2008-03-23 · Desert Island Discs · Stanley McMurtry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was still living in the same cottage and I was travelling up and down. I wish really that I could have gone to university and had the fun of living and being away from home and then coming back maybe for weekends, but I was back every night, and I used to do a paper round every morning, get up very, very early in the morning and do it, and also on Sundays I'd do it, and all the money that I got for my paper round, well not all of it, I had to give to my dad to help.”
2008-03-23 · Desert Island Discs · Stanley McMurtry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The third choice is Yussi Berling. They had a program on the radio called Family Favorites, and Yussi Bueling was quite regularly played, and it was none shall sleep long, long before Pavarotti made the record, and I fell in love with this man's voice. He had such a wonderful, melancholy and wonderful sadness in his voice. My two children got absolutely fed up listening to him when they were kids, and when they were young they used to say Oh not Jussy Blurhead again.”
2008-03-23 · Desert Island Discs · Stanley McMurtry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think he probably was afraid I was up for a fall, but also I think behind it all was the perception that it wasn't really a proper job. A proper job was going at selling something or making something, and eventually after two years at Art College he pulled me out and said, Lurry, I think you ought to be earning a living now. So off I went to get a job.”
2008-03-23 · Desert Island Discs · Stanley McMurtry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think so. I think he thought that cartoonists were actually born rather than actually trained and learning it and gradually honing your skills, in that when I did try to become a cartoonist and he'd paid for me to go to art college after all, he said, Oh, you're wasting your time you're not good enough for this kind of business, and he didn't realise that you can eventually become good enough.”
2008-03-23 · Desert Island Discs · Stanley McMurtry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My father's father painted, but his father my great grandfather was a portrait painter. I don't know how good he was, but I just found a birth certificate and there it was a painter and I thought a painter and decorator, but in fact he was a portrait painter.”
2008-03-23 · Desert Island Discs · Stanley McMurtry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was always very keen on drawing, I liked looking at comics, but I met Glynn, this friend of mine, who I camped in the garden with, and he was a very, very good artist, and we'd sit in his dining room, and he would be drawing strip cartoons, and I would be drawing strip cartoons as well. But I got the bug from doing that, and from then on I was always drawing, and”
2008-03-23 · Desert Island Discs · Stanley McMurtry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, when I was about fourteen, Frankie Lane was at his peak, and I had a very good friend called Glynn. and Glynn and I used to camp out in the summer in his garden he had a very nice garden we'd get into a tent and we'd lie there playing on a wind up gramophone Frankie Lane Records and it was always I believe at that time I believe we'd play it over and over and over again until eventually the neighbors would look out of the window and say for goodness sake shut up And we think, well, what can we do now if we can't sleep? So we'd go out and go scrumping, pinch all the neighbour's apples.”
2008-03-23 · Desert Island Discs · Stanley McMurtry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we didn't really know that we were poor, really. That was life for us. I felt mildly jealous when I went to friends' houses because they were in nineteen thirty semi detached houses which seemed terribly posh to me And I remember feeling slightly ashamed bringing people back to my house because it was so well not squalid, but very, very basic.”
2008-03-23 · Desert Island Discs · Stanley McMurtry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and in the toilet, by the way, there had the newspapers were cut up into squares and are hanging there, so perhaps somebody might even be using my cart for the same purpose now.”
2008-03-23 · Desert Island Discs · Stanley McMurtry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Money was very tight, we were very poor. When we moved to Birmingham we lived in a tiny little cottage, which didn't have any running water at all, but it had cold water but no hot water, it had an outside toilet, and it was freezing cold, and so we were all fairly heavily constipated because you wouldn't go out to the outside loo during the winter. And in the summer months I'd be sitting in the loo and there was a dartboard on the other side. My father used to, he was a very good darts player. And as a wee boy, I'd be sitting there in the toilet, and I could hear this thud thud thud on the other side of the door, and I'd have to shout when I was finished. Daddy, can I come out now?'Cause I didn't want to dart in the middle of my forehead.”
2008-03-23 · Desert Island Discs · Stanley McMurtry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Unconventional. There were a lot of arguments, but they stayed together all the way through their lives, and she missed him like mad when he died. So I think they were very close.”
2008-03-23 · Desert Island Discs · Stanley McMurtry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Children can always be a bit curious and then lose friends, and I suppose at the age of maybe fourteen we permanently settled in Birmingham, so I went to school in Birmingham. But it did upset my education a great deal.”
2008-03-23 · Desert Island Discs · Stanley McMurtry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What we don't really know, my sister and I are always a bit puzzled. I think perhaps he just wanted a bit more time with my mother, really. But we seem to spend an awful lot of time with my granny, and I would just be getting into the hang of talking Birmingham. I'd be talking up here like this in our Birmingham and suddenly become a little brummy boy, and then up we'd go up to Scotland and say we do here like this in no time at all.”
2008-03-23 · Desert Island Discs · Stanley McMurtry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it was very strange, and I still don't understand why he did it, but my father used to send me up to with my older sister I've got an older sister called Joan, and we used to be sent up to Scotland to stay with my grandmother, and we thought it would just be for a brief holiday, but it would go on month after month, and eventually we'd have to go to school up there. And then we'd be whisked off back down to Birmingham where he'd gone to get some work. He was a commercial traveller. So we'd go down to Birmingham, and then we'd have to rejoin another school. So it was always very, very confusing”
2008-03-23 · Desert Island Discs · Stanley McMurtry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I've remarried, and my new wife is red headed. But I've made it look a lot more like her, and so she appears in the cartoon every day she might be part of the curtains, she might be a cloud in the sky, she might be part of a puddle. She's always hidden. It's like those old books that used to have when you were a child where you find eight tennis rackets in this drawing or something like that. But I just did it as a little joke, and now if I leave her out, I get letters from readers, and they've cut out the cartoon, and they'll say will you put a ring round where you've hidden her?”
2008-03-23 · Desert Island Discs · Stanley McMurtry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She does every day every day. I have to put her in otherwise it started off as a joke many, many years ago I got a letter from all places in Paris somebody had noticed it they'd picked up the paper and they noticed this and they'd said Who is this blonde that you keep putting into your cartoon? Well at that time it was a blonde because it was my previous”
2008-03-23 · Desert Island Discs · Stanley McMurtry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My first piece of music is Frank Sinatra singing My Funny Valentine. I first went to see Frank Sinatra in nineteen seventy, and he was absolutely fantastic. And I like this song particularly because it makes me think of my wife, although the words in it are Your looks are laughable, unphotographable, and certainly she's not like that. She's very beautiful, so Frank Sinatra.”
2008-03-23 · Desert Island Discs · Stanley McMurtry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well had one little instance of that long time ago I was on television doing something rather, and I was having a cup of coffee in a cafe, and a little boy suddenly came over to me and he said Could I have your autograph? And I said you were on television last night. Obviously his mum had sent him over. So I wrote my name and did a little quick little drawing for him and handed it to him and he said what do I do with this? And I said Well you collect it and you meet other people who have been on television you might get their autographs as well. And he handed it back to me and he said now I collect Pokemon cards. So I was put in my place very quickly”
2008-03-23 · Desert Island Discs · Stanley McMurtry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think you'll find that most cartoonists who are working in Britain today would probably vote not for the politics of the person, but because they've got a big nose and large ears. We like people that are easy to draw. I think young people are harder to draw because they're not lined and they have handsome or pretty. I always find it very difficult to draw Tony Blair because he was young and good looking. I'd far rather have somebody who was older and few wrinkles. Golden Mare was my favourite Israeli prime minister. She was wonderful.”
2008-03-23 · Desert Island Discs · Stanley McMurtry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was all a bit of a surprise because Frank Sinatra had been in the newspapers and been accused of being part of the mafia, and I decided I would do a cartoon about it. I can't remember what the cartoon was about, but it was a funny one, lightheart, and it wasn't being accusative in any way. And a month went by, and I got a letter from his agent, and his agent said that Frank had asked for the cartoon. So I sent it off, I was really pleased about that, and I thought no more about it, but maybe six months later I got a letter from him thanking me, and saying that he'd been going through a terrible time and it was really nice to know that he had some support in Britain. So I've kept the letter my daughter's got it in her autograph book still. I bet.”
2008-03-23 · Desert Island Discs · Stanley McMurtry · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source