Beryl Bainbridge
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.3 • 14.3K Ratings
🗓️ 3 February 2008
⏱️ 33 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the writer Dame Beryl Bainbridge.
She grew up in Liverpool - in a home filled with acrimony and argument - and started writing when she was still a child. Her only ambition, she says, was to get married and have a 'proper' family, but when her first two children were still young, her marriage broke down and she turned to writing once again. She believes she finds inspiration from the trouble and friction of everyday life and that if her marriage hadn't failed, she would have been too happy to write another word. Now she is one of our most respected authors. She has written 17 novels and countless articles, screenplays and television plays. She's won armfuls of awards too - but, despite being shortlisted five times, she's never won the Booker prize. She doesn't mind not winning, she says, but she would like to be the writer who has had the most nominations.
[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]
Favourite track: Can I Forget You? by Richard Tauber Book: The Case Books by John Hunter Luxury: Pens and Paper.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. |
| 0:05.3 | For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music. |
| 0:08.4 | The program was originally broadcast in 1986, and the presenter was Michael Parkinson. |
| 0:15.2 | A cast away today is one of Britain's leading novelists. She's a winner of both the Guardian and the Whitbread |
| 0:34.8 | Fiction Prizes, and has several times been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. A works been |
| 0:40.3 | variously described as outrageous, exhilarating, and beautifully malicious. She's also a successful |
| 0:46.8 | painter, and moreover, in the view of some observers, she's a genuine English eccentric, and she is |
| 0:52.8 | Barrel Bambridge. Barrel, can we deal first of all with this thing that several reporters have |
| 0:58.0 | made by the remark they made that you're, in fact, eccentric? Do you think you are eccentric? |
| 1:02.6 | Not in the slightest. They remark that you have a dummy called Neville Chamberlain who sits at your |
| 1:08.5 | breakfast table. Yes, but I got him for a purpose, you see, I got him because I was writing a book, |
| 1:14.3 | it's a book about Adolf Hitler. I always wanted to make figures. I like making things, you see, |
| 1:19.8 | and at one point I was going to make the whole of Suzanne's card players out of wax, but never got |
| 1:25.6 | around to that. So I thought, well, I'll get one figure, and he turned out to be Adolf Hitler, |
| 1:31.2 | he had a mustache. The people who made him went too far and got enthusiastic, and after a bit I |
| 1:37.0 | couldn't sort of live with Adolf, so he looks quite like Neville Chamberlain, so I turned him into |
| 1:41.6 | Neville. And he sits at the table? I'm moving around the house, yes. Sometimes in the summer, |
| 1:46.0 | we put him on the front step for a bit of an airing. Also, you have a stuffed dog and a stuffed |
| 1:50.4 | bison in your hallway. He's a buffalo. A buffalo, I'm sorry. Yeah, that was a bit of a mistake, |
| 1:55.3 | the buffalo is a bit of a mistake. You see, where it came from, he's not from being eccentric, |
| 1:59.6 | I had an ex-husband who worked at Liverpool School of Art, who was a teacher, and when that |
| 2:04.6 | revolution came about, where he didn't draw from life, they broke huge statues, Michael Angelo, |
... |
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