Dr Jonathan Miller
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.3 • 14.3K Ratings
🗓️ 23 January 2005
⏱️ 35 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Sue Lawley's castaway this week is Dr Jonathan Miller. Jonathan Miller has been an influential and prolific force in British intellectual life since the 1960s. A writer, theatre and opera director and explainer of science to the public, he's had not one career, but several, and is seemingly capable of endlessly reinventing himself - as a scientist, a director, a television presenter, a writer, a film-maker and, more recently, a sculptor.
Whilst still a medical student he received an invitation which changed the course of his life and career - to take part in a sketch show called Beyond the Fringe, which was to go to the Edinburgh Festival. Jonathan was never to return to science full-time, as invitations to direct began to come in. He went on to become a leading theatre and opera director, celebrated for productions which included Tosca, set in Mussolini's Italy, and a mobster Rigoletto. This career alone would be regarded by many as more than sufficient, but Jonathan Miller combined it with making films and presenting television programmes.
[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]
Favourite track: Aria from Goldberg Variations by Johann Sebastian Bach Book: The Invertebrates by Libbie Henrietta Hyman Luxury: Canvas roll containing dissecting set
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. |
| 0:05.0 | For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music. |
| 0:08.0 | The program was originally broadcast in 2005, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is a theatre director. That's a rather inadequate description of a man who's |
| 0:34.3 | done a lot of things in his life but who nevertheless claims he's failed to achieve as much |
| 0:38.4 | as he could. Having read natural sciences at Cambridge he qualified as doctor, but it was on the stage rather |
| 0:44.7 | than in the operating theatre that he began to make his name. |
| 0:48.6 | He co-wrote and performed in Beyond the Fringe with Alan Bennett, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, started to direct plays |
| 0:54.8 | and became editor and presenter of the BBC Television Arts Program Monitor. |
| 0:58.8 | Since then he's made several series for radio and television on science and the arts, the body in question is probably |
| 1:04.5 | the best known, and directed dozens of plays and operas for the stage. |
| 1:09.4 | In recent years, the invitations have come more from abroad than from home and with his |
| 1:14.5 | accompanying sense of rejection a feeling of regret that he gave up the intellectual |
| 1:19.4 | challenge of medicine for the more frivolous world of the arts. |
| 1:23.0 | There's a very large part of my sensibility, he says, |
| 1:26.0 | which is filled with a sort of inconsolable remorse |
| 1:30.0 | about having betrayed a very good mind. He is Jonathan Miller. People, frankly Jonathan, |
| 1:36.4 | would laugh to hear you say that. You who've been such a sort of force in British intellectual |
| 1:40.6 | and artistic life, you know. |
| 1:42.6 | But it runs very deep this regret, doesn't it? |
| 1:45.0 | I think it's mainly to do with the fact that I grew up in a world in Cambridge which |
| 1:50.5 | valued particular forms of intellectual achievement and devalued others. |
| 1:55.4 | So that when I told the friends of mine that I had at Cambridge that I was leaving medicine, |
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