Keith Waterhouse

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 30 July 1983

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Keith Waterhouse started his writing career on the Yorkshire Evening Post but it was not long before he had a huge success with a novel - Billy Liar. For many years, in a prolific partnership with Willis Hall, he wrote plays, television scripts and screenplays, although now he concentrates on his novels and his regular columns in Punch and the Daily Mirror. In conversation with Roy Plomley, this versatile writer talks about his career and chooses the eight records he would take to the mythical island.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: Guys and Dolls (Title Song) by The Guys and Dolls Orchestra Book: A year's supply of the Exchange & Mart Luxury: Solar-powered television, video and eight films

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello I'm Kirstie Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For Wright's reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.0	The program was originally broadcast in 1983 and the presenter was Roy Plumley. This week our castaway is Keith Waterhouse, novelist, playwright, and newspaper columnist.
0:36.5	Keith, how important is music in your life?
0:39.0	Well, it's never been as important as it ought to be, serious music. It's always been on that list of things to do,
0:45.3	you know, like reading, decline and fall and I've never actually got around it. In fact, one of my earliest
0:50.5	ambitions was to be a famous composer and I did as a child teach
0:57.2	myself musical notation and in fact I set off to write an opera called Robin Hood. But I got more interested in writing the words than writing the dots.
1:06.7	So I think that was really the end of my musical career.
1:09.7	Having written it, could you sing it? I don't think I could even play it. I can play anything with one finger on a piano. I can pick out any melody. That's as far as it goes.
1:18.0	Do you buy discs? I do, and I file them very neatly neatly and I never play them.
1:25.0	Did you find it very difficult to choose just eight that would have to last for a long long time?
1:30.0	Yes, yes I did. I can't say that I had any great thoughts, but I found that I did have a lot of favorite records and I was very sorry to ditch a lot of them.
1:41.0	What's the first one you've chosen? The first one is, well it pretty
1:44.9	well sets a style of my taste. I'm very fond of musicals and one of the best
1:51.1	musicals I know is guys and Dolls, which was recently revived brilliantly at the National Theatre.
1:57.0	And one of the wittiest numbers in Guys and Dolls is Guys and Dolls.
2:02.0	And this is from Which cast? in Guys and Dolls is Guys and Dolls.
2:02.6	And this is from Witchcast?
2:04.4	This is from the American production with Stubby K and Co.
2:08.6	When a lazy slob takes a good steady job and he smells from Vitellis and Barbis
2:17.0	Sal.
	...

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