Michael Elkins
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.3 • 14.3K Ratings
🗓️ 16 February 1985
⏱️ 36 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Michael Elkins was, for many years, the BBC correspondent in Jerusalem. In conversation with Roy Plomley, he recalls his childhood in New York, where he became a pool-room hustler, his screen-writing career in Hollywood, and he talks about his active role in helping to set up a Jewish state in Palestine.
[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]
Favourite track: Spring by Antonio Vivaldi Book: The Hero With the Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell Luxury: Electric typewriter
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Christy Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. |
| 0:05.6 | For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music. |
| 0:08.6 | The program was originally broadcast in 1985, and the presenter was Roy Plumley. |
| 0:31.0 | Our cast away this week has lived for 35 years into Rosalim, and for half of that time has been the BBC's correspondent there. |
| 0:39.0 | It's Michael Elkins, a very familiar voice. |
| 0:43.0 | How much does music mean to you, Michael? |
| 0:45.0 | It means a great deal. It means even more than it used to mean now that I've retired from daily broadcasting, and I have leisure to listen to music. |
| 0:55.0 | Do you have any skill at it, do you play an instrument? |
| 0:59.0 | No, but I sing off key. Do you have a lot of discs? Do you play records? |
| 1:06.0 | Yes, in Israel we're quite lucky. For one thing, the Israeli Broadcasting Service gives us many hours of classical music, or of all kinds of music, each day, a particular program, the voice of music. |
| 1:22.0 | And, of course, I've collected records since, well, since I was about 18, and I'm considerably more than that now. |
| 1:31.0 | Right. Now, the first of this miserable allowance of eight records, we've given you. What is it? |
| 1:37.0 | It's a crutch to help me over the first lonely moments. It's the Vivaldi Four Seasons. |
| 1:44.0 | And I think the opening part, Spring, lively, happy, and it's encouraging music. |
| 2:14.0 | Music |
| 2:45.0 | Music |
| 2:54.0 | Spring from the Vivaldi Four Seasons, the soloists of Zagreb conducted by Antonio Janigro. |
| 3:02.0 | Michael, you were born in the United States in New York? |
| 3:05.0 | In New York. Do you look back on your childhood as a deprived one? |
| 3:11.0 | Well, we were deprived of material possessions. I knew I was poor, and I think it made me aggressive, but I had no real basis for comparison. Everyone I knew was poor. |
| 3:26.0 | When you left primary school, what did you do? |
| 3:29.0 | We were all what you would call young hoodlums. We ran around in the streets, you see, and we were all fairly tough or thought of ourselves as fairly tough. |
... |
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