Michael Heath
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.3 • 14.3K Ratings
🗓️ 7 August 2016
⏱️ 36 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Kirsty Young's castaway is the cartoonist Michael Heath.
He's been working for newspapers and magazines for sixty years and sold his first drawing to the Melody Maker in the 1950s. For the past twenty five years he's been the cartoon editor of The Spectator magazine.
Born in London in 1935, his early schooling was interrupted by the Second World War and by the age of twelve he was still unable to read and write. Both his parents drew professionally and after one unhappy year at art college, Michael left to pursue a freelance career as a cartoonist.
During his prolific career, Michael has created many cartoon strips including 'Great Bores of Today' which ran for nearly thirty years in Private Eye and 'The Regulars' which was centred on his Soho drinking crowd who included the writer Jeffrey Barnard and the artists Francis Bacon and Lucien Freud.
Producer: Sarah Taylor.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is the BBC. |
| 0:02.0 | Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. |
| 0:04.0 | Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Discs from BBC Radio 4. |
| 0:09.0 | For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast. |
| 0:13.0 | For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk. |
| 0:18.0 | UK slash Radio 4. more. My castaway this week is the cartoonist Michael Heath. For 60 years his sharpened nib and equally pointed wit have satirised the |
| 0:45.4 | bumsious hypocritical and contradictory behaviour of, well all of us, High Court judges, |
| 0:51.1 | punk rockers, school children, politicians, young mum, shopkeepers, city |
| 0:54.8 | gents, hipsters, all have, at one time or another, been skewered by the pithy |
| 0:59.7 | concision of his pen. |
| 1:01.7 | He's brought humour to the pages of virtually every British |
| 1:04.2 | newspaper there is and he's currently cartoon editor of the Spectator. Born in the |
| 1:09.0 | mid-1930s, his schooling throughout the war years was virtually non-existent by the age of 12. |
| 1:15.0 | He still couldn't read and write, and as a student he claims to have hated every minute of |
| 1:19.0 | art college, but the fact remains that it was drawing that ended up connecting him to the rest of the world. |
| 1:25.2 | He says the idea of being a cartoonist came because I could draw silly things. |
| 1:29.7 | I couldn't read or write, but I could communicate with cartoons. |
| 1:33.2 | So welcome, Michael Heath. |
| 1:34.1 | You sounded there in the middle of that introductions if you wanted to contradict me. |
| 1:37.6 | Now, you're completely correct. |
| 1:40.6 | The reason I did draw, I suppose, was because I really couldn't read or write and I could sort of scribble little drawings down. I sort of wanted to do that. |
| 1:50.0 | My father was a cartoonist of children's comics, film fun, radio fun. They weren't humorous, |
... |
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