Nick Hornby
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.3 • 14.3K Ratings
🗓️ 28 September 2003
⏱️ 35 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week Sue Lawley's castaway is the internationally successful author Nick Hornby. Originally from suburban Maidenhead, his obsession with football, as chronicled in the autobiographical Fever Pitch, began after his parents divorced and his dad struggled to find a suitable way to pass the weekend. The decision to visit Arsenal had lasting repercussions with Hornby becoming a fanatical supporter.
His next work, High Fidelity, featured Horrnby's other great passion - pop music. It became a bible for all men who've ever catalogued their record collections in alphabetical order or agonised over their own Desert Island Discs choices. His next book, About a Boy, resulted in a bidding war with Robert De Niro's film company buying the rights for £2 million. How to Be Good, which followed, changed tack with a female narrator and is in part autobiographical reflecting the pros and cons of a virtuous life - questions he's had to ask following the birth of his son Danny who suffers from severe autism. He's since set up the TreeHouse Fund, a national charity for autism which has a school in London.
[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]
Favourite track: Kitty's Back by Bruce Springsteen Book: Barnaby Rudge by Charles Dickens Luxury: An mp3 player (iPod)
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 2003, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a writer. Life started a bit late for him by his mid 30s. He didn't have a lot to show for himself having drifted through Cambridge into teaching and then into freelance journalism. |
| 0:40.0 | So he decided to write a book, a personal memoir, about the one thing that really interested |
| 0:45.4 | him and had given him support when everything else fell away. And that was football. |
| 0:50.2 | The book, Fever Pitch, quickly sold hundreds of thousands of copies, is now sold a million or more. |
| 0:55.2 | The novel's high fidelity and about a boy followed, also both made into successful films, |
| 1:00.4 | the first transferring the author's usual setting of Holloway N7 to Chicago. |
| 1:05.6 | His books are engaging, funny, chatty and intimate. |
| 1:09.5 | People forget they're written at all, he says, and of course course I'm striving for that effect he is |
| 1:14.5 | Nick Hornby amazingly arrogant I suppose you could say Nick to decide having done not a |
| 1:20.3 | lot with your life that you're going to write your first book and it's going to be a kind of autobiography. |
| 1:25.0 | Yes, when I was writing it and it's just you and the computer screen it all seems to make perfect sense but of course the moment you see it in hard |
| 1:34.1 | covers you think what the hell was I doing and why did I think anyone would be |
| 1:37.7 | interested in this? But how did the idea come to I mean at the end of the day of |
| 1:42.2 | course the kind of |
| 1:43.5 | disappointments and the victories of a football team are a wonderfully |
| 1:47.3 | rich metaphor for life on them. Did you think that at the time or did you just think |
| 1:51.1 | I know a lot about football so that's what I'll write about? |
| 1:54.0 | Well there were two things. |
| 1:56.0 | One was that I'd been reading a lot of American memoirs. |
| 1:59.0 | There were a couple of wonderful books published in the 1980s, one in particular this boy's life by Tobias. of had this extraordinary life and I loved the book. I'd never seen this before. It's not really |
... |
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