Philippe Petit

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 10 April 2005

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the high wire walker Philippe Petit. Since the age of 17 Petit had been, in his own words, a 'wandering troubadour', making a living by doing magic in the salons of Paris. Notre Dame became the site of Petit's first illegal wirewalk, on 6th June 1971. On 7th August 1974 Philippe Petit committed 'the artistic crime of the century' when he put a rope between the towers of the World Trade Centre in New York and spent nearly an hour walking back and forth across it, pausing to kneel and lie down on the wire. He brought much of Manhattan, a quarter of a mile below him, to a standstill, and succeeded in pushing Richard Nixon's resignation off the front pages of the newspapers the following day.

Since walking between the twin towers Petit has done wire-walks all over the world including Tokyo and Jerusalem. He has, uniquely, devised plays to be performed on the high wire and has also become artist in residence at the cathedral of St John the Divine in New York, the largest Gothic cathedral in the world.

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

Favourite track: 1st Movement of Sonatine for Violin and Piano by Antonin Dvořák Book: Ashley's Book of Knots by Clifford Ashley and Book of short stories Luxury: His mysterious object (An object found by his father that, as yet, no-one can identify)

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 Lolly. My castaway this week is a fanambulist, not a word in my everyday dictionary either, so to put it another way, he's a high
0:35.2	wire walker. With nothing to help him apart from a pole, he's walked, danced, laid on his back and stood on one
0:41.9	leg while balancing on a wire 1,350 feet above the ground
0:46.8	between the North and South Towers of the World Trade Center in New York.
0:51.0	That was 31 years ago and was the most spectacular perhaps of the 70
0:55.4	high-wire walks he's done in his career which include walking between the
0:59.2	towers of Notre Dame and the steel pylons of Sydney Harbour Bridge. He does it because it makes him happy.
1:06.0	He's always refused lucrative commercial offers.
1:09.0	As a boy, he escaped from his strict father by climbing trees and after an unsuccessful
1:14.4	schooling he became a street magician and juggler. Now 55 he lives in New York
1:19.6	where he dreams of walking across the Grand Canyon.
1:23.3	What he does, he says, is life affirming,
1:25.8	rather than life-threatening.
1:27.6	I am drawn by the madness, the beauty,
1:30.4	the theatricality, the poetry, and the soul of the wire he says. He is
1:35.3	Philip Pughty. Your aerial journeys, Philip, are all of those things. They're
1:40.9	mad, they're beautiful, they're theatrical, they're poetic, but they're also incredibly
1:46.0	dangerous. Do you feel no fear when you're up there?
1:48.6	They are not dangerous to me because I prepare them. I want to get to be very old and I don't take any risk.
1:56.7	And that's always surprised people when they point at a little dot in the sky and say,
	...

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