Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1986, and the presenter was Michael Parkinson. Our castaway has been described as the maverick genius of British science and one of the most gifted astronomers and mathematicians of our times.

He's also a prolific writer having published 31 scientific books, 15 novels, four volumes of children's stories, a pantomime, a libretto for an

opera and 2 television series, is Sir Fred Hoyle.

Sir Fred didn't use it play a big part, a significant part in your childhood?

Well, it did because my mother was trained as a musician and so from the very earliest times,

I suppose when he was a few months old, but certainly by the time I was one or two I must

have been listening to music on pretty considerable scale because she would play the piano

maybe three hours every day that I can remember all the years of her life.

I never thought to become a musician because I think it must have been intuitively clear to me that I didn't have the talents for it.

What kind of music do you remember a playing?

Oh it would be Beethoven, normally surely. That was her chief love and so it would almost certainly be the Beethoven sonatas.

She would sing a lot to handle and so forth because that also is one of the things that she did

professionally.

She also played in a cinema didn't she? That was during the war when the

wives of men at the front I think were paid 5P a day. We're talking about the

First World War. First World War indeed, yes.

And so she thought to augment this 5P a day by doing what she could.

I would be about two years old and she went out at night and played in the silent cinemas. What kind of music did she come from?

Oh, she'd be bet old and she's thundering away to the terrible sort of techniques they

had in 1917 cinema techniques but it will be Beethoven

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