Hello, I'm Kirsty 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. Michael Parkinson. Brown, you've been a journalist all your life and it occurs to me that journalists in fact... Know from a very very early age what they want to do that they don't come into the job by accident would that be true of your case oh yeah Ever since the age of eight, I read a story in the Hotspur, do you remember the Hotspur? I do. About a man called Scoop Mallory, ace reporter, and I vowed there and then that I was going to be a journalist.

Must have been being interviewed for the grammar school in the scholarship days. It was the first year of the war and we... The interview for some reason on Wetherby station in Cumberland in the waiting room which was open just me and the headmaster Ebenezer Rhys Thomas and he said what you're going to be when you grow up Brian and I said a reporter a newspaper reporter and he looked very pained. What was it you think about the job that attracted you? Was it the glamour of the job? The nosiness. I'm an incorrigible gossip and that's all journalism is, isn't it? It's kind of structured gossip that you get paid for. And I've always been nosy, always wanted to know what was going on. When you start as a journalist, you remember this, when you do your first bit going to the, you know, the courts and the things you wouldn't go to as a sort of proper human being, you realize... It's the life for you. You know so much. You feel so cocky, you go around and say, But I knew about that because I saw him sent to prison. Let's have a first choice of record, Brown, please.

Right the Benny Goodman trio playing body and soul this will remind you of me of school dances Nice to lead the school dance band and in penr We were evacuated and there was a slender girl and a plump girl who we used to call body and soul and I used to grin at them and play this.

Benny Goodman Trio

and so Brian what kind of a background did you you come from what do your parents do? My father was a silk screen printer, I think, in his earliest days, but he and his brother had an advertising agency in Newcastle-Montaigne. Used to say that one of the first jobs he had was to go and post bills for George and Alfred Black, who started in... And he went into Chophill in County Durham in 1926 during the general strike and they wouldn't let him in because they said Chophill is the first Soviet in Britain. So he said well take into the commissar and it was Will Northup. - You were the only child I believe. - Yes I was the only child. - Were you a bright child? - Yeah. Why don't you say it sadly? Well, I mean, it all sounds cocky, but yes, I mean, I could pass exams standing on my head. In all this background of yours. Was it a very musical family or what? Well, my father wasn't, though he liked music. My mother liked music very... My mother's brother who died not so very long ago I always say of him that he worked in the town hall for 40 years lived in the same house for

50 years and sang in the cathedral in Newcastle for 60 years. And there was that great tradition in the family of singing, but I couldn't sing. But when I went to the grammar school and it was evacuated from Newcastle to Penrith, the great thing was the school was very keen on music and if you showed any interest at all, not aptitude, just interest. You got the chance and that's how I came to learn the clarinet and I was taught by a boy called Jimmy Lickley which is a great name for a clarinet teacher. But why clarinetically? I think because I'd once seen Harry Roy at the Newcastle Empire. And you made your radio debut playing clarinet things at the age of 11? Yes, on Children's Hour. In fact, if we... Play the second record now, that is it, because the first thing I ever played in public, and almost the last, I played the Mozart clarinet trio in E flat when I was 12 in the Wordsworth Hall in Penrith and I was so small me feet wouldn't touch the floor when I sat on the chair and I was terrified and the...

Two rather sort of uppity camp sixth formers playing the viola and the piano, but truth to tell I was better than them. This one is Jack Brimer's recording.

I have to report. So that piece of music that left Brian Redhead awash in nostalgia. You really enjoyed that, didn't you? Oh, it was lovely. Then I played it on Turin's Eye, you see. And I remember going home in the trolleybus from the old studio they had in Newcastle and thinking, I wonder if the people on this bus realise that there's a famous musician among them? Before you went to university, you went in the army. The better national service caught up with you. Did you enjoy it? I did very much. Well, I went first in the Fenham Barracks in Newcastle so I could go home in the trolleybus, which was comfortable.

And then I went to the Sudden Command Drama Company as a sort of stage manager and actor and we toured all the cathedral towns of the south of England, none of which I've ever seen. All those and played in I can't remember the play we played it was awful and then I've got posted to Singapore to an army Education Centre in Singapore and I worked part-time for Radio Malaya. I used to say, This is Sergeant Brian Redhead introducing the records that you have chosen. Play things I chose. You're a disc jockey, are you? Yep. Oh wonderful. You should play nothing but Duke Ellington. That was a marvellous two years because most people I suppose who did National Service regarded it as being a total waste of time. In your case, of course it wasn't. It was career enhancing in a way. Well, yeah, I wouldn't have thought of it in those terms, but I very much have... I've been a person who lives in the present, always. That's why I didn't think, Oh dear me, I'm wasting my time in the army and I should be going to university. I just thought, If you're in the army and they're paying, you might as well enjoy it. I got a bit bored and I went absent without leave to Australia.

And toured around all over Darwin, Alice Springs, Adelaide. Then I got arrested and I was brought back and I was court-martialed for being absent. But I defended myself and got off. That sounds like a novel, actually. It might well be, yet. When you came then out of the army... With all these adventures. Do you then go to university or do you start in journalism at that point? I was trying to go to Cambridge and I had a place but there was such chaos if you remember then because they'd altered the time of national service so much. People trying to get in at the same time in my college said would you mind waiting and I didn't mind at all and I went off and worked for a paper called the Whitley Bay Seaside Chronicle And then for the Newcastle Evening Chronicle. What was the Whitley Bay Seaside Chronicle? I sound like a joke newspaper actually. It was a great, great newspaper. What did you do on it? The first week I was on it, I remember the other reporters all had flu and I wrote practically all of it. But we had a good

eccentric editor, a lovely old-fashioned journalist who was always full of new theories to create new short hands and devoted most of his time to that. we had an old hard-drinking reporter called jimmy lackeby who really taught me how you go about the job properly. Where they had three of us young ones, one called Neville Jackson, who is now I think with time teases, a news editor, a very pretty girl called Audrey Elder and me, and it was lovely. I've got £2.9 a week. But it's exciting to see your own stuff in print, even if it is just about a court case. And if you start on a little local, you can't get... Anything wrong because the people you're writing about you meet on the pavement so you've really got to be accurate and it's as good a training as any and also of course in those days I mean they don't Good now, now you either get industrial tribunals or people having nervous breakdowns, but in those days, if I may use the correct word, you could get severely bollocked for anything you got wrong.

And then of course after university on to Manchester. Before we go to Manchester let's have a record. Well this is the one bit of music I was never allowed to play in public and which I could never play. I tried very hard. There's something about Brahms that even though you know all the notes and you think you've got it right, you always finish up at cross purposes with the other people who are playing. So here properly played is the slow movement of the Brahms clarinet quintet and the clarinetist is a bloke called Jacques Lancelot, a Frenchman. He makes a beautiful sound.

Right now I'm...

Was it you in your career as a journalist to get a job in the Guardian? Then the Manchester Guardian, of course. Well, it goes on, but I didn't believe it. We all applied, all the bright little lads running around Cambridge at the time. Well, we all applied and I got it and I couldn't believe... Look and the only reason I think I got it was because I'd already had some concrete experience on newspapers and I dreamed about three days what would be Manchester Guardian. I remember the first day going into the reporters room and I was introduced round and a very distinguished man in the corner with that kind of moustache people have who take gentleman's relish. ...was introduced to me as Norman Shrapnel. Oh, yes. And I'd read him, and I'd worship him. I was terrified. To be quite honest, for the first six months... I shook every time I wrote anything in case it wasn't good enough. It was a very special school of journalism, wasn't it? It was like no other.

Other I mean you always say that about the golden age of being there but I don't think that there's ever been or will be now because the new technology seems to be destroying English prose there will never be a paper where people cared so deeply about the way Which they wrote something. And of course it lost an awful lot, I thought, to when it became the Guardian and not Manchester Guardian. I wonder if you'd agree with that to start with. Could you define what it was that it lost? It changed, to be fair, and it is obviously now a much more comprehensive newspaper than ever it was as the Manchester Guardian. It only covered those things that it wanted to cover. It didn't cover everything that ought to be covered to be a complete newspaper. But what it lost was some special kind of near academic thing. Be a bit prissy. We used to have a great joke when I became leader writer for instance that if you couldn't think of anything to say at the end of a... Either you were writing, all you said was, but the situation at the Peak Park Planning Board is acute.

That would serve for all purposes. So it did have its own self-parody, but it was intellectually very rigorous, I think. The Guardian. Yes, very much. The Manchester Guardian. Yes. Funnily enough, for a long time, I never thought I would be considered, and by... Time I was being considered and then rejected it wasn't the Manchester Guardian anymore. So in a sense the happening... Days I had with the Guardian were the years I had as Northern editor when the Guardian had become the Guardian and the editor was in London and I was in charge of the Manchester end of it. And that was... Almost, you know, a bit like being CP Scott, but without the terrible responsibility. Of course the sister newspaper, the profitable end of the organisation, like the Manchester Evening News, for about six years, didn't you? Did you enjoy the process of being an editor? Yes, at first. The first year was super because I changed it. I changed it the first Monday I was there. I mean, I decided that it had been set in its ways for quite a long time. It had a very secure readership, whatsoever it seemed.

I would have a go and produce the evening paper I wanted. So I changed the masthead, the typography, the layout of pages. The sort of weight we gave to stories increased the comment in the paper, added the city section, did all the things that anybody else would want to do. Readers were outraged at first, but they grew to like it, and the circulation held, and the profits, not because of me, obviously, but because of the general management. Approach to it, the profit doubled. So we did that, then we moved it to a new building. That was the most fascinating weekend I've ever spent. We're doing the football final on the Saturday afternoon. We have this amazing firm of removal people who specialized in moving newspapers. And as we finished setting the football, the line of-- machines came out of the window and went on trolleys along cross street like Daleks. And the lads who were doing all the work were Aussies on their way to the Munich Beer Festival. And they were all asleep most of the time, they were so tired, but you just smacked them and they picked up and carried two, you know, huge fire...

Cabinets each under their arms and tramp down the street. Quite astonishing exercise and we were impressed on time on the Monday. Let's have another choice of record. Well I think This is very Manchester, although it's a Leningrad orchestra. But when I was at the news, I used to go to the Halle all the time, Sunday concert and Thursday concerts, and I used to... Forward to Arvid Janssen's coming and conducting a Tchaikovsky symphony because he made a noise With the orchestra that nobody else made. Sadly, I can't find a record by Janssens, but he was a conductor of the Leningrad Philharmonic.

The Leningrad Philharmonic, not conducted by him, playing that marvellous bit towards the end of Tchaikovsky's Fourth Symphony, where he has to stop the orchestra twice. And Janssons used to do it by clenching his fists, and it means to make your heart stop.

I suppose looking back, Brown, there's one moment in your life when your entire career could have changed and that's when you were invited down to London to join the Tonight team. Now, Tonight at that time was indisputable, the best program of its kind on television. Anybody who appeared in it became instantly a star and a household face and name. What happened? That was a great mistake in my life. I had always done, at least I had done since about 1958 or 9. I'd done television in Manchester, I did a programme called Something to Read, which was a book programme, we'd do it live. Immediately after Andy Pandy for years. I couldn't hear the Andy Pandy tune without feeling sick and then I done quite a successful program called Points North. I think you came on it. - I did it with you, that's right. - Your television did. As they say. So I got asked to go and do it tonight. Now tonight was a great program, it's true, and there was an incredibly talented bunch of people on it if you think of it. Not just Cliff Mitchellmore and Derek Hart and Kenneth Orsop and Slim Hewitt and Wicker and Fife Robertson, extraordinary. And it was over.

Stuffed. There wasn't anything to do. I used to reckon I did a two and a half minute day and I got paid... Pounds a second. Now as I was used to working about a 16-hour day I was bored stiff. So after a year, I signed a three-year contract and after a year I said, Please, I would like to depart, and I went back to the Guardian. Was there also a sense too, of course, where you were perhaps the sort of brash northern coming into this little whirl of a- Established group of people. They had a golden age mentality already by then, they were looking back. And of course, tact is not one of my virtues. So I bounced in and said, The programme's alright, be better if you did A, B and C. And that didn't go down very well. Experienced sour you at all? No, I don't think so. I'm difficult to suppress. I was very excited living in London. I've not lived in London before, you see, and we had a house on Ham Common and arrived with two... And then we had twins while we were in London. So there was heaps going on in my family life. I had lots of time at home because I really wasn't very hard-worked at all. But I was bored.

You might have enjoyed it. You've become famous, but you've not had that kind of instant recognition. And this preventing you doing your job as a journalist. I mean, do you see the problems involved in being the celebrity journalist? They have tried very hard not to become a celebrity. John Timpson is like that, who John, you know, is a marvellously self-evident. And it seems to me that it does damaging, particularly on television, if you're not careful, you begin to behave like a fella looking in the mirror all the time. Start doing impressions of yourself and you finish up not knowing who you are. Now, I've always thought that... It's dangerous. And the great thing about radio is you can't get corrupted like that. You see, radio is like work. It's proper work. It's like being a journalist. It is being a journalist. So I think there's a lot to be said for sticking to that. Let's have a new choice of record. Well now, I'm not a singer. At all.

Can't sing in tune, but my eldest son can, indeed all my children can, and therefore I began to get interested in singing when I had children. And the first concert at Stevens School, and I remember this at Chilohume School, warehouse, you know, Manchester where all my kids went, the first thing I remember hearing them perform was the Foray Requiem, so he is the quirier from the Foray Requiem, sung by the King's College, Cambridge Choir, conducting and making a splendid Anglican noise.

Brown, let's not talk about... Today and your involvement in it I mean it's not so much a program it's part of the British way of life isn't it at an institution how did it come about That you joined it. An institution you're talking about John Timpson. Well I left, is the polite word. I actually got fired as editor of the Manchester Evening News and I decided there and then at 45 that I would become a freelancer.

I'd funked it really in my early 30s when I'd gone to the Tonight programme. I could have done it then and I went back into, as it were, newspaper management. Editing and things. So I decided to become a freelancer. But you have to eat. And the first three months I was freelancing I had a lovely life. I went to Miami I remember to give a lecture and I ended up after three months and I'd spent exactly three times what I did. So I thought this... I'd better get something a little more regular. And today it asked me, and I thought, I don't want to get up at that hour of the morning, but I went to see them, and there were a couple of very nice blokes. That I met and I was persuaded instantly by them. Then I met John and I thought right I'll have a go at it. I only signed on for three months at first because I didn't know whether I would find getting up in the morning so awful that I wouldn't be articulate, wouldn't be able to speak at all. I find it effortless. I'd like getting up early in the morning and I've now done it what over ten years and I'll go on doing it as long as they ask me why? Well, it's the Nicest kind of journalism. The best journalism is daily journalism. Weekly things come round.

Quickly. You don't seem to be ready for it before it's upon you. A daily journalism has a lovely steady routine and you've got to keep yourself up to date because you automatically top yourself Every morning. Everybody who matters, that's impolite. Most of the people in the country who seem to be interested in things and take decisions about things appear to listen to the Today programme. So you feel there's a constituency there, an audience of following the same people there every day. You know that if you've said something stupid or you've gone over the top, they'll say, The nurse got into him this morning and forgive you and you can make amends the next morning. And it is, it's a marvelous job. I think it fits me like a glove. I mean I say that not meaning that I think I do it well only, but I'm happy doing it. I sit there girdling with happiness and… I will now tell the nation what I think about the budget. What about that relationship that you have, though, with the public? It seems to me that there's a much more, generally speaking, direct relationship through radio to the listener than there is, say, in television to the viewer.

Well, Radio 4 is the best channel of the spoken word in the world, and it's not because of people like you and me that contributed to it. We're just lucky to... No privilege to have the opportunity. It's because it seems to have an audience more interested in its output. More engaged in what it does than any other channel. Everywhere else is, you know, amusing, decorative background music, alright fills in the hour and so on. The audience in Radio 4 that makes it worth working for. When my younger son was killed in a car accident, you... I could not believe the letters. I had 2,000 letters. We used to sit around the kitchen table reading them. and the other kids were sent to the hospital. If they feel like this about your dad, you've got to stay in that job. Now that is, that's very moving and it's, you know, they're... Letters were a source of great comfort and strength at a really very difficult time. Another choice of record please, Brown.

I've always liked jazz singers, women jazz singers. I once was waiting for the lift in the Algonquin in New York and it opened and Ella Fitzgerald stepped out. I was... me! I was dumbstruck. And as she was followed by Oscar Peterson and Joe passing imagine how I felt. I like her, I like Billie Holiday, but I think the greatest of them all is Sarah Vaughan. And I found a track on a one of my favorite records. The track is More Than You Know and it's Sarah Vaughan and Oscar Peterson. Whether you're a wrong man or a heart You need me so more than you'll ever, more than you'll ever know Sarah Vaughan and Oscar Peterson

Brian, all your work down here in London three or four days of the week now, and the Today programme, you're based firmly in the north. You always had your roots up there and kept them up there. Why is that? Well, I feel at home up there very simply. We tried, we had three years in London, then went back north, and we wondered where... To move further south again when I was working on today, but then it seemed all wrong, so we stayed where we were. I like living in the Pennines particularly. It seems to me The real division between North and South physically. The North is the bit that's commanded by the Pennines and the South is the rest. And there's something about those strange treeless hills, you know, that are so bleak at 2000. Feet that I like very much. I love driving just across into Buxton from where I live. I'm going to hear Stephen Grappelli at the Buxton Opera House quite soon. Come out of that at night, come out of that little theatre at eleven o'clock at night and come across those hills if the moon is up.

What about the other divisions between North and South? Are you aware of those? Well, what you have to remember is that if you are in gainful employment in the North of England, you can actually lead a fuller life than you can in the South. I mean, if you're in gainful employment somewhere in Greater Manchester, you've got better music. Instant theaters all around you, better football, better cricket, better schools, and very easily to get to them. I always feel sorry for people in the South East who have to spend so much time and so much money traveling. But if you're out of work, and of course you're much more likely to go out of work in the North, if you live in Liverpool or Hartlepool or wherever, then it seems to me things are very difficult, and we've not... Faced up to that at all as a nation. You see, in Sweden when they close their shipyards, they've only got 3% unemployment. Volvo and Saab instantly set up factories where the shipyard workers are, but we closed shipyards and nobody's rushing there with new work and there's far too much unemployment.

Solve it, you think. I ask you this question because you meet them daily. You talk to them, you move in their circles. I don't see at the moment the political will anywhere to restore full employment, and I would regard that personally as number one. Priority of all policies. But that it can be done, I do not doubt. There are right-wing answers and left-wing answers to it. The political will to do it is another matter. Another choice of wreck, O'Brien. Ah, ha ha, steal yourself. Harrison Birtwhistle, composer from Accrington. As you know, Manchester had a better crop of... Composers than any other town in the country in the post-war period Harry Bertwhistle was one of them Peter Maxwell Davis and people like Harry wrote this thing, I imagine that, I've had the record for 10 or 12 years and he's now got this opera orpheus and I see this as really early work for that opera it's called Neniale.

The Death of Orpheus, it's sung by Jane Manning, who is the most remarkable soprano. She can hit notes without a jump at them, I mean from a standing position. Matrix, Alan Hacker, are three bass clarinets. Imagine having read Midsummer Night's Dream, sitting in your desert island and hearing this. And chill plays. To the moon. Chill. It's you for the king!

I love that high note then she says sort of. Brian, you've had a lifetime in journalism and you've got many more years left, one hopes. Have now. Things I'm allowed to do on Radio 4. I do a quarterly report on employment called Workforce. I do a word in Edgway still, now age 21, would you believe. I'm busy at the moment, as you may know, on a series about the Bible called The Good Book, which I've enjoyed making. I haven't finished yet, but I've enjoyed making it hugely.

I'm hoping to do something on Islam because I would like to understand Islamic things and one of the great men Of interview during the Bible series with an Islamic scholar who was a most holy man. 89 to do as something on the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution. It's high time somebody did something good on Coleridge. I really... Quite a lot of thoughts. That's sort of a final choice of record. Well I think still that the greatest... Of music ever written in the sense that it's the piece of music which reaches out to kind of infinity, if not indeed to eternity, is the... It Open Quartet, Opus 131. I have an old and much scratched recording by the Fine Arts Quartet, but I still think they get to the heart of it, perhaps. Better than anyone else.

Brown, we've now finally reached your desert island. Now, would you be any good on this island? Hopeless. I am the non-do-it-yourself man. I mean that occurs to me knowing you as I do that that would be a dreadful problem for you You mean if I was silent, you know, I was dead. Um, well, I talk to myself a lot you do you can imagine Yes I do, because when I'm alone in the flat in London I talk all the time. I'll get arrested one day. Now what about records? We've got one record from the eight to pick, one that you'd like to keep if the other seven were washed away. Well in theory it ought to be the Beethoven in the sense that I do think that is the most important music ever written. But I think probably for... The Brahms clarinet quintet. And the book, the one book here? Oh, well, you see, this solves the problem of who to talk to. I'm one of the many, I imagine, who delighted that the Bible is already there,

Card on that. I've been reading or using Peake's commentary on the Bible while I've been working on these Bible programs. I don't know if you know Peake's commentary, it's a great fat ...Pilopedia of Bible studies by amazingly clever people. H.H. Rowley and F.F. Grusin, people like that. And I would feel that they were good companions. So I think the thing to do is to take that and have the Bible, and you can read a bit of the Bible, read what one of those said, disagree with him, go back to the Bible, and I could really have a dialogue going. - What about the luxury object? - I did think of a cardboard cutout of John Timpson, but. I tell you what I would really like if I were to ring Mark Tully in Delhi and he had a word with Rajiv Gandhi I would like the Taj Mahal because I think it's wasted where it is it's the most beautiful building in the world Imagine if you had it on a desert island to yourself, you could sit in it and read the Bible and Peake's commentary When you turned up your toes eventually you could be laid out in it. I mean you could lay yourself out in it because it is a mausoleum.

Thousand years people would come and they would say how did that funny little bloke build that thing all by himself? Brian Redhead, thank you very much indeed. You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For more podcasts, please visit

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