PD James and Richard Bacon My Life in Books

APPLAUSE

Thank you.

Welcome to My Life In Books, a chance for our guests to share some of their favourite reads.

With me tonight, Baroness James of Holland Park,

better known to her fans as the famous crime writer PD James.

The Baroness is in her 91st year.

Alongside her, the radio and TV presenter Richard Bacon.

He made a bit of a name for himself for being on, then off Blue Peter.

He now modestly describes himself

as a minor celebrity and presenter on Radio 5 Live.

So, a gap of 55 years between my guests.

-Thank you both for joining me.

-APPLAUSE

Phyllis, tells us a bit about

what it was like when you were growing up.

Well, we lived at Ludlow, a very, very beautiful town.

My father worked in income tax, and I have a sister who's 18 months younger than I am,

and then a brother, there are three of us, and we were educated in the state system.

Was it a house full of books?

-No. No, it never was.

-Really?

-It never was.

So, really, all my reading life,

at least until I became an adult and had money to buy books,

I used to get them from the public library.

Richard, many years later,

your childhood was in Mansfield in Nottingham.

-Yes.

-Your father was a lawyer.

-Still is.

-And your mother was a teacher.

-Were you reading from an early age?

-Yeah, I was. There were plenty of books in the house.

It wasn't FULL of books, but I'm from what you would call a firmly middle class household,

and we had books.

We're going to begin with childhood reads.

Phyllis, your first choice is Jane Austen,

-Pride and Prejudice.

-Yes.

-How old were you when you read this?

-Remarkably young.

It's quite astonishing, really.

I don't think it's for the very young.

-Can you give us a quick summary of the plot?

-It's a romantic novel.

And it is about a family of girls, five of them.

And they have a rather poor outlook because when their father dies,

the dreadful Mr Collins will take over the whole of the estate.

So it's very important that they find husbands, especially in those days.

And the heroine is the second daughter, Elizabeth.

And, of course, Mrs Bennet's sole desire in life...

She is desperate to get her daughters married.

You said that for you, it's one of the great pieces of English literature.

Oh, it is. It's the most sparkling.

And it's one you discovered first, at eight.

Yes, and you get straight into the story,

which is the thing for an eight-year-old.

-You're going to read us a little bit.

-Yes, indeed.

I think it's from my own book here.

Mrs Bennet rang the bell, and Miss Elizabeth was summoned to the library.

"Come here, child", cried her father as she appeared,

"I have sent for you on an affair of importance."

"I understand that Mr Collins has made you an offer of marriage. Is this true?"

Elizabeth replied that it was. "Very well."

"And this offer of marriage you have refused?"

"I have, sir."

"Very well. We now come to the point.

"Your mother insists upon your accepting it. Is not it so, Mrs Bennet?"

"Yes, or I will never see her again!"

"An unhappy alternative is before you, Elizabeth."

"From this day, you must be a stranger to one of your parents."

"Your mother will never see you again if you do NOT marry Mr Collins,"

"and I will never see you again if you DO."

-Richard, have you read Pride and Prejudice?

-I have.

I enjoyed Phyllis reading it out.

Can we just go through the whole book?

-It's, erm...

-When did you read it?

Well, I read it at school and I have not reread it as an adult.

-You obviously have reread it.

-Yes.

Is it just as good, is it as effective re-reading it?

-Oh, just as, do reread it, do reread it.

-Then I shall.

It's great fun, reread it, yes.

Richard, what's your first book?

The book I want to talk about first is Roald Dahl's Boy.

Roald Dahl was my first favourite author. This is autobiographical.

He wrote this in 1984,

and it is...it's written for children and it's about him,

it's from birth to when he gets his first job,

but most of it is set at school.

And he went to a prep school called Repton.

And I went to a prep school called Wellow in Nottinghamshire

and Repton is in Derbyshire.

And so, we played Repton at sport,

and so when I read the book,

I could visualise a lot of the places that he was talking about.

There's a particular incident that you like, isn't there?

-Yes.

-Can you tell us about it?

-Yes, I certainly can.

As a seven-year-old boy, he has a fixation on a sweet shop near his house,

and when I was about that age, there was a sweet shop near where I lived

that I was fascinated with as well, and he just loves confectionery.

He's brilliant in describing the sweets.

But he, as a seven-year-old boy, puts a dead rat in a jar of gobstoppers.

-Urgh.

-Exactly, it's not a pleasant idea.

Mrs Pratchett runs the shop,

and he and his friends simply don't like her,

so they hatch this plan.

Actually, it's a dead mouse, and they put it in and run out the shop.

And she finds it, and she drops the jar and it shatters all over the floor,

-and they get in a lot of trouble at school.

-As they would.

-And... Yeah.

And this is a little scene where he is being caned by the headmaster.

By the time the fourth stroke was delivered,

my entire backside seemed to be going up in flames.

Far away in the distance, I heard Mr Coombes's voice saying,

"Now, get out." Mr Coombes is the headmaster.

As I limped across the study

clutching my buttocks hard with both hands,

a cackling sound came from the armchair over in the corner.

And then I heard the vinegary voice of Mrs Pratchett saying,

"I am very much obliged to you, Headmaster,

"very much obliged. I don't think we's gonna see any more stinking mice in my gobstoppers from now on."

In these days, the headmaster would be in court in no time.

But all the teachers in his book are cruel, aren't they?

I mean, it really was him paying back for the time he'd had.

There's a bit when he...when he's a bit older and he's at Repton,

that's before Repton, and he is a fag for a prefect,

and the prefect would make him warm up his toilet seat every day.

So Roald Dahl had this job.

And he had to sit on the toilet seat,

and he had to get it to exactly the right temperature,

to within one degree.

And according to Roald Dahl,

that over the years that he did this, he did this day after day,

accumulating hours of sitting on a toilet seat,

he claims that in that time,

he read the entire works of Charles Dickens.

LAUGHTER

Phyllis, we're on to your second book,

which is The Hound of the Baskervilles

by Arthur Conan Doyle.

-How old are you by now?

-Oh, I'm adolescent by now.

-Yeah.

And I can't say that I liked his short stories but I did, very much,

enjoy The Hound of the Baskervilles and it seemed to me brilliantly written,

-probably one of the greatest crime novels ever written.

-Tell us a bit of the plot.

Well, Holmes is called in, as he often is, by somebody who comes to his room

at 221 Baker Street,

and says that there is a curse on the family of Baskervilles,

who live on Dartmoor,

and they have died under awful circumstances,

killed by a vicious hound from hell.

Something that isn't natural. And the last Baskerville died in that way,

and now his heir is arriving from overseas to take possession.

And this is the doctor, and he's very, very worried.

He wants to have this mystery solved, and he calls in Holmes.

You didn't start writing professionally until you were in your 30s,

but had you actually decided from a child that you were going to be a writer?

Oh, absolutely, Anne.

I think I was born knowing that I, not that I wanted to be a writer,

I was born knowing that I WAS a writer.

It's just a question of whether I did it.

I seem not to have doubted that I could,

but I did very much doubt whether anybody would want to buy my books.

I didn't think that I would ever be a bestselling writer.

And I had a husband who came back mentally ill from the war.

So, by then, I had to support him and two small girls.

So I had to have safe jobs.

So, for the whole of my writing, except for the latter years,

I have been a bureaucrat, first in the Health Service,

and then in the Home Office,

and I've used that experience in my books.

Well, a hundred years on,

Arthur Conan Doyle's work is still being enjoyed.

We've got a clip here from last year's very successful BBC series

with Benedict Cumberbatch playing Sherlock Holmes.

Shut up.

-I didn't say anything...

-You were thinking, it's annoying.

I thought it was absolutely brilliant, that programme.

And it's interesting how fascinated people are by Holmes still.

Even though it's set now, it's full of the detail of the original books.

Phyllis, do you share that opinion?

It's a wonderful idea to bring it up to date, and yet remain, you know,

faithful to the actual character, and to his methods.

Very faithful.

Richard, your next choice came about, you'd gone to university in Nottingham,

and had enough very shortly, hadn't you?

-Yeah.

-You were 19 when you cleared off.

-I did.

I did a year there.

I wanted to work in radio and I got offered a full-time job as a reporter so I left uni.

What were you reading?

-It was, it was...

-You can't remember, Richard.

Not really.

It was a very strange degree that I took at the last minute,

and it was a hybrid of business studies and electronics.

-Yeah.

-Together at last.

-And it was rubbish, and so I... I went off into radio.

-Yeah.

So the book is called Stick It Up Your Punter!,

by Peter Chippindale and Chris Horrie. What's it about?

-It is about Rupert Murdoch buying The Sun.

-Yeah.

And it then becomes about his first editor called Larry Lamb,

not to be confused with the Gavin And Stacey, EastEnders actor Larry Lamb.

And a guy called Kelvin MacKenzie takes over editorship of The Sun,

rather infamously during the 1980s.

And most of it really is about Kelvin.

Umm...It's an outrageous book. It's an exciting book.

-It's a funny and shocking book.

-Have you met him?

Yes, many times. I went, I went on to work for him.

Kelvin commissioned a documentary,

a grand word, that I made for him,

called Behind The Scenes Of Topless Darts On Ice and...

In my ways, Phyllis, it's still my best work.

Did you... Do you end up regarding Kelvin MacKenzie as a hero, or a villain?

-I suppose both, really.

-A monster, in some ways.

A monster in some ways, yeah. But as an editor, he was brilliant.

At the same time, some of his views and some of the things he did were absolutely outrageous.

This will shock you, OK?

The paper was arousing strong resentment from the world's worst,

which was Kelvin's nickname for The Guardian, and other un-populars for its AIDS coverage.

The disease had come onto the news agenda in a big way

for the first time in early 1985,

bringing out all MacKenzie's instinctive hatred of "poofters".

A report in the paper in February quoted an anonymous psychologist at an AIDS conference in Washington DC

as advocating mass killings of gays.

All homosexuals should be exterminated to stop the spread of AIDS.

"It's time we stopped pussyfooting around", he supposedly said.

This reported in The Sun in the 1980s.

MacKenzie responded to hacks, expressing mild concern about the paper's approach to the subject

with jeers like, "Come out, have we, eh? One of them, are we?",

followed by a shout across the editorial floor,

"Watch out, folks, there's a botty burglar about."

You know, that shows you, partly his personality,

partly how shocking it was, partly how attitudes have changed as well.

Your admiration of the tabloids is quite surprising because you've been a real victim, haven't you?

I've been a victim and I was a story in The News Of The World,

which you very kindly alluded to at the very start of the programme, thank you.

I don't know it.

Yeah, well, Richard, tell Phyllis what you got up to.

-Eh...

-Well, I'd like to know.

LAUGHTER

The audience would like to know, wouldn't you? We all want to know.

As a reader of Sherlock Holmes, I believe you'll be familiar with cocaine.

-Oh, yes.

-Just to bring it back to literature.

-And... I was a Blue Peter... you know Blue Peter?

-Yes.

So I was a Blue Peter presenter and I took cocaine.

And then a best friend sold my story and I got sacked and it was all over The News Of The World.

And what was interesting was,

I am an admirer of tabloid newspapers and I find them fascinating.

I don't support everything they do, but I am fascinated by the way they operate.

And it gave...and I had this grudging respect for the way they'd reported my own story.

So it left me in this emotionally compromised place where I was angry at being turned over,

and yet, somehow slightly admired what they'd done.

-You've brought along a boy's toy, haven't you?

-Yes.

This is how I often read books now. This is my iPad.

Do you understand why people would like to read books on an electronic device?

I try to, but I think it's very much a generation thing.

For me, anything, any technology will go wrong

almost as soon as I touch it so, I'm sure it would go wrong.

I love books. I just love books.

I love the feel of them, the smell of them, taking them down from the...

-Yeah, I agree.

-Anne's really unimpressed.

I'm like Phyllis, I just love books.

I heard you say you give them away, I find it very hard to throw out books.

Look, this is Roald Dahl's Boy and you still get to turn a page,

you still flick the page along.

It's not as satisfying as holding a book,

but they do quite a good job of replicating what it's like to read a book.

Phyllis, your next book, and by this time you're working in the National Health Service, aren't you?

-Probably, yes.

-And it's Evelyn Waugh's A Handful Of Dust.

I certainly would be in the Health Service, yes.

Give us a brief description.

This is a major novel, a brilliant novel, by one of the great masters of the English language.

He's amazing at dialogue, and it's really the story of an unfaithful marriage.

Tony Last, he has a big country house.

It's a great Victorian, very ugly one, but he loves it.

It's been in the family for a long time and he's married to Brenda and they've got a little boy.

And she's obviously bored and she takes this dreadful John Beaver as her lover

and has a little flat in town and pretends she's taking lessons,

in fact she's sleeping with Beaver.

You're talking about his dialogue and you're going to read us a little bit.

The mother has nothing to do with the little boy,

he's brought up by the nanny and by the groom, Ben, whom he adores.

Because Ben teaches him very odd language, he tells his nanny

she's an old tart, so there's very great trouble about that.

"I actually thought it was very nice to be called a tart," John argued,

"and anyway it's a word Ben often uses about people."

"Well, he's got no business to. I like Ben more than anyone in the world

"and I should think he's clever too."

Tony felt that the time had come to cut out the cross talk and deliver the homily he had been preparing.

"Now listen, John, it was very wrong of you to call Nanny a silly old tart.

"First because it was unkind to her.

"Think of all the things she does for you every day."

"She's paid to."

"Be quiet!"

"And secondly, because you were using a word which people of your age and class do not use.

"Poor people use certain expressions which gentlemen do not.

"You are a gentleman.

"When you grow up you must be considerate to people less fortunate than you, particularly women.

"Do you understand?"

"Is Ben less fortunate than me?"

"That has nothing to do with it.

"Now you are to go upstairs and say you are truly sorry to Nanny

"and promise never to use that word about anyone again." "All right."

We know the relationship of the father with the little boy.

We know the values that the father lives by and it is an absolutely brilliant book.

Did you meet him ever, Evelyn Waugh?

I never met him. I'm rather glad I didn't.

-I think he could be very unpleasant.

-Yes. Tricky.

Very tricky. Yes, absolutely.

Not perhaps a very nice man.

But a brilliant writer and what he did teach me,

not only how to do dialogue, but how to care about the writing.

He constantly revised his novels.

Do you revise with each re-issue?

No. No, I don't. But I try to get it right first time, so I don't have to.

If there's a silly error, I might.

Of course I'd deal with that.

Richard, your next choice is Flashman, George MacDonald Fraser.

Yeah.

-It was recommended to you by your co-presenter on The Big Breakfast, Johnny Vaughan.

-That's right.

-Yes.

These are Johnny Vaughan's favourite series of books and have now become my favourite series of books.

There are either 12 or 13 in the series and the last one came out

in 2005, but they started coming out in the late Sixties.

The first one is about the first Afghan war and I read it in 2000

and it was just before the invasion of Afghanistan

that is still going on, and I did feel as if I knew Afghanistan

and I remember thinking at the time, "Good luck with that."

It's a country that's impossible to run, manage, govern centrally, it's tribal and it's difficult

and the British knew that in the first Afghan war, but seem to have largely forgotten it.

It's a shame they didn't all read Flashman.

Flashman is taken from Tom Brown's Schooldays.

Isn't that an interesting idea?

Thomas Hughes wrote Tom Brown's Schooldays

and Flashman is the bully at Rugby under the headmaster Arnold.

And George MacDonald Fraser has taken a fictional character

written by someone else and imagined a life for him.

What is extraordinary, I can't say anyone actually likes him,

but one is very happy to read about him book after book and yet he's a coward.

He's not so much a bully now, but he will bully if he can

and he's an adventurer and he's not particularly honest

and he's a reprehensible character.

-He is.

-But it doesn't matter, does it?

He meets Queen Victoria, he gets the Victoria Cross, he calls her "quite attractive from the neck down".

They're so good and I have learnt an awful lot about big moments

in history that I knew nothing about that we ought to all remember.

Is he a hero to you, Flashman?

In some ways he is a hero. He's another monster. I like these books with monsters in.

You're drawn to outrageous people.

I think that's true.

Phyllis, your next choice is a thriller, which isn't surprising,

but it isn't incredibly well known.

It's called Tragedy At Law by Cyril Hare.

Tell us about this because it's very important in your life.

It is very important. There's a series of books by Cyril Hare

and he was in real life a High Court judge

and in all his books the solution of the puzzle rests on a point of law.

Very elegantly written, beautifully written.

And what happened, I finished reading it

and I'd sent my manuscript off to an agent

and she was called Elaine Greene.

She was married at the time to Hugh Carleton Greene who was Director General of the BBC.

And she read the manuscript and that evening she and the Director General

were due to go to Oxford to have dinner at All Souls.

And at that dinner they sat next to Charles Monteith who was a director of Faber & Faber.

And Charles said how sad it was that Cyril Hare

had died in early middle age and that Fabers did like to have

a detective writer on their list, so they would be looking for one.

And Elaine said, "I've found it."

She sent off the manuscript next day and Faber & Faber took it,

so I was extraordinarily fortunate.

I was accepted with my first book, by the first publisher it was sent to.

So I have an affection for it anyway,

and I do reread it with great pleasure and it does teach me

what I learnt very early and knew almost by instinct

that it's possible to write an exciting book, it's possible to

stay within the constraints and so-called formula

of the classical detective story and still write well,

and still have an elegant and good style and respect

for our magnificent and wonderful language,

and still say something true about men and women and the society in which we live,

which Cyril Hare does.

And your next book, Richard, you, you learnt a lot about Afghanistan

from Flashman and this is a work of non-fiction, it's called Stasiland by Anna Funder.

Tell us about this.

Well, this is a book

about life behind the Wall.

Anna Funder is Australian and she was working at a television station in West Berlin and became fascinated

by what happened behind the Wall.

What I like about it is, it's not a historian giving you

his view of life in East Berlin and East Germany at that time.

She does it as a journalist and she meets lots of people who either

lived under the Stasi, the Stasi were the East German secret police,

and she goes and meets former members of the Stasi

and they tell their stories, there's very little of her view in it.

-Phyllis, have you been to Berlin many times?

-Yes, I have.

Sometimes with the British Council, of which I was a member,

and sometimes to promote my own books.

I've been there when the Wall was up, when the Wall was coming down, and after the Wall was down.

And certainly when the Wall was up,

it was the most exciting city I think I've ever visited.

-The West.

-Yes, the West.

-Did you visit East Berlin?

-Yes, I did.

I went into East, and they've got wonderful museums.

What does your generation think about World War II?

Are you as aware of it as, say, Phyllis who was grown up, and myself who was born just after?

I'm 35, I think my generation is.

People who are perhaps 20 and in their teens, I wonder if,

we're now at the point where it will be as distant as Waterloo.

It will just be this thing from history.

And what's clever about Stasiland is it reminds you, it's not simply a historical event.

A lot of these psychological scars are still very real for people

and I think the book helps you realise that.

We've heard about your childhood reads and the books that have influenced you.

We move on now to books you simply enjoyed, the beach read, or a guilty pleasure.

For you, Phyllis, your guilty pleasure,

if you want to call it that, is The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford.

Yes, indeed. All Nancy Mitford's books, I just love them,

and they're the sort of book you keep by your bed

in case you wake up in the night and want a bit of comfort.

-Can you tell us about the book?

-Well, they're strongly autobiographical.

She came from a remarkable family, mostly of girls, there was only one son,

and all these girls were remarkable.

One of them was a great friend of Hitler's, and the other one was the Duchess of Devonshire,

and the other one was the beautiful Diana, who married Mosley

and was imprisoned during the war.

And they were an astonishing family.

It's that kind of book that you're constantly,

if not laughing, constantly smiling.

We've got a clip from the BBC sound archives

of Nancy Mitford talking about her own skills as a writer.

Did you ever go to university?

I not only never went to university, but I was never taught lessons.

I was taught to read and write.

I can't spell either in French or English at all.

I was taught no arithmetic at all.

I can't...

do sum, any sum, however simple.

And when I have to fill in forms here which involve

very small additions or multiplications,

I have to send for my charwoman's grandson.

So there's proof you don't need to be able to spell

to become a great writer.

Your final book, and your guilty pleasure, Richard,

is an up-to-date piece of fiction, One Day by David Nicholls.

Tell us about it.

It's the story of Dexter and Emma.

It starts in 1988 at Edinburgh University, it's their graduation day

and we catch up with them on one day every year for just over 20 years.

There's a lot that I recognised in it.

He, Dexter, first of all he lives in Belsize Park, which is where I live.

They spend a lot of time in Edinburgh, which I go to a lot.

He's also a TV presenter who's presented lots of rubbish television

programmes, and that was something that I immediately recognised.

He has had a number of hedonistic experiences as well.

Everyone I know who's read it finds something of themselves in it.

And I think that's one of the very clever things about it.

It's constantly funny and it's a sad book as well, but I've never

spent so long thinking about two people who don't actually exist.

Now this is difficult, but I'm going to ask you, Phyllis,

if you had to choose just one book to recommend from your five,

which would it be?

Well, I think it has to be the Austen.

Because...It may well appeal more to women than to men,

but I think that once you really get to know Austen,

then you are reading one of the greatest of our novelists

and I love her.

She has been the strongest influence in my writing.

So it would have to be, it would have to be.

Richard?

Mine would definitely be Flashman because, basically it straddles fiction and non-fiction.

It's a fictional story, through which you learn

a lot about history and it's also brilliant and he's very funny.

What do you think, Richard, your overall choices say about you?

I think, to some extent, in relation to Flashman

and Stick It Up Your Punter, they say that I'm quite intrigued

and drawn towards monstrous characters.

I think I have an interest in history, I like history,

and I think even Stick It Up Your Punter is in some ways

a historical document so I think that's reflected in that.

What One Day says about me I have no idea.

Maybe you're just a bit soppy.

Yes, I think I'm getting older and becoming terribly soppy.

Phyllis, what do your choices say about you?

Probably that I'm a woman who likes order.

Who likes disorder being made into order,

order brought out of disorder, which is what the detective story does.

More cautious than you, being a woman, possibly.

Liking things to work out happily in the end

and loving the English language.

I think we have the richest, the most versatile and I think the most beautiful language in the world.

Well, there we are. Thank you to PD James and Richard Bacon

for joining me for My Life In Books.

APPLAUSE

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd