Sir Trevor McDonald and Rebecca Front My Life in Books

APPLAUSE

Thank you, and welcome to My Life In Books, a chance for my guests to share their favourite reads.

Joining me tonight,

Sir Trevor McDonald, the most famous newsreader of his generation.

So great that when he tried to retire

ITN claimed they couldn't manage without him and brought him back.

Alongside him, the actress and comedienne Rebecca Front,

who won a BAFTA last year for her performance

as the hard-done-by MP Nicola Murray in the BBC series The Thick Of It.

Let's begin with childhood reads.

Trevor, you were brought up in Trinidad.

I was brought up in Trinidad in the West Indies, yes.

Very different to life here.

Slightly. Especially in the winter.

And school, what sort of school was it?

Well, it was a school which was based very much on the English public school line,

and I remember now with great fondness,

but I do laugh about it at times, all my books came from Oxbridge.

They were all printed there, and they were very much the books that people would be reading here,

because Trinidad was a colony of the Empire, and so that influence was pretty profound.

-Rebecca, did you read as a child?

-I did. Books were a big part of my childhood.

My mother wrote books, and my father illustrated books.

-Writing's a part of the family.

-Plenty of books in the household.

Lots and lots of books around, yeah.

And you have a book you brought in with you that your father wrote, or your mother wrote.

Yes. They produced about six or seven books together, so that's my mother's story and my father's illustrations.

And it's a book about theatre. Both my parents are obsessed with theatre.

And in fact, the central character is called Jem, which is my brother's name,

and the book's dedicated to me and my brother. So books were a big part of growing up.

Your first choice, Trevor, is a classic, Great Expectations by Charles Dickens.

-How old were you when you were reading this?

-I must have been fairly young.

I mean, reading was to become a passion which was encouraged by your parents.

My father, who was himself formally uneducated, had this view that you improved yourself,

which everybody in the West Indies wanted you to do.

That was the great thing, improve yourself.

Reading was one way of doing it.

And so he'd make me read anything. He would make me get discarded newspapers,

and made sure I read them. Then, at one stage he worked...

although he was an engineer in the oil refinery, he worked mending shoes for a Scottish doctor.

And there were odd copies of The Lancet lying around,

and he'd bring copies of those home, and I read The Lancet.

God knows why my father made me read this,

but you know, I was to read anything, as long as they were not comics.

He didn't like my reading comics at all.

So there you were with Great Expectations.

-Tell us about the plot of this.

-Well, it's about...

The main character is Pip, who is brought up by his sister, a terrible lady.

Husband is a rather nice, charming chap,

and Pip seems to be going nowhere until he finds an escaped convict.

He meets a curiously mad lady called Miss Havisham and the icy beauty of Estella,

and then somebody gives him the money to make a life for himself in London.

And they said, "Quite frankly, Pip, you now become a man with great expectations.

"You could do something with your life, you could become a gentleman."

And Dickens does it in a wonderful way,

by drawing great, great diagrams of characters

which I think are unmatched in literature, really.

And Pip's being brought up by his sister, who's quite a tricky character.

Well, she's not a nice woman. She's awful.

And her poor, put-upon husband.

He was a wonderfully kind man who,

one wonders, why on Earth did he ever get hitched to this woman?

And you know, if you read a bit of what Dickens said about him, he said,

"He was a fair man,

"with curls of flaxen hair on each side of his smooth face,

"and with eyes of such a very undecided blue

"that they seemed to have somehow got mixed with their own whites.

"He was mild, good natured, sweet tempered, easy going,

"foolish, dear fellow.

"A sort of Hercules in strength, and also in weakness."

You have to imagine in my case, a child in the West Indies, a long way from anywhere,

because one was in this curious position of reading about people in England.

Again, 4,500 miles away.

And so what stood out for me was the sharpness with which these characters were drawn.

And Rebecca, your first choice, wonderful, The Wind in the Willows,

Kenneth Grahame, which of course is illustrated by EH Shepard.

Give us a brief description, in case anyone doesn't know it.

Well, Wind In The Willows is the story of a group of friends who are all animals.

It starts with Mole, who is spring cleaning one day, and gets bored

and goes out for a walk, and then befriends Ratty, who's a water rat.

And then they also have a friend who's a badger, and the wonderful

Mr Toad, who lives in Toad Hall, who's this sort of roguish character.

And for me, what I love about the book is, it's all about home, and I'm very...

I love home more than anything else.

I love hunkering down and just being at home.

And the whole book seems to me to be about variations on how you get back home.

Are you a mole, a rat, a badger or toad, Trevor?

I did like the idea of Mole until you mentioned he was very good at spring cleaning.

No, he's not, he gets bored very easily.

Oh, he gets bored, yes. But I would never begin,

so I'm not too sure I'd have the time to get bored.

Every man I know is... All these characters are archetypes for men, and every man I know falls into

one of these characters, so I think you do have to choose.

Let's have a look at some of the characters here.

This is from the 1983 film. Toad has just done something very bad.

I think it's his driving.

I am pleased to inform you that Toad has seen the error of his ways.

He is truly sorry for what he has done,

and perceives the folly of it all.

That is good news.

Do you, Toad?

Do you really?

No! Ha-ha! I'm not sorry at all! Ha-ha!

And it wasn't folly, it was simply glorious!

What? You backsliding animal! Didn't you tell me in there...?

Oh, yes, in there.

I'd have said anything in there.

-Does the film match the book for you?

-Not quite, no.

But that just made me laugh, because I've been out with a Toad once or twice in my life!

Tell us more, tell us more.

Very charming, but they never regret anything and you just, you find yourself so exasperated.

I'm not married to a Toad, I'm glad to say. I'm married to a Ratty.

Trevor, your next choice, James Cameron's Point Of Departure, this leads to your career, doesn't it?

It's a wonderful book.

Published in 1967,

and James Cameron was a very, very famous foreign correspondent.

I think what made him so brilliant was the fact that he wrote like a god.

I mean, with spectacular beauty.

And then he got the chance to go to all the places

where big international events were happening.

Anything in the '40s, '50s and '60s, he was there.

Later in life he took to TV, and we've got a clip

here where he's reflecting on his life as a foreign correspondent.

I was terribly cross sometimes, and very unhappy sometimes, and frequently very lonely.

But, on the other hand, what other job could I have been doing

where I would have been able to whizz all over the place,

at somebody else's expense, meet people of significance?

Meaningful people who wouldn't have had the slightest

time for me as an individual, but did have some time for me as

a newspaper man.

I think he encapsulates there quite beautifully just what it means to be a foreign correspondent.

And the bit about being lonely too, he once tried to re-establish himself in the community in England,

after lots of foreign trips and found it terribly, terribly difficult. He went to extremes.

He saw people in pubs with leather patches on their coats,

and thought, "That's what I need to do, I'll put some leather patches on."

And he did, and still didn't fit in.

So it was a lonely job.

It requires a great curiosity about people, doesn't it?

I think it's the most important point about being a journalist and correspondent of any sort.

You have to have an interest in people, and things, and in the news.

And you have to have an interest in telling people about it.

And I also suspect a minimum bit of talent as well, in doing that.

And of course, as you say, he did some of the great stories of all time.

By the time you'd left Trinidad, you'd already moved into radio, hadn't you?

I'd done some radio, yes.

-And you came over here to work for the World Service?

-That's right.

And you moved on to be a foreign correspondent.

I got a chance to do some foreign travel by myself.

I must say, I think Cameron's work still goes far beyond anything

that I achieved, because his stories seemed to be much, much bigger than anything that I did.

But obviously there was a similarity, and that drew me even more to the book.

Is there one story he covered here that is memorable to you?

I think the story of his going to cover the dropping

of the first atomic bomb, and the way he describes it.

He followed it on this American ship, and he describes life on the ship.

You know, the PA system didn't quite work.

He thought the food was quite awful.

And they put ice cream on hot plates.

But much more than that, he thought that they wasted so much food, and so at the end of every day,

large joints, off which they would only have cut one bit, would be dumped into the sea.

And so he said, "All the fish in the ocean realised that ours was the boat to follow."

And then, the final line he said, "Sadly they stayed with us too long,

"and were in the vicinity of the atoll when the bomb went off."

And he describes that, hearing that noise,

as a door being slammed in the deepest part of the ocean.

And, you know, and it was introduced with the words,

"Listen, world, this is crossroads."

My goodness, crossroads it certainly was.

-And he was the only British correspondent there, wasn't he?

-He was.

I mean, he was very much a writing journalist.

To me, I feel that anyone who reads this, it's irresistible not to become a journalist.

Rebecca, your next book is Mansfield Park, Jane Austen.

You were at a comprehensive school in East London.

-Was that about the time you read this?

-It was, yes.

It was one of the books I had to do for A-levels.

-Oh, was it?

-Yeah, and which, strangely, didn't put me off it.

-Tell us about the book.

-Well, it's the story of Fanny Price, who is a poor relation of the family

who live in Mansfield Park, this great house.

And she's allowed to go and live there, and be brought up there at their expense.

She falls in love with her cousin, and you know, so the story develops from there.

And what's wonderful about the book,

as is always the case with Jane Austen, is the other characters.

I mean the story, there are aspects of the story which are fabulous, but really it's how those characters

relate to each other that makes the book so immensely readable.

-Did you find Fanny Price a bit irritating?

-Well, I didn't.

Almost everybody in the world does, when they read the book.

She's terribly self-righteous and moralistic and prissy.

When I was 17, when I was reading it, I too was very self-righteous

and moralistic and prissy, so she suited me down to the ground.

But I think as I've got older I've started to

fall much more in love with Mary Crawford, who is her love rival.

There's a bit where those staying at Mansfield Park are putting on a play, but the owner of the house,

the stern Sir Thomas, doesn't know it's happening.

The point about that, of course, is that theatricals were considered incredibly shocking,

so for young gentlemen and ladies to be doing any kind of acting was appalling, it was really poor form.

Actually it's one of the most entertaining bits in the book.

And there's a lovely quote here, which I find myself using all the time.

There's a character called Mr Rushworth, who one of the sisters ends up marrying,

and he's a real sort of silly ass, kind of Bertie Wooster character,

and he claims not to want to be part of the theatricals.

In fact, he's desperate, and he announces at one point,

when they've spent weeks choosing a play, and he comes rushing out and says, "We have got a play!

"It is to be called Lovers' Vows, and I am to be Count Cassel,

"and I'm to come in first with a blue dress and a pink satin cloak,

"and afterwards I'm to have another fine, fancy suit

"by way of a shooting dress.

"I do not know how I shall like it."

And it's just so lovely, because actually that's an actor's impulse,

to think, "I don't know if I want to be involved in this.

"What are the costumes like? How many lines do I have?"

-Were you already acting at school?

-Yes. I knew from the age of about seven that I wanted to act so, yeah.

I was angling for all the best parts even then.

Trevor, your next choice is a poem. TS Eliot, it's called Little Gidding.

Why did you choose this?

I have always loved TS Eliot.

He writes very complex things, with great style

and with great beauty, and I love people who use the language well.

And I'm not sure that it can be claimed that anybody does it better than TS Eliot.

This is about an Anglican monastery, isn't it?

Yes, in a little village called Little Gidding.

And I think, if I'm right, it's the village that Charles I

went to after the crushing defeat at Naseby, and found some refuge there.

But TS Eliot takes a sort of broader view of life and the world -

he says that these are gifts reserved for age.

And he says, "To set a crown upon your lifetime's effort.

"The conscious impotence of rage At human folly, and the laceration

"Of laughter at what ceases to amuse."

"And last" he says,

"The rending pain of re-enactment Of all that you have done, and been;

"the shame of motives late revealed, And the awareness of things ill done

"and done to others' harm."

And he ends this by saying, "Which once you took for exercise of virtue.

"Then fools' approval stings, and honour stains."

But isn't that absolutely wonderful?

"The laceration of laughter at what ceases to amuse."

And he's exceedingly precise in his language.

There's not a word there which is misplaced.

Did you discover Eliot when you were still in Trinidad?

I discovered Eliot then, but I read much more of him here,

and read biographies and got to know...

Got much, much more involved in it, you know? It's just something which stays with you for life.

While you were still at home, were you made to learn poetry?

-We were made to learn poetry.

-It's a generational thing, isn't it?

It is a generational thing. We would stand under a tree somewhere outside

of the classroom, and 15 or 20 or 30 of us would stand reciting,

"The ploughman homeward plods his weary way"

and "The lowing herd winds slowly o'er the lea." You know.

It gave me a love of poetry, and I'm terribly grateful for that.

Rebecca, you studied English at Oxford, we come to your next book,

which is another Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby.

-Was it a piece you were studying there?

-No, quite the reverse.

I came to Dickens after Oxford, deliberately, because I'd read one before I went up,

and I thought, if I have to write essays about this, it's going to suck all the pleasure out of it for me.

So I decided I would save Dickens, and I've always been really grateful that I did, because now my pleasure

is to sort of lose myself in an enormous Charles Dickens book.

Give us a thumbnail sketch of the plot.

Nicholas Nickleby's father dies at the beginning of the book,

and he is charged with keeping his mother, his garrulous mother, and his rather sweet, virtuous sister alive,

really, by whatever means possible.

And he has a villainous Uncle Ralph,

who tries to thwart him in everything he does.

You have a favourite bit. This is after

they've run away from school, Nicholas Nickleby and his sidekick.

-Smike, yes.

-Smike.

Yes, they run away, and they're encouraged to join this awful theatre group, run by Mr Vincent Crummles.

So this is Vincent Crummles introducing his troupe.

"'This, sir', said Mr Vincent Crummles, bringing a maiden forward,

"'is the infant phenomenon, Miss Ninetta Crummles.' 'Your daughter?' enquired Nicholas.

"'My daughter, my daughter,' replied Mr Vincent Crummles. 'The idol of every place we go into, sir.

"'We have had complimentary letters about this girl, sir, from the nobility and gentry

"'of almost every town in England.' 'I'm not surprised at that,'

"'said Nicholas, 'she must be quite a natural genius.' 'Quite...' Mr Crummles stopped.

"Language was not powerful enough to describe the infant phenomenon.

"'I tell you what, sir,' he said, 'the talent of this child is not to be imagined.

"'She must be seen, sir, seen, to be ever so faintly appreciated.

"'There, go to your mother, my dear.'"

And it's full of this wonderful detail.

The infant phenomenon, it transpires, is in fact about 17 or 18, she's not an infant at all.

-And he's saying she's about 10, isn't she?

-Yes.

It's very good. Because he's talking there almost

-like a sort of Hollywood agent, really.

-Yes, "This girl, have I got a girl, this girl is amazing,"

and she's just annoying. It transpires that audiences

avoid going to the theatre if they know her.

-Because he's a very good agent!

-And of course, Dickens famously wrote for money, didn't he?

Yes, and I mean I think that's why

his sentences were, at times, over-long.

-He would have been paid by the word.

-He gets many words in, yes, yes.

Trevor, we've talked about your interest in the classics, poetry.

Your next book is very up to date.

It's called Bloodlands, by Timothy Snyder. Tell us about it.

"Bloodlands" is not a metaphor at all, it actually refers to a part

of the world, basically between the old Soviet Union and Germany.

And what Snyder argues is that, that is where the killing went on.

14 million people were killed there, not in combat.

So this is not the fighting in the Second World War -

these people were killed as a result of the insane, murderous policies

of these two monsters, Hitler and Stalin. They hated each other.

And kind of egged each other on, to see who could be the worst monster.

Sadly, the result was, for all those people who lived in the middle -

in other words, most of Poland, Belarus, the Baltic states, Ukraine -

-those were the people who suffered.

-Did it change your view?

There's endless books been written.

I was fascinated about his interpretation,

because he makes distinctions between the principles on which some of this killing went on.

You know, some people died because they were part of the forced labour that the Germans instituted.

Others just went in and were killed.

It's a frightening account of what happened right in the middle of Europe.

-Do you think your generation, you were born in 19...?

-39.

So just as war...

Do you think it's different, looking back, for you, than perhaps Rebecca?

I mean, this sounds like a book that I should read, because actually this is my distant family's story.

My ancestors were predominantly from Eastern Europe, Russian Jews and Polish Jews.

And my immediate family had actually come over in Edwardian times from Russia and Poland,

depending on which bit of the family, but I didn't know individual names and faces, and I still don't.

It's something that I feel, I desperately don't want to

find out about, but I feel one day I'm going to have to research.

Your next choice, I love this, it's The Diary Of A Nobody,

George and Weedon Grossmith. Tell us about this.

It is a spoof diary, written by these two guys, George and Weedon Grossmith,

who were brothers, and who had actually done a lot of theatre.

I think they were journalists as well,

did bits of acting, my sort of career, actually.

And they came up with this brilliant character called Charles Pooter, who is a nobody.

He's just a very ordinary bloke, living in Holloway in North London, and working as a clerk.

And he has a rather ordinary wife, and a slightly extraordinary son

called Lupin, who's a little bit disreputable.

And he just wants a quiet life, actually.

But he always gets things slightly wrong.

He rubs people up the wrong way, he upsets them.

There are little bits of petty jealousy directed at him.

He makes jokes that people take huge offence at,

and it's just a really lovely, detailed character observation.

He's a completely absurd character. He works in the city,

it's the late 1800s, and he lives in this house in Holloway.

And he thinks his diaries are earth-shattering, and the whole world would be interested in them.

Yes, he does. And it's interesting that you said he's an absurd character, because he is, absolutely.

But he's a really ordinary man, and that's what's so lovely, because absurdity is in all of us, you know.

We all do things every day that are completely ridiculous.

But he writes them down. It's a beautiful, detailed character observation,

very much in the vein of Dickens and Austen.

-And it's just the most wonderful title.

-Yes.

-I mean, it is a magical title...

-Everyone should read this book.

..of a nobody, because it's sort of, you know, counter-intuitive,

about what we think diaries should be made of? Wonderful.

It is, it's a beautiful book, and it's full of just lovely, lovely little details of nothingness.

And the absurdity is not unlike your character in The Thick of It, is it?

Where she's going along, and not quite getting the rest of them.

You're Nicola Murray, we've got a clip here, and this is where you're being interviewed by Richard.

I love this, interviewed by Richard Bacon on Five Live, and you've got all those minders,

-who are trying to help, are actually an awful nuisance, aren't they?

-Yes, that's right.

Nicola Murray, any piercings?

-Er, no.

-Yes, you do.

-No piercings at all, no.

You have got some piercings.

-OK, all right.

-Sorry, no piercings at all, no.

Some people say that my distinguishing feature

would be probably my ears, which I'm told are quite small.

-Right...

-But I do think we have to be a little bit careful about taking

too light an approach to culturally-sensitive issues like body piercing,

or female circumcision... Earrings! Earrings, I've got pierced ears!

-Very good.

-Wonderful.

-It's so beautifully written, all of that. It's lovely.

-Did you always want to go into comedy?

-I didn't really, no.

I wanted to be a great Shakespearian actress, and I went up to Oxford

and started auditioning for Juliet and Beatrice,

and it always went to girls with flowing hair, and I didn't have flowing hair,

and then I went for an audition for the Oxford Revue, which

is the equivalent of Footlights, and there were no other women there, so I got in.

At that point I thought I should just take the course of least resistance, and try to be funny.

-It's proved an excellent choice.

-It's been useful.

Now, we've had your childhood reads, and books that have influenced your career.

Trevor, your guilty pleasure,

Beyond A Boundary, CLR James, about cricket.

Of course. Well I mean, first of all,

CLR James was a brilliant journalist, also a kind of West Indian philosopher, really,

and a great political polemicist.

And he became quite prominent in the West Indies, but the book is about cricket,

and he begins with the premise, you know, what do they know of cricket who only cricket know?

And says that, in the West Indies, it acquired a significance

far beyond the boundaries of just the game. I remember one,

he went to America, James, and discovered that people were cheating at games.

And he thought, "But you can't do that.

"You can cheat in life in many other ways, but you can never cheat in a game.

"And you could never possibly cheat at cricket."

Well, alas, that's no longer so, I fear,

but, you know, this is the view he has.

And yet, he thinks it also has a political relevance,

and he's probably right, because there was a man called Eric Williams,

who was running to be Prime Minister

of the first independent Trinidad and Tobago and in the '50s,

when, after England had been beaten by the West Indies at Lords in 1950,

the political campaign was based almost on the slogan,

"If we can beat them at cricket, then we can govern ourselves."

And so it did have a significance greater than the game itself.

Meanwhile, Rebecca, your Guilty Pleasure, Naked, by David Sedaris.

You can tell this is a guilty pleasure and sits by my bedside

because it actually has tea stains all over the cover.

Did you read this at a particular time?

Well, I came to it fairly recently, but I think what really struck me was, I'm a dreadful hypochondriac.

I lurch from one imagined crisis to another,

and on one particular holiday a couple of years ago,

I was going through one of these, "That's it!"

"I'm absolutely certain I've got something terrible wrong with me."

I was ruining the holiday for everybody, and I started reading

this as a distraction, and it cheered me up no end. It's hilariously funny.

I think what I love about it is,

it's funny, and he writes with a very spare style, that makes it sound as if it's very easy for him.

I don't believe it is, but he writes in a style that's slightly like Bill Bryson, slightly like Woody Allen.

It seems to trip off the tongue, as if he's just chatting to you,

but clearly it's much more complex than that.

And it's also very personal - this volume in particular is about

his, family, his childhood, his mother, and the characters are so vivid.

What do you think, Trevor, your collection of books say about you?

Nothing very much, really.

I do like poetry.

And I would like to think that, if it says anything about me,

is that it says that I am absolutely in love with the language.

I love the beauty of words. I think we're very lucky

to have a language which is so wonderfully expressive about things.

And to read it and to read, it's one of the reasons why I write less and less myself, really.

I read almost too much.

And you realise, you know, people have done it so well before,

why should you, why should you ever try?

But I hope it says that

I love things which are written well.

Rebecca, how about you? What does your choice say about you?

I think it says that I love people.

I'm fascinated by character, and individuality, and quirkiness,

and all of these books are about the quirks of human nature.

And my whole career is about observing and trying to convey the quirks of human nature.

And if you had to recommend just one of them, which one would it be?

-Nicholas Nickleby, I think. Because it's so vast.

-Trevor?

Mine would be very difficult, but I'd take the poetry, because one gets, you know,

endless charm from poems, and I'd probably settle for that.

-You'd settle for a collected poems of TS Eliot?

-Yep.

Well, there we are. Thank you to Trevor McDonald and Rebecca Front for joining me on My Life In Books.

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Please don't forget, there's more about this

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