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Desert Island Discs
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This Week's Guest:
Ronald Searle
Sunday 10 July
Repeated
Friday 15 July |
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Ronald's Choice |
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Sue Lawley travels to Provence in the south of France to meet the illustrator and satirist Ronald Searle in his first recorded interview in more than thirty years.
Ronald Searle is arguably Britain’s foremost graphic satirist, though he has not lived in this country since 1961 and likes to comment that most people in Britain now think he’s dead. He is best-known as the creator of St Trinian’s, the horrible, suspender-wearing schoolgirls who devote more time to gambling, torture and arson than they do their lessons.
Ronald Searle was born in 1920 in Cambridge and drew obsessively from an early age. At the age of just fifteen he had his first cartoon published in the local paper, The Cambridge Daily News and his career blossomed in the mid-to-late thirties. However in 1939 he joined up and after two years of training he was posted to Singapore. He says that for a month they were 'running backwards' through the jungle before being captured by the Japanese and he spent the rest of the war as a P.O.W. They were traumatic years – he felt driven to draw as a way of recording what was happening around him - but his work led to him being singled out as a trouble-maker and as a result he was assigned to work on the infamous ‘death railway’ that the Japanese were building between Thailand and Burma. Ninety-five per cent of those working on it died but, despite coming close to death on several occasions, Ronald Searle survived.
In 1961 he left Britain for a new life in France - one where he was not known as the creator of St Trinians - but where he could concentrate on his political, satirical drawings and reportage. Now aged eighty-five, he still regularly produces cartoons and illustrations for The New Yorker and Le Monde.
His work can currently been seen at the Imperial War Museum in London.
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1. Fantasia on a Theme
Performer London Philharmonic orchestra conducted by Sir Adrian Boult
Composer Vaughan Williams
Publisher EMI records
CD Title A London Symphony:Vaughan Williams
Track 1
Label EMI
Rec No: CDC7472132
2. A Spotless Rose
Performer Choir of King's College, Cambridge conducted by Philip Ledger, with soloist Gareth Morrell
Composer Herbert Howells
Publisher EMI records
CD Title Carols for Christmas Eve
Track Side 1 trk 3
Label HMV
Rec No: CSD 3774
3. Moritat - the opening of The Threepenny Opera
Performer Harald Paulsen from the original cast recording of 1928
Composer Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brechts
Publisher Capriccio
CD Title Die Dreigroschenoper
Track 1
Label CAPRICCIO
Rec No: 10346
4. Im Abendrot (Evening's Glow)
Performer Elisabeth Schwarzkopf with the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Otto Ackerman
Composer Strauss
Publisher EMI records
CD Title Strauss:Four Last Songs
Track 4
Label EMI
Rec No: CDH5674952
5. What A Wonderful World
Performer Louis Armstrong
Composer G Weiss/G Douglas
Publisher MCA Records
CD Title We have all the time in the world
Track 3
Label EMI
Rec No: CDEM357
6. Moon River
Performer Johnny Mercer with Henry Mancini and his Orchestra and Chorus
Composer Johnny Mercer-Henry Mancini
Publisher Famous Music Corp
CD Title The Johnny Mercer Songbook
Track 1
Label RCA
Rec No: 97882R
7. 2nd Movement of Piano Concerto No 21 in C Major
Performer Daniel Barenboim with the English Chamber Orchestra
Composer Mozart
Publisher EMI
CD Title Mozart:Piano Concertos Nos 21 & 27
Track 2
Label EMI
Rec No: 5698212
8. The Champagne Song
Performer Regina Resnik, Erika Koth and Waldemar Kmenett with the chorus of Vienna State Opera and the Vienna State Orchestra conducted by Herbert von Karajan
Composer Johann Strauss
Publisher Decca
CD Title Die Fledermaus
Track Cd1 trk 16
Label Decca
Rec No: 4210462
Record: Champagne Song
Book: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
Luxury: Champagne (the best possible)
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