Selecting hymns for Zoom worship is a challenge. Short of me doing solos, something I am sure, no one would appreciate, I have resorted to selecting hymns from CDs, old recordings of BBC programmes and the use of Spotify, an on-line resource. Sadly, for me, there are only about twenty hymns selected and repeated on many such discs. To try to link the content of the hymn with the biblical material has stretched me considerably. But looking through CDs reminds me so much of my first job and how I grew to appreciate classical music.
At the age of 18, I started working in what was then called the BBC Gramophone Library in a building next door to Broadcasting House at the top end of Regents Street, in the heart of the West End of London. My job title was “Returns Clerk”, and I worked in the Returns department with about another 20 people. We were responsible for making sure the discs that were returned after producers had finished with them, were properly filed in the huge number of shelving. Ladders were provided but it was often easier to climb the shelves to replace a disc, up to what seemed about twelve feet off the ground. We all had to know the alphabet, and be reasonably numerate. After two weeks, I was moved to ‘The Phone’, because Mr Edwards, my boss, thought I was the most personable – or was it because I could spin a good yarn. It was now my job to phone up producers and presenters to ask them to return the borrowed discs because they were overdue or someone else wanted it.
And so it came to be that I learnt the difference between Ada and Aida, that Beethoven wrote only one opera – Fidelio – and Liza Minnelli was the daughter of Judy Garland. I remember too, a gang from the Library often went to the Proms, queuing after work, and then “promming” all evening. My first prom came about because a student of the Royal college of Music who was working through his summer in our section, got us organised with sandwiches and beer and led a party to the Royal Albert Hall. You won’t have heard of him but since August 2011 he has served as Artistic Director of the , Moscow, and as such is the first British born conductor to have ever held such a pivotal role at any Russian opera company. His name is Jan Latham-Koenig. Another name I remember was Phillip Hyman, who later became a Radio 3 announcer. Phillip invited me to go with him to the Royal Opera House and in the weeks leading up to the performance, each lunch time, he’d play me a part of the opera we were to see and instruct me what to listen out for. They were wonderful days!
A highlight of every week was the recording day of Desert Island Discs, when after a good lunch, Roy Plomley would bring into the library the guest who would choose his or her eight discs to take away to an imaginary island. Roy, not a large man, still looked down on mere clerks like us but very often his guests were more gracious and would chat freely with us. And so names from the past like Celia Johnson, Terrence Rattigan, Jack Warner gave us some minutes while Roy seethed behind them.
I thought it would be fun to see what music people would take to a desert island and why. In the coming weeks, I’ll kick it off by taking you through some of my choices. I hope you’ll find it enjoyable.
It’s quite a list and on any desert island it’ll make a noise! There’s no Broadway musical so for my valuable item I would take a DVD of Stephen Sondheim’s “Sweeney Todd: the demon barber of Fleet Street”. I will be allowed the Bible and a complete set of Shakespeare’s plays so I would take a copy of Andre and Pierre-Emmanuel LaCocque’s book of “Jonah – a psycho-religious approach to the prophet”, which changed everything about preaching for me.
