Anthony Burgess Speaks: 1964 (d)

Burgess discusses Franz Kafka on the BBC television show 'Take It Or Leave It' with Bernadine Bishop, Anthony Blond, John Gross and presenter Robert Robinson. Reading by John Moffatt.

Directed by Tristram Powell and produced by Melvyn Bragg. Research by Eve Gross. 'Take It Or Leave It' devised by Brigid Brophy.

(Many thanks to TomGross100.)

'It was assumed that those who wrote books also read them, and writers were drawn, for a fee of a hundred pounds [£1,500 in today's money]....Cyril Connolly said the title of the programme ought to be "Money for Jam"....Anthony Blond, identifying a passage as from "Scouting for Boys" by Baden-Powell, added gratuitously that there was a statue erected to the hero of Mafeking in Germany with the inscription "Der Grosse Britische Homosexuell". This had to be cut....Unable to identify a passage from "Diary of a Nobody", I said, "Oh, it's probably from 'Augustus Carp, Esq. By Himself, Being the Autobiography of a Really Good Man'. The session was held up while [Kingsley] Amis and Robinson exclaimed that now three people knew the book. This got the comic masterpiece back into print after forty years of neglect. Mary McCarthy...failed with Gross to recognise a passage from Bellow's "Herzog", though they had been together on a jury that gave the novel an international award....Once there were two stutterers on the same panel. There were no drunks. Despite the regular fee, I was uneasy....Was it proper to show our ignorance so nakedly?'

— from 'You've Had Your Time, Being the Second Part of the Confessions of Anthony Burgess' (pages 104-105)

• Category

  Entertainment

[TheJinksd]

Wow...there was a time when people watched TV shows like this!... now it's Xfactor and Big Brother

[Geoffrey Grigson]

Yep, these days TV producers assume, wrongly, that viewers are as cretinous as they are.