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expensive dishes and wines without worrying aboul<br />
what it's costing me.<br />
The other great side of the job is that I can take a<br />
friend with me so it's a good way of catching up<br />
with old friends who I may not have seen for a<br />
while. And everyone loves a free meal in a posh<br />
restaurant so ! rarely have to eat on my own.<br />
The downside? Well, there are several. I often have<br />
to eat a lot when I'm not really hungry. To do my<br />
job properly, I have to try all the courses - you know<br />
starter, mai n course, dessert, and sometimes I don't<br />
feel like eating so much, but I have to do it. I also<br />
have a problem with my weight now - it's very easy<br />
to put on weight when you eat out several times a<br />
week. In fact, most restaurant critics have a weight<br />
problem. Another problem is that if I write a bad<br />
review of a meal! have, it's difficult for me to ever<br />
go to that restaurant again, because the owner of the<br />
restaurant will probably recognize me. Another<br />
disadvantage of the job is that because I do it so<br />
often, eating out has lost a lot of its attraction for<br />
me. When the weekend comes 1 prefer to eat at<br />
home rather than go out for a meal.<br />
5.16 Nearly all fore ign correspondents and war<br />
reporters that I've met are people who were looking<br />
for adventure. They're not the kind of people who<br />
would be happy with a nine-to-five job. They are<br />
people who got into the job precisely because it has<br />
very weird hours and involves going to difficult places.<br />
I mean to some extent the things which are difficult<br />
and potentially dangerous about the job are also the<br />
things that made you \V3nt to do the job in the first<br />
place and the reason why the job is so exciting.<br />
Something else I really like about the job is that I<br />
work as part of a team - you sit down and have<br />
dinner together at the end of the day and talk things<br />
through with other journalists and photographers<br />
and you're talking to people who have experienced<br />
the same things as you, and seen the same things as<br />
you. And that's very important in this kind of work.<br />
One of the problems of the job is seeing a lot of<br />
horrillc things and then going back home to<br />
normality. I remember a few years ago coming back<br />
from a war zone where I had been for a long time<br />
and I'd seen a lot of death and destruction and I<br />
went to a fr iend's wedding in London. It was a<br />
beautiful day, everyone was drinking champagne<br />
and talking about unimportant things, and I wanted<br />
to say, 'Why can't you see that there is something<br />
awful happening in the world?'<br />
Another major worry about my job these days is<br />
the risk of being killed. Journalists used to get killed<br />
by accident, but now there are more and more cases<br />
of journalists being killed simply because they are<br />
journalists, and they are also becoming the target of<br />
kidnappers. Two of my colleagues have been<br />
kidnapped recently and a very good friend of mine<br />
was killed last year.<br />
5.17 Interviewer Nicholas Kenyon was the<br />
director of a festival of concerts called the Proms<br />
for 12 years. How did the Proms start?<br />
Nicholas The promenade concerts started way back<br />
in 1895 when a brilliant impresario wanted to use<br />
a newly-built concert hall in London, the Queen's<br />
Hall, for a series of popular concerts that really<br />
brought dassical music to the widest possible<br />
audience. There were important dassical concerts<br />
during the year, but in the summer people tended<br />
to go away, society life finished and so he had the<br />
brilliant idea of taking away all the seats on the<br />
floor of the hall, where the expensive people<br />
usually sat and letting people come in and stand<br />
there and walk around and have a very informal<br />
experience of concert-going. The name 'Proms' is<br />
an abbreviation of'Promenade concerts' and it<br />
basically means that people are able to walk<br />
around and stand during the music<br />
Interviewer How long do the Proms last?<br />
Nicholas The Proms lasts fo r two months in the<br />
summer, from the middle of July to the middle of<br />
September and during that period there's one<br />
concert every day. Two concerts on many days.<br />
three concerts on some days. So it's a very very<br />
intense period of music-making and people buy<br />
season tickets in order to be able to attend all of<br />
the concerts, whether they do or not, very few<br />
people attend actually all of them, except me, and<br />
they come and they queue during the day in order<br />
to get the best places in the floor of the hall where<br />
they stand.<br />
Interviewer World-class musicians perform at the<br />
Proms for much lower fees than they would<br />
expect to receive. Why do you think that is?<br />
Nicholas I think the Proms has an absolutely<br />
unique atmosphere that's what orchestras and<br />
conductors and performers who come here say.<br />
And so people do want to come and perform.<br />
What you get at the Proms is a wonderful mixture<br />
of total informality and total concentration. So<br />
that although people don't dress up to come to<br />
the Proms, they behave how they want, they<br />
actuaUy absolutely listen to the music and that is a<br />
feature that so many conductors and orchestras<br />
really comment on - the level of concentration is<br />
absolutely amazing.<br />
5.18 Interviewer There must have been many<br />
truly memorable concerts during your time as<br />
director of the Proms - Could you tell us about<br />
one of them?<br />
Nicholas The death of Princess Diana was<br />
particularly difficult because of course she lived<br />
just across the road in Kensington Palace from<br />
where the Proms happened in the Royal Albert<br />
HaU. We changed some programmes to make<br />
them more appropriate. On the day of her funeral,<br />
we put in Faure's Requiem to tbe programme.<br />
Very oddly we had programmed two or three<br />
requiems in that last two weeks of the season and<br />
they fitted very very well. We then lost another<br />
major figure of the musical world, the conductor<br />
Sir Georg Solti who was to have conducted the<br />
Verdi Requiem on the last Friday of the season<br />
and he had been a very good friend of Princess<br />
Diana and indeed had rung me up just after<br />
Diana's death to say that he wanted to dedicate<br />
this Verdi Requiem to her memory. As it turned<br />
out, he died just a week later and so another<br />
conductor, Colin Davies, took over that Verdi<br />
requiem and dedicated it to both of them and it<br />
was a fantastically charged atmosphere in the hall.<br />
I can't remember such an electric occasion as that.<br />
Interviewer I understand there was also another<br />
spooky coincidence in the programme at the time<br />
of Diana's death? Could you tell us about it?<br />
Ni.cholas A wonderful American composer called<br />
John Adams had written an absolutely wonderful<br />
piece which we were going to do on the last night<br />
of the Proms in 1997. Unfortunately, I mean it<br />
could have been called absolutely anything this<br />
piece, it's a whirling abstract piece of fanfare<br />
music. Unfortunately he had called it Short ride in<br />
a fast machine. And so it was perfectly obvious<br />
from the first moment that we had to take that<br />
piece out and change the programme.<br />
Interviewer Are there any embarrassing or amusing<br />
experiences you remember?<br />
Nicholas One of the things that was a real challenge<br />
to the Proms was the arrival of the mobile phone.<br />
because in the beginning people didn't know how<br />
to use them, when to switch them off and the<br />
Albert Hall is a very very big space and mobile<br />
phones would go off in concerts and it co uld be<br />
very embarrassing. Usually, because they were in<br />
the middle of the music, conductors just ignored<br />
them and people got embarrassed and switched<br />
them off. But there was one particular incident<br />
that was just so awful because Stravinsky's The<br />
Rite of Sprillg starts with a very very exposed quiet<br />
bassoon solo and Simon Rattle and the Berlin<br />
Philharmonic making one of their first<br />
appearances together at the Proms had just begun<br />
that piece when a mobile phone went off very<br />
loudly in the stalls and Simon Rattle stopped the<br />
bassoonist and turned round and glared at this<br />
person in the stalls and there was a round of<br />
applause and everything. So anyway, it restarted<br />
and the performance was a spectacular success<br />
and it was wonderful. But this was such an<br />
incident, that he had actually stopped it, that it<br />
became the subject of a lot of media attention and<br />
there were paragraphs in the papers and I had to<br />
go and be interviewed the next day at home for a<br />
Radio 4 programme about mobile phones going<br />
off in concerts, and in the middle of this in terview,<br />
my own phone went off and it's a wonderfully<br />
classic little bit of tape. My embarrassment at the<br />
same thing happening to me.<br />
5.20 Interviewer Have you ever been to a music<br />
festival?<br />
Anne Isle of Wight in the 70s.<br />
Interviewer What was it like?<br />
Anne There were just thousands and thousands of<br />
people just chilling out doing whatever you<br />
wanted to do. And it was just great fun - there<br />
was music, dancing, a great memory actually.<br />
Interviewer Have you ever been to a music festival?<br />
Jordan Yes, we have a rock festival back home in<br />
Ohio that we go to, a lot of my friends and I go to.<br />
Interviewer What's it like?<br />
Jordan I don't know what it's called but it's just like<br />
a whole buncb of alternative music, it's like two<br />
days long and you all go and it's just a fun timeall<br />
outside. There's a ton of people and they're all<br />
usually younger, from like college age usually, and<br />
they have a whole bunch of stages set up, and<br />
there's just ba rs in different places, and yOll can<br />
just go and hang out and listen to some music.<br />
Interviewer Have you ever been to a music festival?<br />
Mike Yes, I went to Glastonbury.<br />
Interviewer What was it like?<br />
Mike Incredibly muddy, but great fun, absolutely so<br />
much fun, I didn't get any sleep at all, it was, so<br />
much fun.<br />
Interviewer Have you ever been to a music festival?<br />
Ray Yes, not for many years. When I was much<br />
younger I went to Bath, Bath music blues festival,<br />
I've been to Reading music festival. I can't<br />
remember which other ones I've been to, but yes,<br />
in the 1970s and early 80s I went to quite a few.<br />
Interviewer What were they like?<br />
Ray From a 57-year-old's point of view? Well, at the<br />
time they were really exciting. I can remember a<br />
long journey down to Bath, sleeping in a field, I<br />
can remember expensive food, waiting up all<br />
night to the see the band that you wanted to see<br />
and then falling asleep. I can remember being<br />
taken back to sleep in somebody's tent then<br />
waking lip and realizing we were in the wrong<br />
tent, and had no idea whose tent we were in the<br />
next morning. I can remember feeling slightly sort<br />
of sick and hungry all the time I was there, but<br />
yeah, it was good, it was exciting.<br />
Interviewer Have you ever been to a music festiva l?<br />
Harley No. Oh, yeah, actually. The Big Chill? Yeah,<br />
we went to the Big Chill.<br />
Interviewer What was it like?<br />
Harley Yeah, it was really good. I went with my dad<br />
and my sister, we went in a camper van. So we<br />
camped and yeah, it was good.<br />
6.5<br />
I was giving a talk to about two hundred people<br />
in a large hotel room in Poland. About halfway<br />
through the talk, I realized that something was<br />
flying around the room. At first I just ignored it,<br />
as I thought it was probably a bird that had come<br />
in through the window, but after a while I noticed<br />
that the women in the audience were following its<br />
movements with their eyes and were not looking<br />
very happy. It was then that I realized that it was a<br />
large bat. The next moment I could see from the<br />
audience's eyes that it was directly above my head.<br />
I'm really frightened of bats, and I just panicked. I<br />
tried to carry on, but I couldn't concentrate and I<br />
kept forgetting what r was going to say. So r<br />
hurried through the last part of the talk and then<br />
as SOOI1 as I fmished, I rushed out of the room. It<br />
was awful, I'U never forget it!