Harold Evans
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.4 • 13.7K Ratings
🗓️ 2 April 2000
⏱️ 38 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Sue Lawley's guest this week is Harold Evans. One of the great campaigning journalists of all time, as editor of The Northern Echo in the 1960s he argued the the case for cervical smear tests for women. At The Sunday Times, he highlighted the problems of the Thalidomide children. When Rupert Murdoch bought The Times he was given the job of editor and then sacked. After writing a book which decribed how a newspaper changes when the owner becomes editorially involved, he left for America where he lives a life of apparent glamour, with his wife, magazine editor Tina Brown.
[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. |
| 0:05.0 | For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music. |
| 0:08.0 | The program was originally broadcast in the year 2000, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My cast away this week is a journalist and publisher. He learned his trade in two good schools, |
| 0:36.3 | the north of England and New York. The son of a Lancashire rail women, he was editor of |
| 0:40.9 | the Northern Echo by the age of 31 and eight years after that |
| 0:44.4 | editor of the Sunday Times where his campaigning flare, |
| 0:47.6 | Thalidomide, the crossman diaries, the expose of Harold Wilson's lavender list |
| 0:52.0 | made him one of the most successful |
| 0:53.7 | and important newspaper men in post-war Britain. |
| 0:57.0 | Rupert Murdoch put a stop to that. Having given him a brief sop as editor of the |
| 1:01.1 | times, he sacked him. The abandoned journalist left for America, |
| 1:05.0 | where ten years ago he became president and publisher of Random House. |
| 1:09.0 | These days he can look back on a life of glamour, risk and good fortune. My greatest strength, he says, |
| 1:15.8 | is reckless insensitivity to the possibility of failure. He is Harold Evans, better known as |
| 1:22.0 | Harry Evans, or indeed perhaps happy Harry Evans I feel |
| 1:25.3 | because everything I read about you is is you finding everything so wonderful |
| 1:30.8 | enjoying everything you tackle well just picking I'm just picking up on your introduction, I'd like to look forward to a life of glamour |
| 1:36.5 | and excitement instead of look back on it. |
| 1:38.3 | Now, age 71, which is it? |
| 1:39.5 | Well, let's not say that, but, uh... |
| 1:42.0 | But you are a kind of Dr. Pangloss. Well I'm very optimistic and |
| 1:46.5 | the way it comes from I've been very lucky and so the things that I've tried to do |
... |
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