The abstract painter Roger Hilton isn't widely remembered nowadays, and evidently
wasn't famous enough during his lifetime to be invited onto
Desert Island
Disks, either. This was presumably a sore point for him as he'd got his list of
disks and luxury items ready, and one thing Eddie Elks'
Botallack O'Clock
does is rectify this situation. The title comes from a poem W.S. Graham wrote about
Hilton after his death, describing the time and place where the artist did most of
his late work: Confined to his bed after a lifetime of alcoholism, in a
bedroom/studio at his house in Botallack, Cornwall, waking up to paint in the middle
of the night. This is how Elks' play opens, with Hilton (Dan Frost) waking up and,
after scrambling around for a drink and a roll-up, muttering advice to himself as to
how best to start that night's artwork. After failing to tune into a station, the
Radio (George Haynes) starts speaking to him directly, interviewing him for
Desert Island Disks.
