Sally Ann Howes, the actress who played Truly Scrumptious in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, requests garlic. John Cleese asks if he can bring Michael Palin. Simon Cowell wants a mirror, “because I’d miss me”. Unless you’ve actually been stranded somewhere with neither wireless nor Wi-Fi for the past few decades, you’ll be familiar with the premise of Desert Island Discs on BBC Radio 4. Each week a different guest — or ‘castaway’ in the programme’s parlance — chooses the eight tracks, book and single luxury they are content to be stranded with.
his beguiling premise has been a mainstay of radio since January 1942, when creator Roy Plomley interviewed the first castaway, the Viennese comedian, actor and musician Vic Oliver. Current presenter Lauren Laverne is only the fifth host in the programme’s history.
During the war, it was tightly scripted, with castaways reading prepared answers aloud. For the first four decades, castaways didn’t get to hear their preferred tracks in the studio either: when Michael Parkinson took over as host in 1985, he insisted the music was played during the recording rather than edited in later.
An excellent call on his part, as listening to the sounds that matter most often prompts a castaway to surprisingly open recollections of love, life and loss.
The Desert Island Discs podcast on BBC Sounds has a pleasingly simple interface, which makes it enjoyable to pick famous names and check out their luxury, or let their musical choices inspire your next listen. Bonus content includes archive gems in Revisited; extended editions in Longplay; and Your Desert Island Discs, in which Kirsty Young shares listeners’ music choices. The early archives are fragmented, but some wonderful snippets remain, such as the surviving extract from Plomley’s 1959 interview with Alfred Hitchcock, in which the director describes his new project Psycho as “a rather gentle horror”.
Castaways tend to take their abandoned status seriously, openly wondering if and how they would cope alone. It all got too much for Judi Dench, who at the end of a brilliant and revealing interview, decides she has chosen the wrong music, proclaiming, “I don’t want to go! I don’t want any of those records!” The programme ends with her slowly intoning: “What a nightmare...” For her maybe, but it’s listener gold.
Other gems include Paddy Moloney from The Chieftains (luxury: a tin whistle) telling Sue Lawley about playing a private concert for the Pope — “he loved it” — and the bond between Irish melodies and the music of other countries and cultures; writer Maggie O’Farrell cheekily asking for the National Museum of Ireland’s archaeological wing as her luxury; and former Arsenal manager Arsène Wenger (luxury: a ball) explaining: “I relax by watching other managers suffer, and thinking: it’s your turn, my friend”.
Hosts tend to go hard on castaways who try to bend the rules about their book or luxury, as John Cleese discovered when he asked to bring his pal. Sue Lawley reluctantly allowed the former Python’s request, but only on the condition that Michael Palin was dead and stuffed.