Desert Island Discs is 80 years old and to celebrate this milestone the BBC has planned an event unprecedented in the show’s long history. It is also one that will surely have its creator and original presenter, Roy Plomley, spinning in his grave. Desert Island Discs Live will take place at London’s Palladium over three nights later this month with host Lauren Lavern in conversation with celebrity guests Russell T. Davies, Katherine Ryan, Lemn Sissay, Ellie Simmonds, Dara Ó Briain, Sue Perkins ‘and more to be announced’.
The whole charm of the show, and the reason for its longevity, is its intimacy
If this sounds like your sort of thing then it’s not too late to book – there is, at the time of writing, a whole raft of tickets still available from between £44 and £92. It is perhaps surprising that a show which gets an audience in the millions has so far failed to sell out a venue with a capacity of just 2,000. Perhaps its because regular DID listeners know it is an extraordinarily bad idea.
The whole charm of the show, and the reason for its longevity, is its intimacy. The programme captures the sense of solitude and reflection that being cast away, alone, might bring. The host then gently encourages to share those feelings – with the music selections both articulating and puncturing the intimacy. Desert Island Discs whispers rather than shouts. The studio becomes a confessional.
We listeners don’t necessarily want guests to break down but it’s certainly memorable when they do. One thinks of Ian Wright on his inspirational school teacher, Ade Edmondson on the death of his comedy partner Rik Mayall, Richard E. Grant on how broken he was by the death of his wife, Stephen Graham on having been suicidal, Lemn Sissay on being cruelly taken from his mother. Will Sissay, who is on the DID Live bill, be asked to recreate this emoting on stage?
Lauren Laverne, whose previous broadcasting career had been more in the ‘Hello Glastonbury!’ vein, initially seemed to lack the lightness-of-touch that had characterised her masterful predecessors in the DID chair, Sue Lawley and then Kirsty Young. But she has got better over the last six years and now consistently strikes the right tone – a quiet one.
By putting DID in front of a live audience, it will surely lose this. DID Live will, inevitably, be more akin to a chat show where hoary anecdotes are wheeled out for laughs and cheers rather than a thoughtful, unscripted conversation, one-on-one.
This seems to have been reflected in the choice of guests: there is no unheralded Scottish judge or volcanologist here, it’s pure showbiz, all TV entertainers and performative celebs. Furthermore, all of the guests announced so far have already been on the show. While it’s not unprecedented for guests to appear more than once, they never record another show within a couple of years. All six of these DID Live guests have been interviewed recently, making this, in a sense, another BBC repeat.
It’s not like the producers needed to do this. DID couldn’t be any more loved. It’s regularly the most searched item on the catch-up service BBC Sounds. An expert panel five years ago voted it the best radio show ever. And it’s not even the 80th anniversary at all, not really. Perhaps fittingly for a show about being marooned on a desert island, they have missed that boat. It’s not even in the year of the 80th anniversary. The first DID was in January 1942. The live show is over two years late. So why this? Why now?
Well, the announcement of the Palladium shows came just months after DID became one of several radio crown jewels shows – along with the consistently brilliant Melvyn Bragg-fronted In Our Time – which were moved under the control of BBC Studios, the commercial wing of the corporation. In other words, they wanted to monetise the show’s popularity.
There you have it: its new controllers are using the feeble excuse of the 82nd-and-a-bit anniversary of DID to test the water for turning it into a proper live event earner in the vein of Gardeners’ World with no doubt merch and all the rest. If all this is judged a success – assessed on financial terms, of course, rather than on whether it truly enhances the brand – they’ll surely take DID to Latitude in the summer, perhaps even to Glastonbury, which would be full circle for Laverne.
Please don’t let that happen. This is a precious national institution. Just as you wouldn’t get planning permission to significantly alter a listed building, you should have some respect for heritage radio shows. Leave Desert Island Discs alone.
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