In 1941 Roy Plomley was 27, and living in Bushey, Herts. After stints as an estate agent, film extra and mail-order astrologer’s assistant, he had found a better billet on a wireless programme called Swing from London, and, though only a freelance, was excused compulsory enrolment in civil defence on grounds of his valuable contribution to the BBC (which then had two stations, the Home Service and the Forces Programme).
In spare moments he pitched his ideas for new shows, such as This Too Too Solid Flesh: ‘The boys and I,’ replied Leslie Perowne, head of Light Entertainment, ‘have now digested your programme on the subject of corpulence … we picture all the fat listeners on this island writing rude letters.’ I Know What I Hate fared no better: ‘The BBC would, I fear, get into great trouble for sponsoring such a controversial performance.’ The idea definitely had something, though: celebrities (or prominent notables and personalities, as they were known) selecting eight or so records they particularly disliked.
All it needed was the simplest twist, and on the night of 3 November, when the coal fire in his digs had gone out and he was already in his pyjamas, that simple twist illuminated Plomley’s head and he immediately sat down and wrote a letter to the Gramophone Department. ‘Why didn’t we think of Desert Island Discs before?’ replied Perowne on 19 November. ‘It’s such an obvious and excellent idea.’
Seventy years on — though there were intervals, surprisingly, from 1947 to 1951 and 1953 to 1954 — Sean Magee has produced this magisterial, handsome and charmingly illustrated volume in celebration of the programme’s long established place in the national psyche, and the way it shapes itself around each castaway, as its current presenter Kirsty Young puts it in her foreword, ‘like a well-tethered hammock slung between a pair of obliging palm trees’.
For the signature tune Plomley and his producer agreed on Eric Coates’s ‘By the Sleepy Lagoon’, with the cries of seabirds and the sound of surf breaking. Decades later it was pointed out that herring gulls live in the northern hemisphere, and for a few months in 1964 they were replaced by tropical birds, but the gulls were missed and reinstated.
The first castaway was the Austrian comedian Vic Oliver who, to Winston Churchill’s fury, married his daughter Sarah. Another early guest was Captain A.E. Dingle, who wrote sea stories under the nom-de-plume ‘Sinbad’, and had the distinction of having been marooned for three months on a real desert island, in the Indian Ocean, where he dined on penguin and goat meat.
Procul Harum’s ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ has so far been chosen by Diana Mosley (whose appearance on the programme was, according to her sister Jessica, ‘too ghastly for words’), Gemma Jones, Patrick Lichfield and, strangely, by no fewer than two illiberal home secretaries — Michael Howard and David Blunkett. Enoch Powell’s first four choices were Wagner.
The luxury was introduced on the programme’s revival in 1951, when Sally Ann Howes (who went on to play Truly Scrumptious in the film of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang) became the first castaway to choose one: garlic. Oliver Reed chose an inflatable woman, Kathy Burke chose a laminated life-size
photograph of James Caan, so she could body surf on him, and Norman Mailer ‘a stick of the very best marijuana I could find’.
The book came later, too. Enoch naturally wanted the Old Testament in Hebrew and the New Testament in Greek, while David Hockney decided the only thing he would want to re-read would be pornographic, and so chose Route 69 by Floyd Carter, which is ‘full of bad grammar and spelling mistakes, but quite touching in a way’.
Before the programme, Plomley would give his castaways lunch at the Garrick or Savile — or the Lansdowne if they were female. He was not well disposed to pop music (‘the bashing of electric guitars and the frenzied shouting of tin-eared vocalists’), and repeatedly addressed Cliff Richard as Cliff Richards. When he died in 1985 he had been involved in 1,786 editions, including two as a castaway himself.
Despite his heroic sucking up to Robert Maxwell, Michael Parkinson was never really comfortable in the role and left after two years, to be replaced by Sue Lawley, who was quite hard -hitting. Eight prime ministers have appeared on the programme: Thatcher (‘I just cannot live without some humour’), Blair, Brown (doing his celebrated impersonation of a human being: ‘But are you a loner?’ ‘No, I’m not a loner’) and Cameron before office; Douglas-Home, Heath and Callaghan after it; only Major during. Herbert Morrison, who served in Attlee’s cabinet, was said to have carried his list of eight records in his wallet for years, waiting for the call, which never came.
This book is full of touching moments — Desmond Tutu, for example, used to ask London policemen for directions ‘just for the incredible fun of having a police officer, and a white police officer at that, speaking to you courteously’. And mad ones — Frank Bruno: ‘Yes, boxing is dangerous, but lovemaking today is very, very dangerous.’ And ones that capture the subject perfectly, as when Harold Pinter, asked ‘Why did you choose this?’ replied: ‘I like it.’
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