This article is taken from the February 2023 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

BBC Radio Four’s Desert Island Discs is 80 this year, and in eight decades the programme has neither changed nor flagged. Its format is blindingly simple: a different guest each week imagines life on a desert island and chooses eight tunes to go with them. One book of their choice is also allowed, to accompany the mandatory Bible and Shakespeare, and one “luxury”, which must not in any way connect them with the world they’ve left behind or help them to escape. 

Like a Lynn Barber interview in a Sunday newspaper of yesteryear or being featured on This is Your Life, getting chosen to appear on Desert Island Discs is a sign of national acceptance, that you’ve finally entered the ranks of the Great and Good. Who doesn’t, at the back of their minds, have their eight fantasy records bobbing about, should it ever happen to them? 

The series was founded in 1942 by Roy Plomley, who went on to present the programme for 43 years, and following him there have been four more interviewers, all with their unique tone. With Plomley (1942-85) it’s all there in the surname — he’s plummy yet deferential. Michael Parkinson (1986-88) is … well Parky is Parky, no surprises there. 

Despite being surprisingly skittish when featured on the show herself, Sue Lawley (1988-2006) is earnest to the point of arctic chill at times, and forensic in getting guests to reveal themselves (“This is turning into an interrogation, Sue,” shrieks an affronted Dame Edna Everage. “Probing and digging away.”) 

By contrast, Kirsty Young (2006-18), who followed her, is warm, giggly and persuasive (Terry Wogan, who appeared on the show three times, said she was easily the most lethal, as you would confess to anything confronted by such charm). Newcomer Lauren Laverne, presenting since 2018, is chirpy, approachable and a good listener. Comparisons can be made on the BBC website, which has a huge back catalogue of Deserts Island Discs to delve into, and all the variety of human life seems there. 

This was lucky for me, as having fled Russia in March — a country where I’d been living for four years — I had fetched up in Georgia, a country where I knew precisely no one. Green, mountainous, laid-back and friendly, Georgia is a place you don’t mind getting trapped in for a while, and this was just as well as trapped I was (cats, blood tests, documents). Lacking a social life, I decided to give myself a feast of the human voice, and set myself to listen to at least 200 episodes of Desert Island Discs. 

At the end of this journey into the back catalogue, I could make my selection of the best eight, to parallel guests’ choice of eight records. It was the kind of thing you always imagine doing but never get round to, unless caught in vaguely desert island conditions yourself. Here at last was my chance. 

The format still works a treat

The format still works a treat. There is that music, “By the Sleepy Lagoon”, unchanged since the programme’s inception, which, along with The Archers’ theme tune and the “Sailing By” which accompanies the shipping forecast, is surely one of the great standards of British life. Composed in 1930 by Eric Coates, it was originally inspired not by a tropical island but by Bognor Regis. 

Then there are the guests. The musical choices are one way you start grading guests as you go along. Too much classical music and they appear pompous and remote; only pop music and they seem a bit soulless. 

There are certain choices that subtly put you against someone from the start. The novelist Nick Hornby acknowledges this when appearing himself. “This is from Wagner’s Ring Cycle,” he says of his first piece of music, before starting to giggle. “No, it isn’t. It’s Bruce Springsteen.” 

I remember loving the programme when I was very young, perhaps even needing it. Here was where you discovered what adults were actually like and, in turn, what you might become. You also found out about the strangeness of the human character. Who would have guessed that the ending of The Railway Children always reduced Tony Benn to tears? Or that red- hot lefty Alexei Sayle would choose as his book The Sword of Honour Trilogy by Catholic arch-conservative Evelyn Waugh? Or that actress Pauline Collins had given up her child for adoption, and then had a premonitory dream the child would come into her life once again, just before she did? 

My 200-episode Desert Island Discs odyssey was an island breeze, like attending the world’s best drinks party, and whirling from one glittering guest to another. Only my tastes have changed over the years, and my final shortlist reflects that. 

In my twenties I would have gone for the more highbrow subjects — the philosophers, twelve-tone composers and arcane novelists — feeling they were conjuring with a magic which excluded me and which I should probably be aspiring to. The criteria now are fun, those with honesty, common sense, a surprising back-story or an ability to hold the interest for forty minutes. 

No politicians — at their most cautious and guarded on this programme — have made the grade: people on their best behaviour are rarely at their best. No sportsmen or sportswomen either (perhaps a reflection of my lack of sporting interest). Yet here, from those 200 or so listenings, are the eight that will make it back to land with me — my companions in the lifeboat, as it were, when it finally appears on the horizon. 

JOHN FOWLES 1981 (Plomley) 

There are few laughs in this interview with the novelist John Fowles, author of The Collector, The Magus and The French Lieutenant’s Woman. But it is a wonderfully lucid picture of a writer’s life and craft, back when novelists were near national superstars, from a figure as well-travelled on the continent as he was rooted in Lyme Regis, his West Country home. 

KENNETH WILLIAMS, 1987 (Parkinson)

The Carry On star, Kenneth Williams, starts this interview almost oppressively motor-mouthed and eager to entertain, with world-class Maggie Smith and Dame Edith Evans impressions. Soon he’s calmed down and is giving us his more thoughtful side in that extraordinary voice of his — half Shakespearean maestro, half cockney hairdresser. Of his love life he says gloomily, “I suppose I’ve had some good friendships. That’s about all,” and later “I quite look forward to death.” His life was to end, by his own hand, within a year. 

SARAH MILES 1990 (Lawley)

1960s sex symbol Sarah Miles makes a likeable guest, coming across as extremely candid while at the same time very loyal: an unusual combination. Here she tells you of her exile from a rebellious childhood “with my pig and my pony … and the trees”, and her transformation from strange little girl with “pubic hair” and “flapping transparent ears” to one of the iconic actresses of the 1960s. A charmed life complete with remarriage, to playwright Robert Bolt, after a ten year separation: “We had to go through such huge journeys to get where we are now.” 

GERALDINE JAMES 2004 (Lawley) 

If ever a woman seemed to have everything, it is the actress Geraldine James — tall, classy, glamorous, and with a charmed career including Shakespeare, The Jewel in the Crown and even Little Britain. Nothing prepares you for her unexpectedly Dickensian middle-class upbringing or the triumph of her overcoming it, in a tale of alcoholism, parental rejection, telepathy and wicked stepmothers. 

VICTORIA WOOD 2007 (Young) 

Gone in 2016 and not forgotten, the great comedienne tells here of a strange and isolated childhood, growing up in a remote house on the Manchester moors, with no friends, visitors or shared family mealtimes. But there are books and a piano, and soon the young Victoria is practising on her own and turning round to an imaginary audience. An interesting study of how outward chaos and social failure can be beaten by a steadily growing inner self-belief which would take Victoria Wood all the way. 

PAUL WELLER 2007 (Young) 

Anyone expecting political rage from the Woking-born ex-singer of The Jam and Style Council will be disappointed. Instead, Weller comes across as shy, thoughtful, honest and unassuming, and someone you’d like to have a drink with, as he tells of his stratospheric musical rise through a fractured 1970s Britain just discovering punk. 

CRAIG BROWN 2012 (Young) 

The Private Eye diarist and satirist is included for earthy common sense, humour and quotability. “People will read … Crime and Punishment and yet they wouldn’t read Jade Goody’s autobiography and yet that’s just as rich in lots of ways … The line between them is much finer than most people make out.” Brown is a more emotional man than his Private Eye background suggests, at one point nearly breaking down when discussing the beauty of his daughter’s singing. 

SUE PERKINS 2017 (Young) 

Appropriately for the presenter of the Great British Bake-Off, this interview is a feast. Bubbly, confessional, full of joy and pain, Sue Perkins takes us through the stages of her life, growing up in Croydon, getting into Cambridge University, finding out she’s gay — “the forty-seventh most interesting thing about me”. She is good on the pain of life too: struggling with her father’s death, a brain tumour and the loss of her beloved dog.