I'm on holiday and I have realised the Desert Island Disc archive is worth the BBC licence fee alone. Or in my case, it's even better because I don't have to pay the licence fee and I just get to fondly think of the homeland whenever I hear the opening bars of the soundtrack with the crashing waves and the seagulls.
Desert Island Discs is very 'British.' It is on the same page in my mind as my Dad listening to the cricket in summer (TV on, sound off, radio on), crown green bowling ('There's nowt for short!') and my Grandma cutting the edge of the lawn with those kitchen scissors with the orange handles. It's remembering the New Years Eve party at the next door neighbour's house and all the kids running around outside shouting 'IT'S 1990 EVERYONE!' It is the end of term rounders match and BBQ (made from an oil drum cut in half) at junior school every year with the ceilidh band and the man with the huge belly and the braces playing drums. It is my Grandad jangling change in his pocket, and it is running to the ice cream van with nothing on your feet.
It is all a bit sentimental and nostalgic perhaps, but that's surely what Desert Island Discs focuses on. It's people of note in their particular field reflecting on their life and choosing songs to mark those moments.
The archive goes a long way back, and the programme started in 1942. I find it's good to mix it up a bit on who you listen to; it's surprising what you learn and the older ones I think are the best. Politics is a good place to start - I listened to Tony Benn and Enoch Powell straight after one another. Who knew they were friends? Both great orators, and really both rather mad. Who is left in Parliament like them? Or another way, listen to Margaret Thatcher in 1978, Tony Blair in 1996 and David Cameron in 2006 and then use the benefit of hindsight. Listen to Lord Denis Healey in 2009, whatever your political view. This is a man who saw the Jarrow marchers in 1936 coming through Keighley and it remained with him throughout his political career.
I suppose the music choices ought to be the most important part, but I find the bits in between far more interesting. Who knew that Jonny Vegas is a trained potter and nearly joined the Catholic priesthood? That Dec from Ant and Dec would take a pair of tweezers as his luxury item? That David Jason was left out of the Monty Python gang?
There are some real unexpected gems. Dairy farmer and Glastonbury festival founder Michael Eavis shows that confidence is a wonderful thing. He went to a festival in Bristol and decided they should have the same on his farm in Somerset and decided to book The Kinks for the first festival as they were number 1 at the time in 1970. The poet and author Allan Ahlberg reminds you that the simple things are probably most important when he talks about the 'luxury' he will take to the desert island - bricks and cement and a trowel to build a wall to kick a football against. 'I can pass a lot of time that way' he says.
There are a lot of moving programmes in the archive too. Allan Ahlberg talks about his wife the illustrator Janet Ahlberg dying and notes that she wrote a lot of postcards to her closest friends and illustrated them, saying she was 'going on ahead to put the kettle on.' Listening to the author Jeanette Winterson you understand the effect that her upbringing had on her writing. 'Why do you call her Mrs Winterson?' asks Sue Lawley. 'Because it suits her,' she says 'it would be inappropriate to call her Mother. A lady less motherlike I cannot imagine.'
Some of it is pretty tough listening. I like the way though that by and large interviewees are very open and honest. Tory MP, historian and diarist Alan Clark 'never met anyone as cruel to men as my mother until I met Mrs Thatcher' and he notes that Michael Heseltine is a 'dreadful charlatan who bought all his own furniture.' Former MP and Commons speaker Betty Boothroyd talks of her parents working in textiles in Dewsbury. She notes that her Dad was often out of work and 'stayed at home and did the housework and my mother worked. He closed the curtains so the neighbours didn't see him. We prayed for bad winter weather so he would get a job with the corporation clearing snow.'
It's a wonderful archive and I have hardly mentioned any here really, and there are 500 to go at. Start with Dickie Bird. It's my favourite.
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