It seems like the same programme. The dreamy opening theme with its soaring strings, the cosy tête-à-tête between host and guest, the interspersed tracks ranging from classical to pop to world music. But there is something wrong with Desert Island Discs, whose guest today is Delia Smith. Like other fans of the programme I have kept on dutifully listening through its latest iteration, hosted by DJ Lauren Laverne, but with an irrepressible sense of disappointment. I snapped recently when, tuning in at the usual time, I learnt that the castaway was a businessman, barely known outside the pages of the Financial Times, who ran an energy company. It didn’t even make good background radio.
Benefit-of-the-doubt defences kicked in. Perhaps we are listening through a period when British public figures just aren’t that interesting? In fairness, the golden age of the show was in the late 20th century when many castaways had participated in the Second World War. They came furnished with fantastic stories of achievement and adversity. The great world event of our age was Covid-19, which wasn’t exactly participatory for most. But the decline of Desert Island Discs can’t be put down solely to the disappointing roster of guests. The show has lost its way.
I write this not out of malice but because I love the programme and want it to prosper. It hurts me to see this great fruit of broadcasting wither on the vine. With biting BBC cuts to Newsnight and local radio, and the cancellation of A Question of Sport, it seems even the corporation’s oldest and most beloved shows are under threat. The show has recently been shifted over from the public service to the profit-making division of the Beeb, which makes me nervous, and God forbid Discs should get the axe. But in order to save it, we must understand what has gone wrong.
The open secret about the programme is this: it’s not actually about the music. The songs form a pleasing background and, when everything is right, give the interview a natural flow (a pleasing ditty for childhood, some optimistic yet nostalgic track for early adulthood, perhaps a wedding song, etc.). Roy Plomley, the musical aficionado who founded the show in 1942 and served as its first presenter, knew this. Before recordings he would take his guest to a pub near Broadcasting House for a gin, inspect their track list, and encourage them to remove any inauthentic or pseudo-intellectual choices. The point of the programme was not to make the castaway seem cultured or show their enthusiasm for great music. It was to show listeners who the guest really was.
Laverne is too nice. Previous presenters were dry and inquisitive
DJ Laverne, like a modern Plomley, is a music geek. But unlike him, she doesn’t get the formula quite right. Her crackling enthusiasm for guests’ song choices comes over almost too much, as Laverne has a habit of cutting short her guest’s telling anecdote or reflection in order to get on to the next track.
She is also too nice. The previous presenters — Plomley, Michael Parkinson, Sue Lawley and Kirsty Young — were never rude. But they were dry and inquisitive, sitting in judgement as the guest accounted for their lives before sailing into oblivion. But when Sir Keir Starmer prepared to cast off recently, Laverne allowed him to tell his well-honed rags-to-riches story without missing a beat: toolmaker, pebble-dashed semi, nurse. What a doddle, his spinners must have thought. When David Cameron was trying to become prime minister, he barely got out of the studio in one piece. Sue Lawley grilled him on his Bullingdon Club past and lack of political conviction, and listeners could hear Cameron sizzling in her frying pan. Surely Sir Keir could have undergone some tough questioning about his record as director of public prosecutions?
Interrogation, friendly or not, was a fundamental part of the show that now seems to have been lost. Think back to the shocking, awkward-pause-filled episode in which Lawley got Diana Mosley to admit, on air, that she was an unrepentant Holocaust denier. Or, at the lower stakes end, when Stephen Fry was quizzed about his chequered past of criminality and drug abuse. Would the current Desert Island Discs team have the front? I doubt it.
The strictures of the programme have fallen away in other ways. The luxury item allocation has become far too generous. While guests used to cringingly beg Kirsty Young for a pen, promising to craft their own papyrus from leaves, now they cocksuredly demand full writing sets and all the accoutrements necessary to carry on their daily skincare routine. Recent castaways have even broken the fundamental rule that the luxury item (singular) must not allow the possibility of escape from the island or communication with the outside world. In recent months, Laverne has permitted a scuba diving kit, woodworking tools and even a television!
It is not all the fault of Laverne. She is a great music broadcaster whose talents have been misdirected by Beeb higher-ups, and with so many interview podcasts around now, there is much stiffer competition for top-tier guests. But asking past master Kirsty Young, who left due to ill health, to return would be a smart move. Her excellent new Radio Four interview series, Young Again, has reminded me and countless other Disc-heads why we miss her so much.
