Fenster writes:

Desert Island Discs is a BBC radio program, one that has been running since 1942 and is one of the longest running radio programs in the world.  Various prominent types are asked to imagine themselves cast away to a desert isle and invited to come up with a list of eight musical selections they would take with them.  They may also take one book and one luxury item, and are asked to pick one of the eight musical selections that they would save first from the waves.

Needless to say, the selections run quite a gamut owing to the many changes to the world, including to music, that have taken place since 1942.  I suspect, too, that changes to the BBC have played a part in the gamut run.

The general idea that the media should elevate has a longer and stronger pedigree over there, with the result that even in 1979, deep into the rock era, one would be more likely to come across Sir Osbert Lancaster plugging for Gluck, Poulenc and Stravinsky than Marc Bolan plugging for Styx.  On the pop side, Michael Palin, also interviewed in 1979, did in fact include the Beatles’ Things We Said Today, but in the end opted to save Elgar’s Enigma Variations from the waves first.  I suspect there’s pressure to show one’s good taste (in which regard see the snippet from Tom Stoppard below).

Moving on to the current day, there’s an inevitable movement away from the idea of elevation, at least as regards the high-minded classics, but something of the BBC tone remains.  The most recent interviewee was (clearing throat) the Rt Hon Eric Pickles, who plumped for Puccini.  But it is increasingly the case that popular artists do show up as guests and as picks.

Pickles Plugs Puccini

Various technological and legal factors kept the archived shows from becoming available.  Now over 1,800 of the over 2.900 shows are available for download at the BBC.  It’s worth a visit,  and not only for the downloads but because the website itself is designed to make for a fun tour.  You can analyze the site chronologically, of course, by decade.  But you can also plug in artists or musical selections to find references to them, and if you select a certain kind of interviewee (a pop musician, say, such as Eric Clapton), the site offers up suggestions for other musicians who have been interviewed (John Lee Hooker, Elvis Costello, Randy Newman).

It can be fun to see how taste works.  Have you ever had the experience that someone other than you shares your tastes even though you take yours to be idiosyncratic or eclectic?  Is there a shared sensibility that runs through certain kinds of artistic experiences that tilt them in the direction of persons x,y and z but not a, b and c?

For example.  I am not a fan of Pink Floyd.  Having been pro-psychedelia in the sixties and pro-progressive in the seventies, you’d think I would have been, but no.  Yet Roger Waters’ picks totally resonated for me.  Neil Young’s Helpless, Leonard Cohen’s Bird on a Wire, Ray Charles Georgia and Chet Baker’s My Funny Valentine have all at one time or another been special to me as specific songs, and not just because of the artists.  There was even one selection by Waters (an instrumental number entitled Endless Flight from the Babel soundtrack) that grabbed me in the first few notes.  I wondered why Waters and I would overlap to such a degree.

What goes through someone’s mind when being asked on the show, particularly given its long-term prominence in Britain?  Do you select songs you listen to the most and don’t get tired of?  That you admire the most?  That you think will meet the BBC’s expectations?

Tom Stoppard’s lead character in The Real Thing (1982) had to grapple with this decision.  The lead character, Henry, is an accomplished playwright and has been asked to be on the show.  He would have appeared, and put on the spot, in 1982, at a time when the real show was interviewing a real theater person, the head of the Mermaid Theater Lord Bernard Miles.

Miles goes for Mozart

The esteemed Lord Miles selected a classical-heavy eight, with concessions to non-classics in the form of Art Tatum and Louis Armstrong–high-minded in their own way.

Poor Henry’s anxieties about his upcoming appearance follow:

HENRY: Yes, Charlotte will provide dips for the crudity. She knows where everything is. (Charlotte takes charge of the vegetables. Henry gets a fourth glass.) Sit down, have some buck’s fizz. I feel reckless, extravagant, famous, and i’m next week’s castaway on Desert Island Discs. You can be my luxury if you like.

ANNIE: I’m not sure I’m one you can afford.

MAX: What are your eight records?

HENRY: This is the problem. I hate music.

CHARLOTTE: He likes pop music.

HENRY: You don’t have to repeat everything I say.

MAX: I don’t understand the problem.

CHARLOTTE: The problem is he’s a snob without being an inverted snob. He’s ashamed of liking pop music. (Charlotte takes the vegetables out into the kitchen, closing the door.)

HENRY: This is true. The trouble is i don’t like the pop music which it’s all right to like. You can have a bit of Pink Floyd shoved in between your symphonies and your Dame Janet Baker – that shows a refreshing breadth of taste or at least a refreshing candour – but I like Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders doing ‘Um Um Um Um Um Um’.

MAX: Doing what?

HENRY: That’s the title. (He demonstrates it.) ‘Um-Um-Um-Um-Um-Um’. I like Neil Sedaka. Do you remember ‘Oh, Carol’?

MAX: For God’s sake.

HENRY: (Cheerfully) Yes, i’m not very up to date. I like Herman’s Hermits, and the Hollies, and the Everly Brothers, and Brenda Lee, and the Supremes… I don’t mean everything they did. I don’t likeartists. I like singles.

MAX: This is sheer pretension.

HENRY: (Insistently) No. It moves me, the way people are supposed to be moved by real music. I was taken once to Covent Garden to hear a woman called Callas in a sort of foreign musical with no dancing which people were donating kidneys to get tickets for. The idea was that i would be cured of my strange disability. As though the place were a kind of Lourdes, except that instead of the front steps being littered with wooden legs, it would be tin ears. My illness at the time took the form of believing that the Righteous Brother’s recording of ‘You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin” on the London label was possibly the most haunting, the most deeply moving noise ever produced by the human spirit, and this female vocalist person was going to set me right.

MAX: No good?

HENRY: Not even close. That woman would have had a job getting into the top thirty if she was hyped.

MAX: You preferred the Brothers.

HENRY: I did. Do you think there’s something wrong with me?

MAX: Yes. I’d say you were a moron.

HENRY: What can I do?

MAX: There’s nothing you can do.

HENRY: I mean about Desert Island Discs.

ANNIE: You know damned well what you should do.

HENRY: Cancel?

I think I would have some of Henry’s anxieties, not that anyone is asking me on the show.

Any suggestions for your own DIDs?