BC 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,
