Cast astray
Desert Island Discs has lost the plot
MELANIE MCDONAGH
T
here’s a cultural problem at the BBC,
isn’t there? The Corporation is trying
to attract under-35s — the sort who
don’t really listen to scheduled radio pro-
grammes and who probably listen, if to any-
thing from the BBC at all, to Radio 5 Live.
This is the most obvious way to explain
what’s happened to Desert Island Discs.
It’s the only possible reason why Lauren
Laverne, DJ, pop musician, a face for televi-
sion rather than radio, replaced Kirsty Young
for her sick leave.
The bad news is that Kirsty isn’t coming
back. She was good: she knows everyone,
she’s probing and she’s sympathetic. Given
that the programme, with its brilliantly sim-
ple premise, has been going since 1942, this is
an appointment people really care about. It’s
also the gig every presenter wants: Sunday
morning, somewhere between late breakfast/
church and lunch. If you’re on Desert Island
Discs, people know about you. Or used to.
The reassuring news is that Radio 4 con-
troller Mohit Bakaya is apparently looking
for someone other than Lauren to front the
programme. The real question is, why was she
put there in the first place? She runs Kathy
Clugston of Gardeners’ Question Time close
as the worst appointment Radio 4 has made
in its apparent effort to alienate its listeners.
It’s not her fault, obviously, that she will
always be compared with former Desert
Island Discs host Sue Lawley, a woman who
could make a moment’s silence really tell.
Lauren is northern, not a common type on
Radio 4. She’s also patently nice. Certainly, she
isn’t mean; she doesn’t press home an advan-
tage with an interviewee or even spot that
she could be following up answers at all. Her
interview with Louis Theroux comes to mind.
There’s no getting away from it: Lauren is
lightweight and uncerebral. Her capacity to
come up with the forgettable phrase is quite
something; she introduced Mary Berry as the
woman ‘who has sold more cookbooks than
most of us have had hot dinners’.
When I asked a former radio critic what
he thought of her he answered instantly:
‘Awful. I heard her with [poet] John Cooper
Clarke and it was sucking up to PC idiocy
and brandished plebbiness. But that’s what
the programme is for now... Guests can be
nearly anonymous provided they are vibrant
and diverse.’ A BBC journalist observed:
‘The latest run of programmes have been
really flat — is that her or is that the selec-tion of guests? Nobody chooses anything or
says anything that is surprising — perhaps
her lack of big interview experience tells.’
The recent programme with Tim Water-
stone, the bookshop man, was an exception
— it was good listening — but then, he prac-
tically interviewed himself. He also cares
about music, but because it was classical, it
elicited no enthusiasm from Lauren.
Under her, the show has become that bit
more politically correct. When she had the
Chief Medical Officer Dame Sally Davies
on last month, the one thing she pressed her
on was the advertising campaign against
obesity, and ‘how to remove the stigma and
shame from that conversation’ — that is, the
indignation fatties would feel at the sugges-
tion they are eating themselves into the grave.
Dame Sally gave that usefully short shrift.
She knows her stuff with contemporary
music — she was plainly at ease interviewing
Emily Eavis — but on classical she’s out of
it, which is a pity when some castaways, like
the geographer and social scientist Jared Dia-
mond, are so interesting and informed.
The issue here isn’t the merits of one pre-
senter; it’s the BBC’s reflex when it comes
to appointments like this. Simply put, being
youngish, regional, a pop presenter and
a woman really isn’t enough. Choosing inter-
viewees on the basis that they’re not Estab-
lishment, posh, white, elite, male, isn’t enough
either. The BBC needs to pick the best per-
son for the job; it says a good deal that this is
now a controversial view.
Granted, not everyone was a fan of Roy
Plomley, the inventor and original presenter
of the programme: some thought him obse-
quious as an interviewer, though overt flat-
tery did quite often persuade guests to expose
themselves amusingly. But he did have a stel-
lar cast of guests.
Who might be better? Sarah Montague is
an excellent interviewer. Mark Lawson, pre-
senter of the BBC arts programme, is plausible.
But the person I’d like to see presenting would
be Michael Berkeley, host of the Radio 3 ver-
sion of Desert Island Discs, Private Passions. His
interview with Jo Brand was a revelation. He’s
polite, informed, intelligent and knows about
classical music. He gets guests to talk. But he’s
male, 71 and posh. No chance then, I suppose.SPECTATOR.CO.UK/RADIO
Kate Chisholm on why she changed her mind
about Lauren Laverne.It is said that our
political system is ‘broken’ simply
because the passions aroused by
Brexit have effectively created a hung
parliament. So what to do about it?
Athenians would have dealt with the
problem by ostracism. Its purpose
was to send one citizen into exile.
Once a year Athenian citizens (all
males over 18) meeting in assembly
got the chance to vote for an ostracism.
It was held by citizens inscribing the
name of their candidate on a potsherd
(ostrakon). As long as at least 6,
votes were cast, the man with the
most votes was sent into exile for ten
years. He did not suffer disgrace, lose
citizenship or property, just his ability
to reside in Athens.
About 10,000 such ostraka survive.
Some citizens spoilt them. One
inscribed his ostrakon with ‘starvation’,
another with ‘Aristides [an influential
speaker in the assembly], brother of
Datis’ — an accusation of consorting
with the Persians (‘medism’), Datis
being a commander of the Persian
attack on Greece at Marathon in
490 bc. One batch of 190 unused
ostraka has been found with the same
name written on it, ‘Themistocles’,
in just a few hands. This may have
been a service to the illiterate — or
a scheme to fix the vote.
But what did an ostracism achieve?
It was probably designed to defuse
situations in which the Athenians could
not make up their minds between
proponents of competing policies:
an ostracism forced a final decision.
Speakers were ostracised for ‘medism’;
so was a speaker for opposing Pericles;
Themistocles was regularly a candidate
for it (and finally fell to it).
The current ‘larger than life’ PM
is exactly the sort of person who
would have been the subject of an
ostracism in Athens — and he knows
it, especially as many of his own party
would willingly ostracise him. But
that, of course, would not solve the
problem of stalemate in parliament. To
do that, the PM is promising to deliver
Brexit, do or die, and also splashing the
cash, in the hope of winning a general
election with a healthy majority. That
would break the suffocating deadlock
and restore British politics to business
as usual.
— Peter JonesANCIENT AND MODERN
Breaking the deadlock