Culture Desk: Seven Decades of Desert Island Discs : The New Yorker

The New Yorker reviews the Desert Island Discs retrospective which was broadcast yesterday (and resists the temptation to use the US spelling of the word “Disks”):

If some castaways couldn’t resist the temptation to be clever—Alfred Hitchcock’s luxury item was a Continental railway timetable—and others surrendered to predictability (Philip Larkin chose a typewriter), a few gave their choices more soulful thought. Paul McCartney, who was the castaway thirty years ago, on the fortieth anniversary of the show, eschewed any Beatles hits, but included a track by John Lennon, from “Double Fantasy”—“Beautiful Boy.” Yoko Ono chose Gracie Fields’s sentimental favorite “When I Grow Too Old to Dream,” because she had sung it with her aged mother. Daniel Barenboim, the conductor, who was married to the cellist Jacqueline du Pré, spoke of their discovery that she suffered from multiple sclerorsis. She had to stop playing when she could no longer feel her bow, and he chose one of the pieces she had loved most, Elgar’s Cello Concerto. Ronald Searle, the cartoonist, who died last month, at ninety-one, spent much of the Second World War as a prisoner of the Japanese in the Kwai jungle. He wanted to be cast away with the four last songs of Richard Strauss, he said, because they give you the courage to face death.

If you’d like to hear these snippets for yourself, the BBC is in the process of putting up a massive archive on the official site, with individual episodes available as podcasts. Yay for the TV Licence.