In 1941 Roy Plomley was 27, and living in Bushey, Herts. After stints as an estate agent, film extra and mail-order astrologer’s assistant, he had found a better billet on a wireless programme called Swing from London, and, though only a freelance, was excused compulsory enrolment in civil defence on grounds of his valuable contribution to the BBC (which then had two stations, the Home Service and the Forces Programme).
In spare moments he pitched his ideas for new shows, such as This Too Too Solid Flesh: ‘The boys and I,’ replied Leslie Perowne, head of Light Entertainment, ‘have now digested your programme on the subject of corpulence … we picture all the fat listeners on this island writing rude letters.’ I Know What I Hate fared no better: ‘The BBC would, I fear, get into great trouble for sponsoring such a controversial performance.’ The idea definitely had something, though: celebrities (or prominent notables and personalities, as they were known) selecting eight or so records they particularly disliked.
All it needed was the simplest twist, and on the night of 3 November, when the coal fire in his digs had gone out and he was already in his pyjamas, that simple twist illuminated Plomley’s head and he immediately sat down and wrote a letter to the Gramophone Department. ‘Why didn’t we think of Desert Island Discs before?’ replied Perowne on 19 November. ‘It’s such an obvious and excellent idea.’
Seventy years on — though there were intervals, surprisingly, from 1947 to 1951 and 1953 to 1954 — Sean Magee has produced this magisterial, handsome and charmingly illustrated volume in celebration of the programme’s long established place in the national psyche, and the way it shapes itself around each castaway, as its current presenter Kirsty Young puts it in her foreword, ‘like a well-tethered hammock slung between a pair of obliging palm trees’.
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