The problem with Desert Island Discs

It should be the basis for new playlists, exciting discoveries, the leftfield, the overlooked, the forgotten gem. But too often these days listening to Desert Island Discs is akin to being stuck in a minicab with the radio locked to Golden Greats FM, where the hits just keep on coming. It’s not so much that many guests have bad taste but that they have no discernible taste at all, their choices plucked almost exclusively from the canon of the bleeding obvious. It’s Exile on Mainstream Street. 

This week the otherwise estimable and charming novelist Maggie O’Farrell flirted with greatest hits territory with among the better known output of Radiohead (The Bends) and The Cure (Lovesong) before finally going there in earnest: Nina Simone’s Feeling Good, that latter day staple of X Factor auditions and de trop karaoke singers. If it sounded familiar that’s because it was: just last month it was also on the list of Monica Galetti.