Today’s 75th anniversary show with Kirsty Young looks at the best interviews from the BBC programme’s 3,068 guests.
There have been four hosts, including creator Roy Plomley, Sir Michael Parkinson, Sue Lawley and Kirsty.
The first interviews from the 1940s and early 1950s have unfortunately been lost but there were still many thousands to choose from.
Introducing the show, Kirsty says 2017 was a special year for Desert Island Discs. “We celebrated 75 years casting guests away to that tiny deserted island with just a few treasured recordings, three books and a luxury to keep them company,” she says.
“Today we are going to mar the end of such a special milestone by hand-picking a festive selection box of archived goodies from some of the 3,000 guests who have been cast away over the past three-quarters of a century.”
The earliest clip broadcast today, from the late 1950s, will be with the BBC’s first war correspondent Richard Dimbleby, who famously chronicled the Second World War from the front line and witnessed the liberation of the BergenBelsen concentration camp.
He went on to become the voice of the BBC and commentated on events such as the Queen’s coronation and the funerals of John F Kennedy, Winston Churchill and George VI.
He described his time in Europe, saying: “Two or three days before the war began, and it was obvious it was coming, we took a recording car quietly over to France and hid it in a garage so we were all ready.
“I went in [to Berlin at the end of the war] very early on, before the British Army went in. I was arrested briefl y by the Russians but managed to get out. And then they took me down into the bunker where Hitler had committed suicide, they showed me it. And I pinched a knife and a fork and a spoon of his which I’ve got now with his initials on the handle.
“If anyone comes to dinner which I don’t like I give them the spoon to eat the soup with.”
One of the most notable guests was Archbishop Tutu in 1994, seven months after South Africa held its first free post-apartheid election.
Describing his first experiences in London in the swinging 60s to then host Sue Lawley, he said: “[It was] unbelievable. Mind blowing. To walk the streets of London just to savour this thing called being free.
“In other days we would walk very late, which would have been curfew time in South Africa.”
Stranger luxury items chosen include Norman Mailer’s one cannabis joint that he would enjoy one perfect evening.
Also featured are Louis Armstrong, Dame Judi Dench, Dame Barbara Castle, Jaqueline du Pre and Val McDermid.
● Desert Island Discs, BBC Radio 4 at 11.15am today.
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