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THE BBC this year marked its centenary, an occasion that prompted a plethora of reminiscences, ruminations, plaudits and brickbats. Both the praise and the criticism are often well deserved.
As an institution, the public broadcaster has always been a part of the British establishment. At least since the Thatcher years, it regularly gets slapped down for deviations from the ruling ideology, and generally prefers to play it safe. That invariably involves tilting its political ‘balance’ to the right. The union leader Mick Lynch recently called it out — accurately — for taking its cues from the rabidly reactionary Daily Mail.
Whatever the extent to which the BBC World Service received its cues from the Foreign Office as an instrument of British soft power, it has over the decades undeniably served a useful purpose in many parts of the world, especially where the local media has been intimidated into conformity or silence. At least three of this newspaper’s editors were previously stalwarts of the Urdu Service, which often offered a lifeline to some semblance of reality in troubled times.
Anyhow, no one can seriously deny that the legacy of the BBC’s first 100 years includes a fascinating archive of sounds and images. Inevitably, not everything has been preserved — yet, incredibly, recordings of programmes considered to have been lost long ago keep turning up in attics and basements.
The BBC archive throws up unexpected pleasures.
Perhaps the oldest ongoing show is Desert Island Discs, inaugurated 80 years ago. The idea behind it is to invite a guest to share the eight pieces of music they would take with them if they were to be stranded alone on an uninhabited isle. The show first turned up on the Forces Programme during World War II, and was resurrected after a brief postwar hiatus. Its host for the first 43 years was Roy Plomley.
He wasn’t a particularly engaging or empathetic interviewer, but the show was popular enough to survive, and became a lot more interesting when it was passed on in the mid-1980s to Michael Parkinson, briefly, followed by Sue Lawley, Kirsty Young and the incumbent host, Lauren Laverne. Based on the early episodes I’ve listened to, Plomley showed little interest in delving into the lives of his guests — known as castaways — or in their responses to his questions.
Lawley and Young vastly improved the show’s template and broadened its scope, inviting castaways from all walks of life who might previously have been considered too controversial — or simply unworthy. And occasionally they teased out scoops from guests who might have been more reticent in the face of aggressive interlocutors.
In 1991, Lawley’s castaways included a certain cricket captain, perhaps past his prime but still a prominent all-rounder in the London social scene. Asked how he navigated the initial culture shock, Imran Khan says he resisted peer pressure to down a pint, while certain other Pakistani cricketers got sucked in and developed alcohol problems. Later, his reputation as a playboy is also brushed off as speculation. He’s never had the time or the money for that, he claims, but admits that one of his closest friends fits the description.
The song he chooses to remember this friend by is Elvin Bishop’s Fooled Around and Fell in Love. When queried about the ‘English girl’ he came close to marrying, Imran says that the cultural divide proved impossible to bridge. At 38, he declares he’s still not prepared for the commitment that marriage entails. Fewer than four years later, he wed the then 21-year-old Jemima Goldsmith. There have been two further marriages since they divorced in 2004.
Some of the other tracks he chooses might resonate in a different way today. There’s Johnny Nash’s rendition of Jimmy Cliff’s I Can See Clearly Now, to which one can only add: if only. And, linked to a World Cup failure, The Rolling Stones’ You Can’t Always Get What You Want — which might be worth revisiting.
His favourite pick is Pink Floyd’s Us and Them, which includes the verses: “‘Forward!’ he cried from the rear/ And the front rank died/ And the general sat/ And the lines on the map/ Moved from side to side…” Imran says he could meditate to it, were he inclined to meditation. But he won’t be doing that on the desert island. The ‘luxury’ he chooses to take with him is a shotgun, to target clay pigeons. His favourite pastime.
Arguably, the best song he chooses, relating it to a romantic liaison gone wrong, is a version of a Bob Dylan song by the Irish band Them. “You must leave now, take what you need/ You think will last,” it says. “But whatever you wish to keep/ You better grab it fast … Look out baby, the saints are comin’ through/ And it’s all over now, baby blue.” Let’s see if that realisation eventually sinks in.
Published in Dawn, December 21st, 2022
