scholarly journals Scripting the radio interview: Performing Desert Island Discs

2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 175-192
Author(s):  
Kathryn McDonald
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
Public Figure ◽  
Early Approach ◽  
Desert Island ◽  
Radio Programme

Desert Island Discs reveals much about the BBC’s early approach to the radio interview. The radio programme calls for its audience, the host and a ‘castaway’ to engage in a fantasy where guests are invited to preselect musical records to accompany them on a fictional desert island. This concept acts as a vehicle in which the host asks questions or makes statements about the significance of these records, in order to unearth the private motivations of a public figure. This has proved itself as a predictable, reassuring and innovative format that all parties must commit to. This article addresses the first decade of the programme, where all interviews were scripted. Studying the origins of this series allows us to cast some assertions on the ways that scripting was used to communicate and mediate a host’s persona and an interviewee’s past and personality. The use of scripting was intended to create a sense of informality, humour and theatrical drama. Contextualizing these types of scripted exchanges further informs our understanding of the radio interview within our mediated cultural heritage.

Desert island data

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurie Cohen ◽  
Joanne Duberley
Keyword(s):  
Life Course ◽  
Desert Island ◽  
Data Source ◽  
Research Scientists ◽  
Radio Programme ◽  
Work And Life

Laurie Cohen and Joanne Duberley describe their use of an unconventional data source—a radio programme—to study celebrity careers. This source also includes music, which evokes memories, and elicits emotions not readily captured in conventional interviews. They used the archives of the BBC Radio 4 programme Desert Island Discs to study the careers of well-known research scientists. The programme’s format has been consistent over its 70-year history; ‘castaways’ from all walks of life are interviewed about their careers and are asked to select eight pieces of music, which reveal many other aspects of their lives. This research focused on the relationships between work and life course, the notion of career as performance, and the role of emotion in the narration of career. Desert Island Discs is part of an extensive archive. As time and funding for research are tight, rapid no-cost access to such data is valuable.

Personal Spin B

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Derek Drescher
Keyword(s):  
Golden Opportunity ◽  
Desert Island ◽  
The One ◽  
Radio Programme

Desert Island Discs was, and probably still is, the one radio programme that everyone wants to appear on. So when I was asked to produce it in 1976, I saw it as a golden opportunity to meet all my heroes, from Lauren Bacall, Luciano Pavarotti, and Sir Adrian Boult to Count Basie and Felicity Kendal....

scholarly journals The self-defining period in autobiographical memory: Evidence from a long-running radio show

2020 ◽  
Vol 73 (11) ◽  
pp. 1969-1976 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine Loveday ◽  
Amy Woy ◽  
Martin A Conway
Keyword(s):  
Autobiographical Memory ◽  
Forced Choice ◽  
The Self ◽  
Western Music ◽  
Naturalistic Setting ◽  
Desert Island ◽  
Radio Programme

This study is the first to demonstrate that a self-defining period (SP) for personally relevant music emerges spontaneously in a public naturalistic setting. While previous research has demonstrated that people tend to have better memory and preference for songs from their teenage years, the theoretical relevance of these studies has been limited by their reliance on forced-choice methodology and a confinement to contemporary popular Western music. Here, we examine the record choices of famous guests ( n = 80; mean age = 61.6 years) interviewed for Desert Island Discs, a long-running popular radio programme on BBC Radio 4. Half of all choices were shown to have been most important between the ages of 10 and 30 years, and the most popular reason for their relevance was the song’s link to memories of a person, period, or place. We suggest that music is a defining feature of the SP, intrinsically connected to the developing self.

scholarly journals Broadcasting personalities: The relationship between occupation and music preferences in the BBC Radio programme Desert Island Discs

2016 ◽  
Vol 45 (5) ◽  
pp. 645-664 ◽  
Author(s):  
Don Knox ◽  
Raymond MacDonald
Keyword(s):  
Personality Types ◽  
Music Preference ◽  
Music Preferences ◽  
Vocational Personality ◽  
Main Effect ◽  
Music Model ◽  
Desert Island ◽  
Five Dimension ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Radio Programme

This research examines the music choices of interviewees on the BBC Radio programme Desert Island Discs over a 72-year period. In the programme, individuals with a public profile related to high achievement in their chosen occupation identify several pieces of their favourite music. Publicly stated music preferences offer insights into how individuals construct and wish to communicate crucial aspects their identities. We propose that, in this context, occupation is related to music preferences. We investigate this relationship within the framework of Holland’s RIASEC model of vocational personality types, previously ignored by research into music preferences. We consider music preferences in terms of the five-dimension MUSIC model of music preferences, and preference for acoustical attributes of chosen music. Results demonstrate several significant associations between RIASEC occupation types and MUSIC preference dimensions, and also a main effect for RIASEC type on acoustical music attributes such as tempo, energy and loudness.

Defining the Discographic Self

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Personal Narratives ◽  
British Society ◽  
Documentary Evidence ◽  
Presentation Of Self ◽  
The Public ◽  
Online Archive ◽  
Desert Island ◽  
Iconic Status ◽  
First Time ◽  
Radio Programme

The radio programme Desert Island Discs has run almost continuously since 1942, and represents a unique record of the changing place of music in British society. In 2011, recognising its iconic status, the BBC created an online archive that includes podcasts of all programmes from 1976 on, and many from earlier years. Based on this and extensive documentary evidence, Defining the Discographic Self: ‘Desert Island Discs’ in Context for the first time brings together musicologists, sociologists, and media scholars to reflect on the programme’s significance, its position within the BBC and Britain’s continually evolving media, and its relationship to other comparable programmes. Of particular interest are the meanings attributed to music in the programme by both castaways and interviewers, the ways in which music is invoked in the public presentation of self, the incorporation of music within personal narratives, and changes in musical tastes during the seven decades spanned by the programme. Scholarly chapters are complemented by former castaways’ accounts of their appearances, which give fascinating insiders’ views into how the programme is made and how its guests prepare for their involvement.

scholarly journals Desert island data: an investigation into researcher positionality

2017 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 273-289 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jon Dean ◽  
Penny Furness ◽  
Diarmuid Verrier ◽  
Henry Lennon ◽  
Cinnamon Bennett ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Research ◽  
Research Team ◽  
Social Research ◽  
Group Analysis ◽  
Data Sets ◽  
Desert Island ◽  
Analyse Data ◽  
Compare And Contrast ◽  
Final Group ◽  
Radio Programme

The nature of qualitative research means that the personal values of an individual researcher can and do (unwittingly) shape the way in which they analyse data sets, and the resultant conclusions drawn. However this phenomenon is under-studied in social research and this article seeks to help rectify this. This article presents findings from a small research project focused on discourses of class, masculinity and work among British male comedians from working-class backgrounds, interviewed on the popular BBC Radio 4 radio programme Desert Island Discs. Six different researchers, from varying disciplinary, methodological and theoretical groundings, as well as from varying personal backgrounds, analysed three interview recordings and transcripts separately. All the researchers wrote up their individual analyses of these interviews and wrote reflexive pieces examining why they thought they approached the data as they did. The researchers then came together as a group to compare and contrast findings and approaches. The results from this study, including the discrepancies and distinctions and final group analysis, are reported alongside a thorough discussion of the project’s methodology. We find that the project evidenced how a diverse research team can bring out deeper and richer analyses, and was a refreshing way to try and answer questions of individual and collective positionality

scholarly journals Constituents of a hit parade: Questioning democracy and listener participation in P4 i P1’s Det elektriske barometer

2014 ◽  
Vol 30 (57) ◽  
pp. 21
Author(s):  
Mette Simonsen Abildgaard ◽  
Erik Granly Jensen
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
Public Service ◽  
Important Implication ◽  
Macro Level ◽  
Digital Archives ◽  
Self Presentation ◽  
Listener Participation ◽  
Historical Contextualisation ◽  
Radio Programme

<p class="p1">Due to their historically inaccessible nature, public service broadcasters’ media archives have lent themselves primarily to internal refl ection while historical contextualisation of the cultural heritage in these archives has been broadcasters’ prerogative. In this study, digitised material from the Danish youth radio programme P4 i P1’s Det elektriske barometer forms the basis for an experiment into how access to digital archives can inform humanities scholarship. We argue that one important implication of the new digital archives is that they enable approaches independent of broadcasters’ own narratives since they off er the possibility for autonomous study of large quantities of material. The character of listener participation in Det elektriske barometer, which had the slogan ‘the listener-determined hit parade’, is approached from a micro-, meso-, and macro-level employing Carpentier’s concept of participation (2011b), to explore how diff erent approaches to digital archives can provide new answers to media’s self-presentation.</p>

What does it mean to be cultured? Desert Island Discs as an ideological archive

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Frith
Keyword(s):  
Folk Music ◽  
Detailed Examination ◽  
Paradoxical Effect ◽  
Musical Genre ◽  
Musical Taste ◽  
Cultural Ideology ◽  
Desert Island ◽  
Radio Programme ◽  
The Way

This chapter is concerned with the cultural ideology of Desert Island Discs. It argues that the way DID is organised, as an interview programme on BBC Radio 4, has a paradoxical effect. If, apparently, Desert Island Discs involves the weekly reiteration of the argument that music is at the centre of people’s lives, its ideological assumption, as a radio programme, is that music does not really matter much. This argument is illustrated by a detailed examination of the programme’s choices of records and guests, organised in terms of musical genre. Some interesting aspects of musical taste emerge, such as the absence of folk music and changing status of jazz, but, in the end, what the data show most clearly is that a programme format depending on a rather limited account of what it means to listen to music has, nevertheless, colonised the musical imagination of the British public.

Women in extraordinary times: the impact of external jolts on professional women’s careers

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurie Cohen ◽  
Joanne Duberley
Keyword(s):  
Women Professionals ◽  
Women's Careers ◽  
Structure And Agency ◽  
Women’S Careers ◽  
Desert Island ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Radio Programme

Abstract This article examines the impact of external jolts on professional women’s careers. Although scholars have begun to address the role of context in career, little research has addressed the effects of unexpected and uncontrollable events. This is regrettable, particularly in the light of the current pandemic that appears to be impacting on us in hitherto unimaginable ways. We draw on the accounts of women professionals who appeared on the iconic BBC radio programme, Desert Island Discs. Our study culminates in two contributions: the first relates to the interplay of structure and agency in women’s accounts of jolts and their response. The second argues that jolts trigger changes in the career imagination, and potentially in professional landscapes themselves.

Introduction: Desert Island Discs in context

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julie Brown ◽  
Nicholas Cook ◽  
Stephen Cottrell
Keyword(s):  
National Identities ◽  
Media Culture ◽  
Potential Value ◽  
The World ◽  
Online Archive ◽  
Desert Island ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Radio Programme ◽  
Over Time ◽  
Selection Of

This chapter provides an overview of the long-standing and highly popular British radio programme Desert Island Discs (DID). It sets out the historical contexts in which the programme was established and developed, and interrogates both its changing format and the meanings and values that have been associated with DID over time. Developments in the production process are also assessed, including the impact of various presenters and the selection of castaways, as well as the programme’s place in broader media culture and its relationship to particular national identities. Finally, it considers the potential value of DID to the world of scholarship, particularly following the establishment in 2011 of the programme’s online archive, and the contribution of chapter authors to the realisation of that potential.

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