Desert Island Discs and British emotional life
This chapter explores how Desert Island Discs has responded over time to an increasing public appetite for openness and honesty. One of the programme’s presenters once said it was ‘properly impressed by power, wealth and ambition, but … knows that the world is made up of more than that’. This spoke to a longer-term revolution in modern life, as outlined by historians of the emotions: an increasing informality of manners, especially in broadcast talk. How did the BBC navigate these trends in a series that had long been a byword for decorum? And what did Radio 4 listeners think of its new willingness in the 1980s and 1990s to probe guests more deeply? Drawing on unpublished BBC records and Mass Observation archives, this chapter focuses on how desire for openness over private lives and feelings—and the anxieties this prompted—was negotiated behind the scenes at crucial moments in its history.