Lauren the supply teacher kept her first pupil firmly in line
DESERT ISLAND DISCS
★★★★✩
CHILDREN know the drill. When the stand-in teacher turns up to take the lesson, their predatory instincts kick in. They sense weakness – and try to get away with murder.
Lauren Laverne, filling in for regular host Kirsty Young on Desert Island Discs yesterday, faced exactly that problem.
Guest Tom Daley, the two- time world champion diver and veteran interviewee, seemed mischievously intent on exploiting her inexperience and taking maximum advantage.
Asked to pick a luxury to ease life as a castaway, the keen cook declared: ‘I would like to take my whole kitchen, including all the cookware.’
It was a make- or-break moment for Laverne, a former model and pop singer turned DJ. Give in to him, and her authority would be compromised.
She handled it with aplomb: ‘I’m new to this, it’s my first day, I’ve really got to stick to the rules,’ she said decisively. ‘I think a whole kitchen is a stretch.’
In the end, Tom was allowed to take just the cooker, which won’t be much use without saucepans.
Young, who announced at the end of August that she was taking a break from the show after developing the debilitating illness fibromyalgia, has been the voice of the Desert Island since 2006 when she took over from Sue Lawley.
Her firm, but gentle, Scottish tones have become as much a sound of the show as the crying herring gulls in its opening theme music. Laverne, more usually found presenting a music show on Radio 6, faced a steep challenge.
Retaining an air of control is important on Desert Island Discs, because it is a chat show like no other.
Big name TV interviewers such as Graham Norton are keen to prove what great friends they are with the A-listers, while presenters on BBC One’s The One Show can be downright sycophantic as they coddle celebs.
Not so for the radio castaways. The extended one-to-one format allows deeper questioning and, however bland the choice of music, it is always psychologically revealing. Daley, 24, didn’t pick any very profound pieces, and some were plain trite.
His idea of a meaningful lyric was the Carpenters’ Top Of The World, to describe the feeling after his first gold medal.
But the reasons for his choices were often desperately moving, and Laverne coaxed him to talk about what the songs really signified. Elvis Presley’s Suspicious Minds was his karaoke favourite – because he used to perform it as a duet with his father Rob, a largerthan-life character who died from cancer in 2011, aged just 40.
Daley is articulate and selfaware, but he has been facing interviewers since he was a 14year-old prodigy at the Olympics in Beijing, a decade ago.
Inevitably he has a stock of answers prepared earlier for the difficult issues.
But by winning his trust, Laverne persuaded him to open up about his father’s death to a painfully intimate degree. He described seeing Rob in a bed in the sitting room of their home, watching his chest rise and fall after he slipped out of consciousness for the last time. Daley was holding his hand. ‘It was not till then that I finally acknowledged he wasn’t invincible,’ he said, going on to describe in a choked voice the mundane things he had always assumed they would do together – driving lessons, sharing a pint – and what Rob had missed … watching from the front row at the London 2012 Olympics where Daley took a bronze medal and never meeting his first grandchild, who is named after him.
Since Rob’s death, Daley has married a man 20 years his senior, the screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, and they had a son (via a surrogate) in June. Laverne touched on the age difference, and her guest responded by pointing out that he had achieved and endured so much by the time he was 18, few people his own age could understand him.
The novice host sensibly avoided the obvious, crass question of whether Black was a father surrogate.
Daley must have heard that one thousands of times and merely raising it would have wrecked the trust Laverne had won.
HER own rather forceful personality, was very much in the background, and she resisted any temptation to climb aboard the Virtue- Signalling Express when Daley talked about campaigning to change the laws on gay sex in 37 Commonwealth countries where homosexuality is banned.
But she pulled him up short when he became too schmaltzy. He had already gone ‘gooey’ about his wedding day, playing Ellie Goulding’s How Long Will I Love You which was the soundtrack to the couple’s first dance.
And he picked Angel by Shaggy, which he said was baby Robbie’s favourite lullaby.
When he described his ambitions for the 2020 Tokyo Games and announced: ‘You know what, there are bigger things than Olympic gold medals – my Olympic gold is Robbie’, Laverne lost patience. ‘All right then, grandad, let’s have some more music,’ she retorted.
Unruly pupils be warned – this supply teacher means business.