Marooned with Monty — what luxury!

On SUnDAY, Desert Island Discs celebrates its 75th anniversary. When I was a castaway, I wanted a subscription to Private Eye as my luxury item, but to my surprise Kirsty Young wouldn’t let me have it — unfair, in a way, since two years later she let Theresa May have a subscription to Vogue.

On the spur of the moment, I chose a conjuring set.

Since then, I’ve regretted my choice. Conjuring is dependent on an audience which doesn’t know how it works. Try as you may, it’s impossible to bamboozle yourself.

nowadays, my luxury would be the entire Desert Island Discs archive on BBC iPlayer. All human life is there, with something of interest in every single episode. From the archive, the dead come alive, and seem to be talking to you directly.

It’s particularly good for listening to in the bath, which is an appropriate location. Surrounded by water, you turn into your very own desert island.

The other night, I listened to V. S. naipaul’s Desert Island Discs. ’Would you try to escape?’ asked Roy Plomley.

‘no,’ replied naipaul, who had obviously given the matter considerable thought. ‘I’ll tell you why. Growing up on a tropical island (Trinidad), I have always been terrified of the sea. I’m frightened of drowning and choking.

‘And after a little time in solitude, existing in conditions like those of a mental illness, one will probably not be fit for human converse again.

‘So I’ll stay. not because I dislike the world — I love the world and everything in it — it’s just that I feel I’ll become very strange away from the world.’

I like castaways who take it this seriously. Asked how he would fare on the island, Enoch Powell gives almost as melancholy a reply. ‘It’s a cruel fate because man is a social animal, and to take him and put him, with whatever conveniences and commodities, in isolation, is an affront to his humanity.’

Desert Island Discs has provided some of the most poignant moments of broadcasting, and some of the funniest, too. For me, there is nothing funnier than listening to the nightmarish film director Otto Preminger rounding on the hapless Roy Plomley.

‘And you’ve been something of a gipsy,’ says Plomley, innocently. ‘You’ve had no real base.’

‘no,’ Preminger replies, indignantly. ‘...I’m not a gipsy. I’ve a house in new York. What do you mean, a gipsy?’ ‘I mean, you live under cover.’ ‘Is this what you do to your guests, insult them and say they’re gipsies? I mean, look, I’m not much balder than you.’ ‘no, only minimally.’ ‘I have as much hair as you, only I shave it, because I think it’s awful to have this little hair around and be bald otherwise.’ ‘Yes, I know.’ ‘If you take my advice, buy yourself an electric shaver and shave yourself.’ ‘I’ll start tomorrow.’ Plomley tries to move things on. ‘There are actors who’ve worked for you who say that you’re very tough on the set; in fact, that you’re something of an ogre . . .’

‘Who told you that? WHICH ACTOR TOLD YOU THAT? You are incredible... you read things and you believe every bad thing about me . . . TAKE IT BACK!’ ‘Right, I take it back.’ ‘Okay! You’re lucky that you did!’

Another favourite was the programme’s 1,000th castaway, Field Marshal Montgomery of Alamein — one of the few people to have chosen his own book as his favourite.

For some reason, it comes as a surprise that he can’t pronounce his ‘r’s. His second record is My Love Is Like A Wed Wed Wose. How very odd he is! Asked about his childhood, he says, in his clipped military tones: ‘My father was a saint, if any saints walk about on this earth. I worshipped him, but my mother was a disciplinarian... I was very rebellious. When my mother demanded discipline from me, and when I said no, I’d take a beating. I can tell you an interesting story.

‘I was caught one day in the garden smoking . . . my father heard about this and he took me to the little chapel we had at the back of our house and we knelt down and he prayed to the Almighty that I might be forgiven this dreadful sin and then there was a little silence, and I thought that the matter was settled, and the Almighty had accepted my sorrow . . . not at all.

‘When we opened the door and went out, there was my mother with a cane, she thought a more earthy correction was needed and I got beaten. I took it.

‘But I think the point is really that when people say to me what makes me TICK (he gives a sudden emphasis to the word ‘tick’), I think what made me TICK was that I absolutely refused to give in . . . That was the sort of thing which moulded my character. It was good for me.’

The interview was recorded in 1969, but it seems more like 1859. Roy Plomley even calls Montgomery ‘sir’. Strange to think that, 75 years from now, even this year’s trendiest castaways will seem just as quaint.