Hello, I'm Christy Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1982, and the presenter was Roy Plumley.

And in Plymouth, I'm happy to say that our cast away is the West Country writer,

journalist and broadcaster, Angela Ripon.

Angela, with what degree of dread do you envisage isolation on this island?

Quite honestly, I don't view it with any kind of dread at all.

I think perhaps by nature I'm a loner, and certainly there'll be people and

places and memories that I would want to take with me in my mind,

but actually being on the Desert Island itself doesn't bother me at all, no.

How important is music to you?

Well, it's very important, I think, probably because it's always been there

since I was a very little girl when my mother took me to ballet classes when I was three years old.

And it may have only been a piano plonking away in the corner, but from,

I suppose, a very, very early age, I associated music with movement, with dance.

And as I got older, it certainly became something that, for me,

at least, always stimulated the senses and the emotions, and I love it.

And my life is surrounded by it.

It'd be very difficult choosing eight records, I might tell you.

I know.

Do you play any music yourself?

No, I don't.

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