Brian Keenan
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.3 • 14.3K Ratings
🗓️ 23 December 1990
⏱️ 37 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Last August the world rejoiced at the liberation of a man who, to all intents and purposes, had vanished from its face more than four years previously. A pale and gaunt Brian Keenan emerged from a captivity of appalling deprivation and isolation after being kidnapped in Beirut by Islamic extremists.
This week on Desert Island Discs, he will be talking to Sue Lawley about those lost years, when, often blindfolded, chained and alone, he relived his life, conjuring up forgotten sights and sounds through imagined magical music, or by singing half-remembered lines from songs with John McCarthy when they were allowed to share their captivity.
[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]
Favourite track: Dweller On The Threshold by Van Morrison Book: The Life Times and Music of An Irish Harper by Donal O'Sullivan Luxury: Pencil
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. |
| 0:05.0 | For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music. |
| 0:08.0 | The program was originally broadcast in 1990, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is a man with a profound story to tell. |
| 0:32.8 | Born in Northern Ireland 40 years ago, |
| 0:35.4 | he grew up to hate the sectarian divides in his country. |
| 0:39.2 | After a career as a community worker and an academic, he went to teach at a university in Beirut. |
| 0:45.0 | He arrived in the city in January 1986. |
| 0:49.0 | Four months later, he was |
| 0:53.4 | kidnapped by Islamic extremists. In August this year, more than four years after he disappeared, he was released and appeared before |
| 0:58.9 | an astonished world, pale, gaunt, but still full of humour and optimism. |
| 1:04.0 | Held in appalling conditions, sometimes blindfolded and chained, sometimes beaten, |
| 1:10.0 | his moment of freedom was one of the most joyous of 1990. |
| 1:14.4 | And this is his first Christmas at Liberty for five years. |
| 1:18.4 | He is Brian Keenan. |
| 1:20.6 | Brian, I think most people will recall that you said on your release that you were going to visit all the countries in the world, |
| 1:26.0 | drink all the drink and make love to all the women. |
| 1:29.0 | So I have to ask you, how are you doing so far? |
| 1:31.0 | It's been the most unfortunate thing I ever said in my life because |
| 1:36.1 | the consequence of me in that statement has been that any time I would like to ask a woman |
| 1:41.7 | out for dinner or to go to the theatre or something, |
| 1:46.1 | they become very apprehensive about seeing with a man who's going to make love to all the women in the world. So it's mere my social life, extremely complicated and |
| 1:57.8 | extremely difficult to pursue. But there's some other difficulty, isn't there, |
... |
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