Christopher Frayling
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.3 • 14.3K Ratings
🗓️ 2 November 2003
⏱️ 37 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week Sue Lawley's castaway is Professor Sir Christopher Frayling the Rector of the Royal College of Art and a champion of popular culture. He was born into an affluent family living in London. His father, Major Arthur Frayling, was a successful furrier, and his mother was fascinated by the arts and cars - she won the RAC Rally in 1952. At six he was sent to boarding school, which he hated, and it was there that he developed his life long love of film acting and design. He studied history at Cambridge and did a doctorate on Jean Jacques Rosseau and the French Revolution. He fought his father's ambitions for him to enter advertising and chose an academic career path, becoming a lecturer at the Universities of Exeter and Bath in the 1970s. At that time he worked on the programme The World at War and he's since become an accomplished broadcaster known for his work on Radio 4. He won an award at the New York Film and Television Festival for a six-part Channel 4 series about advertising called The Art of Persuasion.
He's published 13 books to date with an eclectic range of titles from spaghetti westerns to The Face of Tutankhamun and Clint Eastwood - a critical biography. As well as being Rector of the Royal College of Art, Sir Christopher is also the longest serving Trustee of the Victoria and Albert Museum and is Chairman of the Design Council.
[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]
Favourite track: Il Triello by Ennio Morricone Book: Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes Luxury: V & A Museum
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Krestey 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 2003, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is an art historian. He's as much at home with the spaghetti Western as he is with the old masters. He sees art everywhere and has spent his life encouraging his students to have the same vision. |
| 0:42.0 | His academic career has been centered around the |
| 0:44.4 | Royal College of Art, of which he's now rector. From that base he's written books, |
| 0:48.6 | made television documentaries, served on innumerable committees, and generally gone about the business of trying to |
| 0:54.6 | make more people understand the beauty and importance of the simplest things around |
| 0:59.4 | them. He hates intellectual snobbery, but loves intellectual engagement. |
| 1:04.4 | You can do a PhD on Mickey Mouse, he says. |
| 1:07.2 | Nearly all the books I've written are about taking seriously that which many people |
| 1:12.1 | would consider beyond the pale. |
| 1:14.0 | He is the RCA's professor of cultural history, Sir Christopher Freling. |
| 1:18.0 | Give me a list then, Christopher, of these beyond the pale subjects that you've written about? |
| 1:23.0 | Well, we start off with vampires. |
| 1:25.0 | We move on to European West. |
| 1:27.0 | Well, they're now known as Euro-Westons, |
| 1:29.0 | but in my day it was spaghetti-Westons. |
| 1:31.0 | In fact, you coined that for it. |
| 1:33.0 | I did. |
| 1:34.0 | Actually, there's a bit of a paternity suit going on about to who was responsible. |
| 1:37.0 | Certainly the Italians think I did, so I have a very rough time every time I go to Italy. |
| 1:41.0 | They think it's racist. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.