Hello I'm Kirsty 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 1988

and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is a woman who by any standards has become a phenomenon of the age in which we live.

Her present success as a First Lady of the theatre belies her comparatively humble origins.

Yet the fact remains that it was from the Melbourne suburb of

Moone-upon South Australia that she has risen to enjoy a position of unrivaled

influence throughout the civilized world.

Her relentless pursuit of perfection

has made her the role model of thousands

of decent middle-class women everywhere.

She is, of course, house housewife triumphant and global superstar Dame Edna Everett.

Dame Edna, to be cast away alone with only your thoughts and a little music and is that your idea of heaven or hell?

Well Sue, first of all thank you for that beautiful little speech.

It was from the heart and it touched me very very deeply.

I would be at first I think a little bit lonely

on a desert island and yet in a spooky spiritual way and I think I can be pretty

frank and up front with you on this in-depth program. Sometimes I feel a little bit lonely inside.

I'm up there, the adulation of the crowd smothering me, the affection, the constant stroking that I get from my enormous global public

still doesn't satisfy that little, rather isolated little girl inside me.

So being on a desert island would evoke that a bit.

It would remind me of the inner loneliness of the mega-star.

...