Dame Joan Bakewell

Desert Island Discs: Archive 2005-2010

BBC

Society & Culture, Personal Journals

4.4 • 804 Ratings

🗓️ 9 August 2009

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Kirsty Young's castaway is the broadcaster Dame Joan Bakewell. Born in Stockport in 1933, it was in the 1960s that she first started to shape the cultural agenda, interviewing the likes of Kingsley Amis and Stockhausen for the radical BBC TV show Late Night Line-Up. It was also during the 1960s that she had an affair with Harold Pinter, a relationship which inspired his play Betrayal. Looking back on it now from the age of 76, she says, "We always said we had a damn good time".

Now appointed as the Voice of Older People by Gordon Brown, her passion for debate and social change is as strong as ever. She says she has always regarded the world to be improved and is not afraid of being called a wishy-washy liberal. "It's a good thing to do," she says, "you feel you can be part of change."

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: String Quintet in C Major by Franz Schubert Book: War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy Luxury: An abundance of paper and pencils.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, it's Nicola Cochlin. Young people have been making history for years, but we don't often hear about them. My brand new series on BBC Sounds sets out to put this right. In history's youngest heroes, I'll be revealing the fascinating stories of 12 young people who've played a major role in history and who've helped shape our world. Like Audrey Hepburn, Nelson Mandela, Louis Braille and Lady Jane Grey,
0:24.7	history's youngest heroes with me, Nicola Cochlin.
0:27.8	Listen on BBC Sounds.
0:30.4	Hello, I'm Krista Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive.
0:35.5	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:38.6	The program was originally broadcast in 2009.
1:01.5	My My castaway this week is the broadcaster Dame Joan Bakewell.
1:07.1	For more than 40 years, her hallmark has been intelligent, thought-provoking programmes.
1:12.8	Always fascinated with where the boundaries of taste and decency lie, she's not averse to giving them a bit of a shove herself. She faced the threat of legal action for broadcasting a
1:18.0	poem that was deemed blasphemous and smuggled her copy of Lady Chatterley's lover into Britain in her
1:23.7	underwear. As well as exploring social change for her work, she's lived through it too.
1:29.4	At the vanguard of women forging careers in television,
1:32.7	she combined work with motherhood, has twice been divorced,
1:36.4	and her relationship with Harold Pinter formed the subject of his play, betrayal.
1:41.4	When she started working in television,
1:43.6	it was a medium which she says,
1:45.6	stripped bare the illusion of all things being well. In doing so, it created our more open,
1:51.7	more truthful, but more conflicted society. A more open and truthful society than Joan Bakewell.
1:58.8	A better society than when you were a young woman growing up?
2:02.4	Much better. People hark back nostalgically to the 60s, but I go back to the 40s and 50s,
2:09.8	and I do remember society being very closed down, very conventional, a lot of hypocrisy, a good deal of secrecy, and I grew up quite fearful of the world and
2:21.7	wondering what it was really going to be like, because inside me I had churning all sorts of
	...

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