Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.

For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk.

Radio 4. My My castaway this week is the writer and broadcaster Danny Baker. He's a Sony gold

winner who has careered through numerous radio and TV shows, walking out or being sacked when the luster

dulls, but always picking up a new gig, finding another outlet for his wit and his spleen.

As a script writer, he's put words in the mouths of Jeremy Clarkson, Ricky Jervais, Jonathan

Ross, Chris Evans, and even the legendary George Burns, and is typically forthright in summing up his talent. He says it comes from being really good at what I do.

I make someone sound as good as they've ever sounded.

Emotionally and domestically he hasn't strayed far from his South London roots and he says his career isn't about ambition or stardom

It's simply a Swiss army knife if one thing doesn't work he put it away and get something else out.

He appears to have confidence in abundance. He says,

radio is a pretty soft gig.

You play a few records, you yack up a storm, and that's it.

It's like Quentin Crisp used to say you're making a living

from your personality so you feel do you Danny Baker that you can entirely rely on your

personality yes and it sounds confrontational when you put it like that at the top, but I think it comes from a distant shame at doing this when you come from a family of manual workers.

And when I say I make people sound as good as they ever did, that may not be any kind of boast.

But it's purely and simply a working of the personality.

And I don't necessarily see it as a noble craft. Right.

Do you think you're talented?

Yeah.

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