David Olusoga, historian and broadcaster

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 10 January 2021

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

David Olusoga is a historian, writer and broadcaster who has presented a range of programmes including the BBC’s A House Through Time and Civilisations. He is currently professor of public history at Manchester University. Born in Lagos, the second child to a Nigerian father and a British mother, David was brought up by his mother in Gateshead after his parents’ marriage broke down. As a child he and his siblings experienced sustained racism and he remembers school as a place of violence and cruelty. He credits his mother’s tenacity and her determination to educate her children for his later success in getting to university and establishing a career in television. His love of history developed from a young age, thanks to one of his teachers who taught him why an understanding of history matters. Watching television documentaries also opened up a world of possibility and David fondly recalls programmes from the 1980s presented by the historian Michael Wood, who made history seem cool in the eyes of the young schoolboy glued to the TV in his Gateshead council house. Last year David delivered the MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh Television Festival in which he talked candidly about his loneliness at being the only black person on a production team and the difficulties he had trying to explain the racial implications of how, for example, people in Africa were often portrayed on screen. DISC ONE: Zombie by Fela Kuti DISC TWO: Roll on Buddy by Aunt Molly Jackson DISC THREE: Black Mountain Blues by Bessie Smith DISC FOUR: Just The Other Day by Dr Alimantado DISC FIVE: Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground by Blind Willie Johnson DISC SIX: Last Kind Words by Geeshie Wiley DISC SEVEN: You Can't Blame The Youth (Live At The Record Plant '73) by Bob Marley & The Wailers DISC EIGHT: Precious Lord, Take My Hand / You’ve Got a Friend by Aretha Franklin BOOK CHOICE: The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell: An Age Like This, 1920-40 LUXURY ITEM: Acoustic guitar CASTAWAY'S FAVOURITE: Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground by Blind Willie Johnson Presenter Lauren Laverne Producer Paula McGinley

Transcript

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0:00.0	BBC Sounds Music Radio Podcasts
0:04.6	Hello, I'm Lauren LeVern and this is the Desert Island Disks podcast.
0:08.3	Every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, book and luxury they'd want to take with them
0:13.6	if they were cast away to a desert island.
0:16.1	And for right reasons, the music is shorter than the original broadcast.
0:20.8	I hope you enjoy listening.
0:40.8	My cast away this week is the historian and broadcaster David Ola Shogger.
0:45.2	He's a familiar presence on the small screen these days presenting hit series like a house
0:49.9	through time, civilizations and black and British have forgotten history.
0:54.4	Although his work in broadcasting began behind the camera, he was in his mid-twenties when,
0:59.7	in his words, he ran away from academia to join the television circus.
1:04.0	Perhaps it was inevitable.
1:05.6	It was television that ignited his passion for history in the first place.
1:09.4	He was a teenager in his bedroom in a Gateshead Council house when, one night in 1986,
1:14.8	his mother persuaded him to watch a BBC 2 documentary, artists and models.
1:19.8	It was an epiphany that promised what he's called,
1:22.7	a world beyond my circumstances.
1:25.2	Just two years earlier, he and his family had been forced out of their home by a sustained
1:29.8	campaign of violent attacks by members of the National Front.
1:33.8	Unlocking his own history as a self-described Jordy Nigerian was an important first step.
1:39.8	Now, as Professor of Public History at Manchester University,
1:43.3	the discipline is still about making the past personal.
	...

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