Hello, I'm Krestey 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 1994, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is a journalist and broadcaster. He was born 65 years ago in an East End foster home

and brought up, he says, without the handicaps of family and religion. At the age of

eight he discovered that one of the big sisters in the home was in fact his mother.

His taste for reading and writing led him towards journalism.

Beginning as a messenger at Reuters, he eventually became the editor of three Fleet Street newspapers, The Daily Express, The Daily Star, and

the News of the World.

Then nearly a decade ago he joined BBC Radio where he's become a popular personality,

first with a breakfast show and now with a late night program.

My life, he says, has been an attempt to prove that I'm entitled to a place in the human race.

He is Derek Jameson.

It's a real rags to richest saga Derek. Why are you going to tell me there are no riches?

Well that's absolutely true. I mean it's been a lifelong struggle and it goes on.

Every single day people ask me how I'm doing as I walk along the street,

you know, I'm now a sort of national institution

and they will say how you're doing, Dell and I always say

struggling on in a cruel world.

Struggling on and they all laugh, they this is cruel, driving a taxi or being up a ladder.

But you've got a nice house on the south coast, you've got a flat in in London I mean you've done terribly well

very very well at least a hundred times better than anyone could ever have

imagined but if you are born and grow up as poor as I was then you carry those scars with you all your life.

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