Engelbert Humperdinck
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.3 • 14.3K Ratings
🗓️ 19 December 2004
⏱️ 35 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Sue Lawley's castaway is the singer Engelbert Humperdinck. Engelbert Humperdinck is one of Britain's most successful entertainers. He is known as the King of Romance and has been at the top of the showbusiness ladder for nearly 40 years - selling more than 130 million records including sixty-four gold and 23 platinum albums. He was born Arnold George (Gerry) Dorsey in 1936 in India and was one of 10 children. At the age of 10, his family returned to the UK and Leicester. At 17 he began performing in clubs and pubs. In 1965 his manager changed his name to Engelbert Humperdinck but it was still two years before his chance arrived. His big break came in April 1967 when Dickie Valentine was ill and Engelbert took his slot on the show Sunday Night at the London Palladium. His single Release Me flew off the shelves staying in the charts for 56 weeks. He went off to conquer America and there he shared the bill with Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra while he counted Elvis Presley as a close friend. He starts a new UK tour in February next year and his autobiography Engelbert - What's in a Name? was published this year.
[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]
Favourite track: Return to Me by Dean Martin Book: What's in a Name? by Engelbert Humperdinck Luxury: A saxophone
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello I'm Krestey Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. |
| 0:05.0 | For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music. |
| 0:08.0 | The program was originally broadcast in 2004 and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My cast way this Christmas is a singer. |
| 0:34.0 | Demobbed from National Service in the late 50s, he was determined to become an entertainer, |
| 0:39.0 | but the going was tough and sometimes he slept in railway stations and telephone boxes surviving on |
| 0:44.9 | bread and butter and tea. |
| 0:47.1 | Then in the mid-60s his manager came up with the strange but brilliant idea of changing |
| 0:52.0 | his name to that of a 19th century German composer. |
| 0:55.9 | Its unfamiliarity combined with the popular appeal of songs like Release Me, The Last |
| 1:00.8 | Wals and there goes my everything made him a huge star not only here but in America too where his success has been the secret of his longevity |
| 1:09.6 | Those days of hardship are a distant memory now. At 68, he's said to have the largest fan club in the world |
| 1:16.3 | and still performs 140 concerts a year. |
| 1:19.6 | You go through cycles of being at the top, |
| 1:22.1 | he says, if you wait long enough and work hard |
| 1:24.8 | enough it will always come back he is Engelbert Humpertink it was as it turned |
| 1:31.7 | out Engel just to laugh at that name I mean it's a great name. It was such an inspiration, but it's still very difficult to understand why it did the |
| 1:38.0 | trick for you. Well I think it did the trick because it was so unusual, number one, and number two, it was |
| 1:46.8 | so large that people thought it was a group. |
| 1:51.0 | But Gordon Mills, who was my manager at the time, was quite brilliant in his choice of names. |
| 1:56.0 | He picked out, Tom Jones and Gilbert of Sullivan, and of course he did pick out Anglbert |
| 2:01.0 | Humberton. |
| 2:02.0 | He picked a difficult one for you. |
... |
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