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 2008. My cast away this week this week is Janet Street Porter. She pioneered the highly stylized sassy broadcasting that revolutionised youth television

and went on to influence a generation of programme makers, winning awards and new audiences

along the way.

Born, she says, with frilly teeth, big glasses and beige hair,

she also came with a healthy measure of ambition, determination and creativity.

Yet although she's held down a fistful of highly influential media jobs and

commanded budgets of tens of millions of pounds, she has often been criticized,

derided for her abrasive manner, for throwing tantrums, and for an apparent lack of seriousness.

She has described herself as the most hard-boiled opinionated aggressive woman in Britain,

but adds, I have long learned how to tailor my behavior and speech for the

appropriate audience. I'm wondering what fashion we're going to get today.

Don't worry. I'm feeling quite mellow today. I mean the implication in that in the

idea that you tailor yourself is that you always know exactly what you're

doing that when you fly off the handle you're

absolutely intent upon flying off the handle. Yes I think when I'm on

television now, television at the moment thrives on confrontation and that's what people want to see of

course I'm not like I am on television at home or you know just going around on a

day-to-day basis what about people's opinion of You're one of the there are very few people who

elicit such strong opinions. First I would say everybody knows who you are and

secondly everybody has an opinion on you. Yeah it doesn't bother me now but I think that it did bother me in the 70s and it did bother me in the 80s

...