Jeffrey Bernard
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.3 • 14.3K Ratings
🗓️ 10 March 1991
⏱️ 37 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The castaway in Desert Island Discs this week is the Spectator columnist Jeffrey Bernard. His Low Life column has gained him something of a cult following over the 15 years or so it's been appearing; slightly irregularly. It concentrates on the kind of life in Soho which seems often to revolve solely around drinking, women and gambling - the kind of life Jeffrey Bernard enjoys, by his own admission. And of course, last year Keith Waterhouse turned some of these columns into the highly-successful West End hit Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell - a production starring Peter O'Toole which is about to return to the Shaftesbury Theatre next month.
[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]
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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 1991, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is a journalist. Taking his own life as a model, he |
| 0:36.3 | entertains his readers with witty and honest accounts of his experiences. He |
| 0:41.2 | would be the first to admit that these are rarely heroic. |
| 0:44.0 | For him, booze, horses and women have made up the greater part of his life. |
| 0:49.0 | A life which really began when at the age of 14 he was introduced to the joys of Soho. |
| 0:55.6 | Having been unhappy at school he found himself very happy there and it's been his base ever |
| 1:00.4 | since. |
| 1:01.4 | All was a freelance he's written for the New Statesman, the Sunday |
| 1:04.4 | Times and Sporting Life, but it's in the weekly magazine The Spectator that he's |
| 1:08.9 | found fame with his funny and sympathetic column, life. A great survivor though often |
| 1:15.0 | unwell he is Jeffrey Bernard. Jeff Booze, horses and women is that the order of |
| 1:22.4 | their importance in your life or does it vary? |
| 1:25.5 | It varies from time to time. It started off women horses booze, then coming into the final furlong, booze moved up at an alarming rate, |
| 1:37.0 | women dropped back. |
| 1:39.0 | Then I suppose that racing and booze cross the line together as it were a dead heat. |
| 1:47.0 | But of course any one of them can be the downfall of a man but so far they haven't quite been your downfall? |
| 1:53.0 | No, but anyone who can claim that women are their downfall is just an idiot I think. |
| 2:00.0 | Well, whatever as I said at the beginning I mean I mean you've survived them all so far, you are a survivor. |
| 2:06.0 | Is that how you see yourself if you had to define yourself? |
| 2:09.0 | Yes, very much so, yeah. |
... |
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