Ken Follett
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.4 • 13.7K Ratings
🗓️ 25 November 2001
⏱️ 36 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week the castaway on Desert Island Discs is the writer Ken Follett. Novels such as Eye of the Needle, The Pillars of the Earth and The Third Twin have put him in the best seller lists all over the world - although when he started writing his first novel his agent suggested he use a pseudonym in case he "wanted to write something better later!". In conversation with Sue Lawley, he talks about his life and work and chooses eight records to take to the mythical island.
[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]
Favourite track: Beginning of Violin Concerto No 3 in G Major by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Book: Philosophical Investigations by Ludwig Wittgenstein Luxury: Entire cellar of a great collector of French wine
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Kirstie 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 2001, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a novelist, his books are huge bestsellers and he commands huge advances for writing them. |
| 0:36.5 | A new one appears every two years, carefully structured, rigorously plotted the products of an author possessed by a relentless application to his craft. |
| 0:46.2 | Brought up in Wales his parents were Plymouth Brethren who denied their children access to |
| 0:50.6 | television cinema and popular music. He's long broken free from such a cloistered life, |
| 0:55.9 | not least, as one of the high profile supporters of New Labour, a role which eventually brought |
| 1:00.8 | him into conflict with the party hierarchy and |
| 1:03.1 | led him to attack Tony Blair and his entourage. Married to a high-profile labor |
| 1:07.8 | MP he's now back doing what he does best writing books that people want to read. I want to entertain you, he says. |
| 1:15.1 | I definitely want you to be on the edge of your seat. He is Ken Follett. The truth is, Ken, |
| 1:21.1 | that life was never the same once you discovered James Bond, wasn't it? |
| 1:25.0 | That's right. When I was 12 years old, I read my first James Bond story. |
| 1:30.0 | It was a Casino Royale, and I was just blown away. I mean I had been reading |
| 1:36.2 | Children's Adventure stories and I had read all the ones in the junior library |
| 1:40.5 | and they admitted me earlier than normal to the adult library. |
| 1:45.0 | Did your parents allow this? |
| 1:46.4 | I'm not sure they knew. |
| 1:49.0 | And I discovered Ian Fleming and these wonderfully exciting stories. This man who knew everything. |
| 1:57.0 | He knew about all the things I was curious about as a 12 year old boy. He knew about cars, guns, cocktails, and most of all he knew about |
| 2:07.0 | women, which was... |
| 2:08.0 | He knew about kissing. He knew about kissing. The greatest mystery of all. And when about 10 years later I tried to write a novel |
... |
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