Loyd Grossman

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 30 November 1997

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the television presenter Loyd Grossman. His career has allowed him to peer through the keyholes of the rich and famous and comment on their homes. He once described Tony Blackburn's house as like that of a maiden aunt in Eastbourne. It's a formula which has lasted 14 years. Although he was well into his 20s before he learnt to cook, some 20 million viewers watch him as he deliberates, cogitates and digests the culinary efforts of his would-be masterchefs. As a boy his dream was to be a rock star or a historian. In the end, he gave up both, forsaking his study of the gin-drinking experiences of 18th-century Londoners and forgoing his evenings spent dodging beer cans thrown on stage. He turned instead to journalism and Harpers & Queen. It was by accident that he was picked out to present for the new fledgling television station, TVAM, but by the time they realised their mistake his TV career was launched.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: Girls Just Wanna Have Fun by Cyndi Lauper Book: Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson Luxury: Fishing rod

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 1997, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is a man of taste. Taste and style are his livelihood as he
0:36.4	entertained some 20 million television viewers a week by eating his way through
0:40.4	their culinary efforts or snooping around their houses.
0:44.1	A New Englander with a first class degree in history and an ambition to be either an academic
0:48.6	or a rock star.
0:49.9	He came to London when he was 25 and studied at the LSE. In fact he became a journalist and a restaurant critic and got into television by mistake when breakfast television began in the early 80s.
1:01.0	First on through the keyhole and more recently on Master Chef he's
1:04.9	kept us entertained with his classless commentary on our way of life. From
1:09.4	pebbledash to Kiwi fruit he's a stalwart defender of the mass market.
1:13.8	I don't sneer at it, he says.
1:16.0	I'm like someone from another planet who's observing the weird domestic facets of life here.
1:21.8	He is Lloyd Grossman. However, you've been here, Lloyd, nearly as long as you were there.
1:27.4	Surely you have to stop being the outsider at some point. Oh yes, I mean I think I probably
1:32.1	describe myself as being like
1:33.5	someone from another planet just to stop a journalist from describing me is that I
1:39.1	in fact feel very much at home here. But do you think you have to be a foreigner to say the things that you do?
1:45.0	I mean if you know if someone else pointed out the ducks up the wall or the ubiquitous
1:50.5	kiwi fruit on the side of the pudding, you know, they would be accused of being
1:53.8	snobbish.
1:54.8	Somehow you can get it.
	...

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