Lynn Barber
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.3 • 14.3K Ratings
🗓️ 25 July 2010
⏱️ 36 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Kirsty Young's castaway is the interviewer Lynn Barber.
A master of the profile interview, her razor-sharp observations have earned her the nickname the Demon Barber and won her a stack of awards. Although critics say her articles are hatchet jobs, she disagrees: "I think that people are well served by quite blunt or quite rude questions because it forces them to fight back and come back strongly," she says.
Producer: Leanne Buckle
Record: Macushla sung by John McCormack Book: The Complete F Scott Fitzgerald Luxury: A cyanide pill.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4. |
| 0:06.0 | For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast. |
| 0:10.0 | For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk. |
| 0:17.0 | Radio 4. My customers. My castaway this week is the writer Lynn Barber. |
| 0:37.0 | Her nickname, The Demon Barber, goes some way to explaining her unflinching and often excoriating style of interview. |
| 0:44.0 | Over the past quarter of a century she has picked apart in prose, Hollywood stars, cabinet |
| 0:48.8 | ministers and contemporary artists. Quite an achievement in a celebrity world dominated by puff pieces and overzealous |
| 0:55.8 | publicists. Critics say her profiles are hatchet jobs. She famously asked Harriet Harmon if she was |
| 1:02.0 | thick and reduced Chris Evans to tears, |
| 1:04.8 | whilst the artist Jake and Dinos Chapman said they would kill her if they ever set eyes on her again. |
| 1:10.0 | But for her readers, if not her subjects, her writing is always revealing and brilliantly entertaining. |
| 1:16.0 | I feel no guilt about being the sort of journalist I am, she says. |
| 1:20.0 | I'm not ashamed of being nosy, and I'm rather suspicious of people who claim to have no curiosity |
| 1:25.5 | about their fellow humans. Your honesty in Prince Lynn Barber can be breathtaking. How do you behave when you're actually meeting your |
| 1:34.2 | interviewees face to face? I think I'm very nice, but I do ask quite blunt |
| 1:39.9 | questions and I don't see the point particularly in beating around the bush, you know, I mean, if I'm trying to find out if Harrod-Halman is thick, I mean, it seems quite simple to ask her if she's sick, you know, but I don't know. |
| 1:54.4 | I mean, I'm not tactful, that's for sure. |
| 1:57.1 | Do people fly in sight often? |
| 1:59.1 | No, I mean, I think there's quite a lot of people who do their flancing before I mean they |
| 2:03.9 | don't agree to see me as it were I've had people sort of hovering on the brink of |
| 2:08.8 | flancing actually or slightly bringing an interview to a fairly abrupt halt. I think that people are well |
| 2:15.2 | served actually by quite blunt or quite rude questions because it forces them to |
... |
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