Marti Caine
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.3 • 14.3K Ratings
🗓️ 24 March 1991
⏱️ 36 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week's castaway in Desert Island Discs is the entertainer Marti Caine. Although her public life is one as comedienne, television presenter, star of a sit-com series, singer and glamorous pantomime performer, Marti Caine's private life is one that is very different. Her father died when she was seven, she was taken into care before she was 10, her first marriage broke up, and then, about four years ago, she was diagnosed as suffering from cancer of the lymph glands. She talks about the way in which she's coped with all these things and the way her sense of humour helped her through.
[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 an entertainer. She started her career playing the |
| 0:34.6 | working men's clubs in and around her native Sheffield. She ended up hosting the |
| 0:38.9 | television talent show which first discovered her, as well as starring in Las Vegas, the Royal |
| 0:44.0 | Variety Show, her own television show, and a situation comedy. She could sing, she |
| 0:48.8 | could dance, she could make him laugh, and she was sexy too. But then about three years ago she discovered she had |
| 0:55.1 | cancer of the lymph glands. Her life since then has been a battle against her |
| 1:00.0 | illness, a battle she's winning. She believes through positive thinking and the support of |
| 1:04.7 | family and friends. Still working, still at the top, and still glamorous, she is Marty Kane. |
| 1:11.9 | But you can't, Marty, have been born in post-war Sheffield and been given a handle like that. |
| 1:16.6 | Marty, where did the name come from? |
| 1:18.2 | Sounds terribly glamorous anyway. Thank you for that wonderful introduction. It came from a gardening book actually. I was Sunny Smith for a week and then I was Zoe Bond for a week. I didn't want to be Susie or Cindy or Jane. So we got a gardening book and page 43, right, second line down, |
| 1:38.4 | right, fourth word along, manure, no no right. Page 97 and so on until we came across to Martyr cane, by which |
| 1:47.4 | time, my husband of the time was tiring of the game and said, well you built along similar lines, call yourself Martyr Kane. |
| 1:55.7 | So I rang the club where it was supposedly appearing that night and said hello, Zoe Bond won't |
| 1:59.7 | be able to come tonight. Martyr Kane is coming instead. So he said, all right. And when I got there, |
| 2:05.8 | he'd misheard and written Marty Kane. And I have rather a deep voice anyway. So he must |
| 2:10.1 | have thought I was a fellow on my phone. So you've been |
| 2:12.6 | stuck with it ever since? I've been Marty Kane. How old were you then when you |
| 2:15.9 | invented Marty Kane? I reckon I'd be in my 20s, very early 20s. But you set |
| 2:22.3 | out to sing not to tell gags, didn't you? Yes, yes, and I was so |
... |
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