Nigella Lawson
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.3 • 14.3K Ratings
🗓️ 5 October 2003
⏱️ 34 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week Sue Lawley's castaway is the broadcaster, cook, mother and domestic goddess Nigella Lawson. She came from a privileged background - her father, the former Conservative chancellor Nigel Lawson, her mother the society beauty and heir to the Lyons Corner House empire Vanessa Salmon. After graduating from Oxford, she wrote a restaurant column for the Spectator. She became deputy literary editor of the Sunday Times in 1986 and it was on that paper that she met John Diamond - the couple married three years later. She credits him with uncovering her potential - suggesting she wear more flattering clothes and make-up, encouraging her food writing and investing faith and pride in her.
He came up with the title of her first book How to Eat. It was a huge success and was followed by a second, award-winning book How to be a Domestic Goddess, which held out hope to would-be goddesses that even the most meagre skills could produce stunning results. But her life has been tainted by cancer. Her mother died of liver cancer in her 40s and her sister Thomasina was in her 30s when she died of breast cancer. When her husband had hospital tests for a cyst on his neck it was Nigella who chased up the doctors to find out the results and interrupted EastEnders to tell him that he too had been diagnosed with the disease. John Diamond died in 2001, leaving Nigella to bring up their two children, Cosima and Bruno. She has written a further two books and her series Nigella Bites has been bought up by American television. She says "I suppose I do think that awful things can happen at any moment, so while they are not happening you may as well be pleased."
[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]
Favourite track: Yeke, Yeke by Mary Kante Book: Divine Comedy (in Italian) by Dante Alighieri Luxury: Liquid Temazepam "...to give me the possibility of a very pleasant exit"
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 2003, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My costaway this week is a food writer. An erratic schooling followed by a spell at |
| 0:35.0 | Oxford took her into journalism and a restaurant column in the spectator. From |
| 0:38.9 | there she blossomed into a much in demand culinary expert writing for national newspapers and later on |
| 0:45.4 | publishing her book How to Eat. Eventually she burst onto our television screens as a |
| 0:50.3 | domestic goddess. The title of course is ironic. Her voluptuous careless manner |
| 0:55.3 | has enraptured audiences here and in the States. The casual mistress of comfort |
| 1:00.4 | eating has however a sad aside. Her husband and father of her two children |
| 1:04.8 | died of throat cancer after long and well documented suffering. She'd seen her |
| 1:09.6 | mother and sister die of cancer too. This she believes partly explains why food became the |
| 1:15.1 | center of her professional life. It was during their illnesses that she turned to |
| 1:19.4 | cooking for consolation. I let greed be my guide, she says. My qualification is as an eater. She is |
| 1:27.0 | Nijela Lawson and in an era Nijela in which diets and exercise dominate our newspapers and magazines I have to say you're a |
| 1:34.3 | wonderful anti-taker is is there any food you don't like? Well you know in an emergency |
| 1:40.0 | I'd eat tripe but I'd rather not but I'm afraid I can't genuinely think of a food I |
| 1:45.3 | don't like eating. People say your idea of a diet is having less cheese on your |
| 1:48.9 | jacket potato. Well you know the thing is I'm not really such a creature of excess. I think appetite to be |
| 1:57.0 | fully satisfied needs bouts of restraint, but what I don't like is that sort of self-persecution and I'm not really very good at denial. |
| 2:06.0 | Every now and then there's something in the front of the newspapers that says there's a fabulous new drug which allows people to feel full up. |
| 2:16.0 | And I think this is a very, very mistaken way of looking at it because I've always thought that those |
| 2:19.4 | of us who eat a lot, it's not because we have huge appetizers, because we have this great genius, |
... |
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