You're listening to the London Review of Books podcast. I'm Thomas Jones. My castaway this week is Miranda Carter, whose books include Anthony Blunt, his lives and the three emperors on George V, Kaiser Wilhelm

the second and Sir Nicholas II. She wrote recently in the LRB about Desert Island

Discs, the world's longest running interview show. Hello Miranda and thank you very much for

joining me. Thank you for giving me that introduction. So before we get to your first record,

as it was, maybe you could, not really, maybe you

could talk us through the origins of the show.

Yes.

As you say, it's the world's longest interview show, but it didn't actually start out as

an interview show.

It started out very much as a music show.

And it was the creation of a man called Roy Plumley, who also became its longest-running

presenter from its inception in about 1941, 1942 until 1985 when he died. And he was a freelance

radio producer and presenter and had been rather desperately bombarding the BBC radio music department with ideas for formats.

And in fact, some of the earlier ideas are really fantastic.

There was one called, I Know What I Hate, which is you choose six or eight records that you really, really, really dislike.

And another one was he'd had an idea about fat people called

this too-two corpulent flesh. And both of them were turned down because they were regarded as

slightly too negative. Although, of course, you think forward 40 years and room 101 and all those

fat programs. Actually, he was obviously clearly very ahead of his time.

Anyway, they were turned down, but then it was just towards the end of the Blitz, and he had digs in

bushy and nobody had enough coal. So everybody went to bed at about 7 o'clock in the evening,

and he just put on his pyjamas to get into bed, and he had this brilliant idea, and he immediately

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