Paul Gambaccini
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.3 • 14.3K Ratings
🗓️ 13 October 2002
⏱️ 34 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Paul Gambaccini was born in New York City in 1949 and revelled growing up to the sounds of the 1960s. He loved listening to the radio and chose to go to Dartmouth College in preference to Harvard or Yale because it had a student-run commercial college radio station. He soon became a news reporter, DJ and eventually manager. Paul came to England to study PPE at Oxford University and, although he was despondent when the local radio station wouldn't give him a job, his luck changed following his graduation when he was offered an American Music slot on the recently launched BBC Radio 1. At 24 years of age, he was their youngest broadcaster and stayed with the network for 18 years.
He has worked on most radio and television networks, including a film review slot, which ran for 13 years, on breakfast television, and presenting the film edition of BBC Radio 4's Kaleidoscope programme. He has also written a number of books, including co-authoring The Guinness Book of British Hit Singles, which illustrates his remarkable memory for music facts and figures. He now presents America's Greatest Hits on BBC Radio 2 and Classic Countdown on Classic FM.
[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]
Favourite track: The Finale of Rhapsody in Blue by George Gerhswin Book: The complete Carl Barks Library by Carl Barks Luxury: A piano
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 2002, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a disc jockey, the cultivated voice of pop. |
| 0:32.7 | He presented shows on Radio 1 for nearly 20 years |
| 0:35.6 | and left it unusually without rancor. |
| 0:38.4 | These days, his anglicized American tones Grace Classic FM, |
| 0:42.4 | where he returned after a gruesome battle with the high |
| 0:44.8 | brows at Radio 3. He lost. Born in New York, clever and musical, he came to this country |
| 0:50.8 | on a scholarship to Oxford. His encyclopedic knowledge of music |
| 0:54.6 | had drawn him to broadcasting and he tried to get a job with local radio but discovered he |
| 0:58.5 | had a better record collection than they did. He went on to become Radio One's youngest star and has been telling us about culture high and low, pop and classical ever since. |
| 1:08.0 | What's good is good regardless of whether it's high or low, he says. He is Paul Gambachini. |
| 1:14.9 | Your story Paul is one of how you became this arbiter of high or low or both taste. The fact is you might have been a lawyer, mind you? I came very close to going |
| 1:26.8 | to law school. I had done well at Dartmouth College in the Ivy League and had been |
| 1:32.2 | accepted to Yale and Harvard Law Schools. |
| 1:36.5 | And the pressure was on... |
| 1:37.7 | Parental pressure is this? |
| 1:39.7 | This is what your parents wanted for you, is it? |
| 1:41.7 | Well, my dad once told me that he had hoped |
| 1:44.2 | that one of his three sons would become either a priest or a lawyer, but the |
| 1:48.4 | pressure at the moment when I was in college was from the institution itself. |
| 1:52.0 | At that time there was the feeling that the future leader College was from the institution itself. |
... |
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