Peter O'Sullevan

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 28 September 1997

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sue Lawley's castaway this week has been the voice of racing for half a century. Due to retire in November 1997, Peter O'Sullevan calculates that he has commentated on some 14,000 races.

After calling his last Grand National earlier this year he perhaps breathed a sigh of relief, because even after 50 broadcasts he admits to still finding the responsibility nerve-wracking. Horses have always been his life. He owns them, bets on them, writes about them and campaigns for their welfare, with the same enthusiasm that he had as a young boy riding with his grandparents' groom, Truelove.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: Piano Concerto 5 in E Flat Major by Ludwig van Beethoven Book: Ends and Means by Aldous Huxley Luxury: Bottle Of Calvados

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 1997, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a sports commentator. For the past 50 years he's been the
0:35.3	voice of racing for the BBC and for 36 of those years was also the racing
0:39.9	correspondent of the Daily Express. When he retires in November this year, he estimates that he'll have provided the
0:46.4	commentary for 14,000 races.
0:49.4	To hear him now, it's hard to imagine that this refined and a bane gentleman had a childhood dominated by
0:56.2	asthma and acne which isolated him and drove him for companionship towards a love of horses. He still loves them. He's owned them, bet on them, and he's
1:05.2	only giving up commentating on them because of his age. Almost 80 he says he doesn't
1:10.2	think he'll get any better so he can only guard against getting any worse.
1:14.5	He is Peter O'Sullivan, now Sir Peter.
1:18.2	Let's talk about the voice first of all, Peter, your trademark.
1:21.2	How much did you work on it in the early days cultivated?
1:25.0	Frankly, Sue, not at all, it's just my voice.
1:28.3	Maybe I've modified my pace a bit.
1:31.8	I'm told that I used to speak very much too quickly and so I tried to slow down but of course you
1:37.2	have to talk quite fast to keep pace with a racehorse.
1:40.4	What you've cultivated, well I'm saying you have, you say you haven't, is that sort of
1:45.4	monotone as it were in the non-pajorative sense, this unbiased, cool straight approach? Yes, because I think one has to remember that as a commentator on a sport in which so many listeners or viewers have a pecuniary interest.
2:04.4	You're inevitably a purveyor of ill tidings to the majority,
2:10.3	and not only a purveyor of ill tidings,
2:12.3	but you're held partially accountable for them.
	...

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