Richard Hoggart

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 15 October 1995

⏱️ 37 minutes

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Summary

The castaway in Desert Island Discs this week is the academic and author Richard Hoggart. Nearly 40 years ago, he wrote the hugely influential Uses of Literacy. In it, he argued that the working classes were being short changed - both by rampant consumerism and by the dross he felt was being churned out by the mass media.

Cast well away from materialism and the media on the desert island, he'll be talking about how he now feels about his original thesis and about his own working-class background in Leeds, where he was orphaned at an early age.

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

Favourite track: Fidelio: The Prisoner's Chorus From Act One by Ludwig van Beethoven Book: Essays by Michel de Montaigne Luxury: Fountain pen and paper

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 1995 and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is an academic and author. He was born and brought up in poor working class
0:35.3	conditions in Leeds. His father died when he was very small and he came home one day to find
0:40.5	his mother dead from TB. Nevertheless, he went on to university and into academic life,
0:45.7	experiences which prompted him to write nearly 40 years ago now an enormously influential book called
0:51.6	the uses of literacy. It's thesis that the work a society chooses to give them has accompanied him ever since.
1:03.0	As Professor of English at Birmingham University,
1:05.0	as Assistant Director General of UNESCO,
1:08.0	and as the Warden of Goldsmith's College in London,
1:10.0	he's waged a ceaseless battle against a society founded on popular consumerism.
1:16.4	What he's described as the corrupt brightness of mass entertainments, a world in which progress
1:22.2	is conceived as a seeking of material possessions and freedom
1:26.2	as the ground for endless irresponsible pleasure.
1:29.6	He is Richard Hogut.
1:32.0	When you warned of those influences Richard Hogarth back in the 50s the worst examples you could
1:37.1	quote of them then were were the gang show and tidbits and and the daily mirror and now of course there's a plethora of such
1:44.5	stuff about us you must feel entirely defeated no I don't feel defeated I feel
1:50.6	depressed but I'm depressed by the weight of the material that's coming on now.
1:56.0	I mean I wrote before television and if you look at the worst of television and it's getting
2:00.5	worse all the time then it reinforces I'm sorry to say, what I was saying all those
2:05.7	years ago. It's a curious kind of balancing act. On the one hand there is massively more tripe for most people which I'm afraid they consume because
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