Richard Madeley
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.4 • 13.7K Ratings
🗓️ 8 March 2009
⏱️ 36 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Kirsty Young's castaway this week is Richard Madeley. It's 20 years since he opened the first edition of ITV's This Morning programme with his wife Judy Finnigan and, in the years since, pretty well everyone has sat on their sofa, from Madonna to Tony Blair, from the Clintons to, notoriously, OJ Simpson. Today, Richard Madeley is the epitome of a certain kind of smooth charm. In this frank interview though, he describes how he wasn't always so confident: he used to be so anxious about holding a conversation with his colleagues that he'd make excuses to hide himself away. He was in his 20s when he decided to become, he says, embarrassingly frank. He recognised how both his father and grandfather had deliberately stifled their own emotions and decided that he would be healthier and happier giving voice to them.
[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]
Favourite track: Summertime by Ella Fitzgerald Book: Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell by Suzanna Clarke Luxury: Guitar.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Kresse 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 2009. My cast away this week this week is Richard Madele. It's 20 years since he opened the first edition of this morning with the words, |
| 0:34.0 | Hello, I'm Richard Madele and this is my wife Judy Finnegan. |
| 0:37.0 | In the years since, pretty well everyone has sat on their sofa from Madonna to Brad Pitt |
| 0:42.0 | from the Clintons to notoriously O.J Simpson. their own screen |
| 0:45.0 | their unique selling point has always been that their on-screen chemistry |
| 0:49.0 | is based on their real-life relationship. |
| 0:51.0 | When they're on air, the personal and the public seem indivisible. So over the years, we've found |
| 0:56.7 | out every detail of their married life from their experiments with Viagra to his vasectomy. |
| 1:01.7 | I'm wondering, Richard Meekingly, if you derive a degree of comfort |
| 1:05.3 | from knowing that it's all out there, that nobody can ever get one over on you. |
| 1:08.6 | I wonder if that is the reason that I in particular I'm so sort of remorselessly |
| 1:15.3 | embarrassingly sometimes frank I don't know I think it might be actually more a |
| 1:18.5 | reaction to to to the men in in my past my grandfather for example, very typically of his generation, |
| 1:24.5 | spoke very little about his emotions and his feelings and the bad things that had happened to him. |
| 1:29.4 | And similarly I didn't really understand until after my father had died and he died very young |
| 1:33.6 | when he was 49 and I was 21 that there were a great many things about him |
| 1:37.4 | psychologically emotionally that he kept buttoned up I came to realize realize that keeping as quiet as both he and his father had done |
| 1:46.1 | hadn't been particularly good for either man. And as I moved through my 20s I sort of |
| 1:50.3 | unconsciously I think resolved to be the opposite, to say what I thought, to wear my heart on both |
| 1:55.9 | sleeves as it were, and communicate with my family and as my career developed I guess with |
... |
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