Robert Fisk
Desert Island Discs: Archive 2005-2010
BBC
4.4 • 804 Ratings
🗓️ 15 October 2006
⏱️ 39 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the journalist Robert Fisk. He is one of our most distinguished foreign correspondents and has spent his life covering conflicts around the world - the past 30 years immersed in the life and politics of the Middle East. He formed his ambition at a young age - he saw Hitchcock's film Foreign Correspondent when he was just 12 years old and was determined to join their ranks. War, too, was a strong influence - his father had fought on the Western Front and was haunted by his experiences. He insisted that young Robert should learn about the war and his first foreign holiday was a tour of the Somme.
He has become used to living in a war zone - he has escaped a kidnap attempt, survived an attack by Afghan refugees and risked his life to secure interviews of which other journalists dream. Perhaps his greatest scoop was securing a series of face-to-face interviews with Osama Bin Laden.
[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]
Favourite track: Adagio for Strings by Samuel Barber Book: Le Mort D'Arthur by Thomas Mallory Luxury: A violin
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, it's Nicola Cochlin. Young people have been making history for years, but we don't often hear about them. My brand new series on BBC Sounds sets out to put this right. In history's youngest heroes, I'll be revealing the fascinating stories of 12 young people who've played a major role in history and who've helped shape our world. Like Audrey Hepburn, Nelson Mandela, Louis Braille and Lady Jane Grey, history's youngest heroes with me, Nicola Cochlin. |
| 0:27.8 | Listen on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:30.3 | Hello, I'm Krista Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. |
| 0:35.3 | For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music. |
| 0:38.4 | The program was originally broadcast in 2006. |
| 1:02.2 | My castaway this week is award-winning journalist and best-selling author Robert Fisk. |
| 1:08.5 | He spent his life covering conflicts around the world and the last 30 years living in and writing principally about the Middle East. |
| 1:10.5 | His choice of career came early. Age 12, he watched |
| 1:12.2 | Alfred Hitchcock's film Foreign Correspondent. The lead character's cunning, lack of scruples, |
| 1:17.6 | and winning way with the ladies enraptured him, and from that day on his mind was set and never |
| 1:22.7 | wavered. He says his job is monitoring the centres of power. Doing it has on occasion brought him perilously close to death. |
| 1:30.8 | He's been beaten to a bloody pulp by a gang of Afghan refugees, fled kidnappers in a car chase through the streets of Beirut, |
| 1:38.0 | and been invited to take tea in a cave with the most unlikely of hosts, Osama bin Laden. |
| 1:44.4 | His is not the prose of the dispassionate bystander. |
| 1:47.6 | In fact, he rails at the media's emphasis on balanced reporting |
| 1:50.8 | and is criticised by some for his partiality. |
| 1:54.7 | It sounds Robert Fisk from that catalogue of daring do |
| 1:57.8 | as though you almost have lived the life of an action movie hero. |
| 2:01.3 | No. I was thinking the other day where I actually enjoyed the life I've had, and I think I |
| 2:05.9 | haven't. I might have been passionate about it, but I don't think I've actually enjoyed it. |
| 2:10.8 | I was sitting on the boulevards in Paris and watching families walking down the street in the |
| 2:14.5 | sunlight. I went back to Beirut and sat on my balcony over the Mediterranean and thought to myself, did I really want these last 30 years of war? |
... |
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