Robinson Crusoe
Great Lives
BBC
4.2 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 13 August 2019
⏱️ 25 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Was Robinson Crusoe real? According to the book it was 'written by himself'.
To establish the facts, Matthew Parris is joined by two notable desert island survivors to discuss Crusoe’s life and strange adventures, during 28 years on an uninhabited island near the mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque.
Crusoe's nominator is Lucy Irvine, who spent a year on Tuin Island with a man called Gerald. Her exploits resulted in a book and a film called ‘Castaway’. The second guest is journalist Martin Popplewell, who was inspired as a teenager to try desert island life by Brooke Shields in the film ‘The Blue Lagoon’.
As Martin points out, "There's no mention in the entire Crusoe book of coconuts" in this entertaining dissection of both Crusoe and his creator, Daniel Defoe.
Producer: Miles Warde
Produced in Bristol and first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in July 2019.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're about to listen to a BBC podcast and trust me you'll get there in a moment but if you're a comedy fan |
| 0:05.2 | I'd really like to tell you a bit about what we do. I'm Julie Mackenzie and I commission comedy |
| 0:10.2 | podcast at the BBC. It's a bit of a dream job really. |
| 0:13.0 | Comedy is a fantastic joyous thing to do because really you're making people laugh, |
| 0:18.0 | making people's days a bit better, helping them process, all manner of things. |
| 0:22.0 | But you know I also know that comedy is really |
| 0:24.4 | subjective and everyone has different tastes so we've got a huge range of comedy on offer |
| 0:29.6 | from satire to silly shocking to soothing profound to just general pratting about. So if you |
| 0:36.2 | fancy a laugh, find your next comedy at BBC Sounds. |
| 0:41.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, radio podcasts. |
| 0:45.0 | I was born in the city of York in the year 1632. |
| 0:53.0 | If ever a man was born to be his own destroyer, |
| 0:56.0 | then I was he. |
| 0:58.0 | Against the good advice of my father I went to see. |
| 1:02.0 | I forgot the terror that possessed me in my first voyage and |
| 1:06.5 | voyaged into danger and calamity again. Even after deliverance from the Turks and landing safe in the Brazil's where I made my fortune. |
| 1:16.0 | My heart still yearned to wander. We all know that feeling. My guests today certainly do. The clip you've just heard comes |
| 1:30.3 | from an astonishing tale, The Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, written by himself. |
| 1:38.0 | That novel is 300 years old this year. |
| 1:41.4 | Now let's play for a while with the idea that Crusoe was real because in truth |
| 1:45.9 | we have two great lives in this program, Crusoe and his creator Daniel Defoe who lives in a way through his creation as authors often do. |
| 1:57.0 | Nominating him or rather them is the heroine of her own island adventure and she is real the author of the books cast away run away |
... |
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