Ruby Wax

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 26 June 2005

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the broadcaster and comedian Ruby Wax. Her brass neck and immunity to embarrassment led to her pioneering a new brand of journalism which saw celebrities, film stars and even royalty open their hearts - and their sock drawers - to her. She rifled through Madonna's handbag and, with Ruby's encouragement, Imelda Marcos entertained the audience with a rendition of Feelings.

Ruby grew up in Illinois, the only child of Jewish refugees who had fled Austria in 1939. Her childhood was unhappy - and, by the time she was 18, she says she was so unconfident she feared she would never find a job without her parents' help. But she left America and came to Britain where, eventually, she was to find a place at the Royal Shakespeare Company. There, her friend and contemporary Alan Rickman persuaded her that her future lay in writing rather than acting. Her career has spanned more than 20 years but she says that while she has been enjoying the success that came her way, she has also suffered from depression and an anxiety that she should not pass on to her own children the insecurities she suffered from herself.

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

Favourite track: A Day in the Life by The Beatles Book: The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann Luxury: A huge bed

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 2005, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My cast away this week this week made her name as a television interviewer. Her style is unique, her
0:34.2	programs astonishingly revealing, wacky, witty and dead clever, she's
0:38.8	rifled through the lives of those she's talked to like a housemaid through a
0:42.1	sock drawer. The results have been extraordinary.
0:45.0	Imelda Markos sang for her. Madonna allowed her to inspect her thongs and O.J. Simpson stabbed her with a banana.
0:52.1	She herself had a turbulent childhood in Illinois where
0:55.6	her father, a Frankfurt and her mother, subjected her to verbal abuse and the occasional
1:00.8	beating. She escaped to Britain via finishing school in Switzerland where she tried with limited success
1:06.6	to become an actress.
1:08.3	Then she started writing comedy and gradually her own style emerged, the unembarcible interloper in the lives of the famous and the unusual.
1:17.0	These days, she doesn't appear much on television, preferring to write and to study psychology.
1:22.8	Harking back to her childhood,
1:24.8	she remembers that she needed attention
1:26.5	from as many people as she could grab.
1:28.4	This makes for an exhausting life, she says,
1:30.8	but a fantastic career. She is Ruby Wax. You were Ruby a pioneer
1:37.1	really in that kind of television. I mean arguably the the forerunner of Ali G
1:42.0	of Graham Norton, Mrs. Merton, seeming to be harmless and yet getting
1:46.7	the kind of material that an investigative reporter would kill for.
1:51.9	But the trick there, first of all, is to get over the doorstep, isn't it? How do you get over
	...

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