Virginia Ironside
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.3 • 14.3K Ratings
🗓️ 30 March 1997
⏱️ 34 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week's castaway on Desert Island Discs has all the qualifications she needs for her job. A journalist, she learnt her craft in the 1960s when she interviewed rock star legends like Mick Jagger, Jimmy Hendrix and Janis Joplin.
She's also a single mum, frequently experiences deep bouts of depression and finds that many of her lasting relationships are with alcoholics. The agony aunt Virginia Ironside describes to Sue Lawley how her life and her work are inseparably entwined.
[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]
Favourite track: Hot Tomales by Will Grove-White Book: The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale Luxury: Big bag of plaster to make heads of friends
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 1997, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a journalist, novelist and agony aunt. Her work reflects her life. A |
| 0:36.7 | Londoner with artistic parents, one an alcoholic. She was a wild child in the 60s, |
| 0:41.7 | has suffered from depression and been a single parent. |
| 0:45.5 | These experiences she's turned to good account in more than a dozen books, the first written |
| 0:49.4 | when she was 20, and in columns for a variety of newspapers and magazines. |
| 0:54.0 | These days her wisdom graces the pages of the independent, |
| 0:57.0 | but she's also written advice columns for Woman magazine, |
| 1:00.0 | the Sunday Mirror and the today newspaper. |
| 1:03.0 | She's realistic about the effect she has on people's lives. |
| 1:07.0 | Most people don't need advice, she says, they need love. |
| 1:10.0 | She is Virginia Ironside. |
| 1:12.0 | So you don't think people take any notice of the advice |
| 1:15.9 | that gets handed out on these pages, do you Virginia? I think they do take notice. |
| 1:20.5 | I think they take notice of a lot of the advice and self-help groups that one writes about. |
| 1:26.4 | And I think they do take notice of the love that comes across with the advice so that when you |
| 1:31.8 | read an agony column page you are aware of people in |
| 1:36.4 | pain being answered with reassurance and kindness now what that reassurance and |
| 1:41.8 | kindness and affection consists of I think now |
| 1:45.8 | Rather later on in my life doesn't matter |
| 1:49.3 | Terribly what matters is pain |
... |
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