In its primary Sunday morning slot, Desert Island Discs on BBC Radio 4 finishes at noon. This is the cue for radio cognoscenti to turn the digital dial a single notch – to BBC Radio 3. Because as Desert Island Discs ends, Private Passions, its lesser known twin, is about to begin.
I wrote here recently about the celebrations around DID’s 80th anniversary. And many of the comments from Spectator readers were along the lines of ‘yes, but it’s no Private Passions’. And that sentiment, which I partly share, comes, I think, from the fact that PP feels the more serious, the more grown-up of two otherwise very similarly formatted shows.
‘The big difference is that on Desert Island Discs people do not necessarily have to be passionate about music. In fact, sometimes you feel they almost dislike music’
Both feature a sustained conversation between a single guest and presenter, discussing their life and work, choosing music they find meaningful. But where DID is quite rigidly structured, with eight tracks evenly spaced over 45 minutes, reduced to excerpts for time purposes, PP is looser, less of a cradle-to-grave biographical recap than a free-flowing conversation which goes where it will. And together with its longer, whole hour slot, this allows musical pieces, often very long pieces, to be played in full.
Instead of one time pop singer Lauren Laverne, at 45 younger than some of her guests, PP has the older Michael Berkeley – or, to give him his full title, Baron Berkeley of Knighton. Berkeley, an erudite and avuncular composer, was made a life peer in 2013 for services to music: his musical biography covers everything from meeting Stravinsky as a boy to writing choral arrangements for Kate Bush. Benjamin Britten was his godfather.
Where DD is dominated by celebrities with just a smattering of non-showbiz types from academia, business or the law, the ratio with PP tends to be the other way around.
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