#roy plomley

[cyhsal]

Turn left at Orion 🔭🌌

Listening material:

🔭 Denys Lasdun on Desert Island Discs (December 1976)

🌌 Spotify playlist (compilation of all the songs from the episode)

Instagram // Twitter // VK // ArtStation // Mastodon

[sondheims-hat]

First broadcast August 16, 1980.

[mariocki]

The Man Who Walks By Night: A Dinner Date with Death (BBC, 1950)

"You can't take away a man's whole career!"

"Why not? He took away my wife."

"Ha, you never loved me."

"I don't love that picture - but the world values it, and I should hate to have it stolen."

[tvarchives]

News report on the death of Roy Plomley. Plomley hosted BBC Radio's Desert Island Discs for over 40 years.

[royally-obsessed]

on this day in 1981

Margaret and Radio

Princess Margaret and presenter Roy Plomley recording an episode of the BBC Radio 4 series 'Desert Island Discs' at Broadcasting House, London on January 15th 1981.

[thecrownnet]

To prepare for the role, [Lesley Manville] listened to the few audio tapes available of the princess during the ’90s, including an appearance Margaret made on BBC Radio’s Desert Island Discs, which is recreated in the episode. She also spoke to several mutual friends who happened to know the late royal, given her passion for the arts.

- Vanity Fair, The Crown: Princess Margaret’s Real-Life Reunion With Peter Townsend and Fading Glamour, Nov 10, 2022

*Listen to the original Desert Island Discs via link above. ♚

Photo: Norman Parkinson/National Portrait Gallery. Lady Sarah Chatto; Princess Margaret; David Albert Charles Armstrong-Jones, Viscount Linley in 1981.

[period-dramallama]

So excited guys I found a clip of Desert Island Discs with Jean Plaidy (more importantly she's Victoria Holt)

Here she is!!!! And her voice is exactly like I imagined it lmao

[georgefairbrother]

Desert Island Discs must be one of the greatest archives of oral history anywhere, freely available to everyone to stream or download thanks to the BBC. There are interviews with Montgomery and Douglas Bader, war heroes and Hollywood silent film stars, singers, comedians, politicians and actors.

Possibly the greatest interview of all was from 1980, when it was still hosted by its creator, Roy Plomley, who was unfailingly courteous and although disciplined, had a very warm approach and an endearing sense of humour. Unfortunately with film director Otto Preminger, it all seemed to go wrong, as Preminger took great offence when Roy Plomley described him as a Gypsy; this was an innocent observation that Preminger was a travelling film maker. Preminger went on to torment the host about his bald head, and you can hear poor Roy Plomley's bewilderment as the interview progresses. Roy put to his guest that he was seen as a tough director, frightening and 'something of an ogre'.

"Who told you that? Which actor told you that? You are incredible. You read things, and you believe everything bad about me."

"No. I was giving it to you to deny."

"I don't deny it."

Preminger either genuinely, or deliberately, didn't understand the premise of the show, so when it got to the end and Roy asked him about how he might survive alone on a desert island, Preminger asked if the host was out of his mind...

Roy Plomley's knowledge of British theatre was encyclopaedic, yet he perhaps struggled a little with politicians. When he passed away in 1985, having hosted for 43 years and nearly 1800 episodes, Michael Parkinson took over and had some great encounters over 100 programmes, including with film director Alan Parker and possibly one of the best and most insightful interviews with Kenneth Williams.

[afactaday]

#aFactADay2023

#733: in Desert Island Discs (a radio show where guests pick 8 tracks, a book and a luxury item), the most requested piece was Ode to Joy (from beethovens ninth symphony), and the most requested luxury items was a piano. usually, the luxury item has to be strictly inanimate and of no use to escape or external contact, which was enforced strictly by the programme's creator, Roy Plomley. however, he granted a special dispensation to Princess Michael of Kent, who took her pet cat to the island. nowadays people can get away with anything, like when John Cleese chose to take Michael Palin (on the condition that he was dead and stuffed). some other choices that interested me were Judi Dench, who chose an audiobook because she has macular degeneration, and David Hockney, who chose a rather adult book filled with grammar and spelling mistakes.

DID celebrates its 80th birthday later this month.

many people have been cast away multiple times (including stephen fry and david attenborough) and the vainest episode was the pianist Moura Lymphany, whose (on her second time round) eight selections were all her own recordings. the funniest episode was when Roy Plomley attempted to interview Alistair MacLean, a scottish novellist, but accidentally ended up interviewing some Ontario office worker with the same name. this episode was never broadcast.

an aside: did prince michael of kent really marry someone with the same name, i thought to myself. turns out he married somone called marie-christine and gave her his name.

link: entertainment for the ears

[mrepstein]

Paul McCartney on the death of Brian Epstein and the break-up of the Beatles during an interview with Roy Plomley on the BBC radio series Desert Island Discs

ROY PLOMLEY: Now, the whole Beatle set-up was put in jeopardy when Brian Epstein killed himself; I suppose there had to be a split-up with four young musicians, all with their own ideas about how the business ought to run

McCARTNEY: Yeah, well first, I’m not really sure if Brian did kill himself, I’ve always thought that it was an accident, I don’t really think he would have meant it. I think it was just an unfortunate mix of pills and booze, I don’t think he’s the kind of fella who’d actually do it on purpose, there’s been all sorts of rumours and stuff. Personally, I don’t think that was so. So what was the second part of the question? Sorry!

PLOMLEY: The second part of the question was I suppose it was inevitable that the split had to happen?

McCARTNEY: Yeah, I think so. I think eventually, we all sort of found girls and split off, you know, obviously you could go into the reasons for years, as to exactly what caused it. I think it was things like that, you know, Brian had died, so the management thing was a bit more difficult. We were starting to find our own feet, away from the group, and becoming a little bit individual. John would do a film, Ringo would do something separate, I might do something separate. So I suppose it was just an inevitable part of growing up, really.

[dontcallmeshirley]

I thoroughly enjoyed Gregory Peck’s Desert Island Discs. His voice is so deep and soothing, he’s open and honest and really funny. His rise to fame is very interesting and yet he seems so unaffected by it. Plus his music choice is good.

[popsixsquishcicerolipschitz]

BBC Radio 4 - Desert Island Discs

Omar Sharif

Desert Island Discs

Roy Plomley's castaway is actor Omar Sharif.

Favourite track: All The Way by Frank Sinatra Book: The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery Luxury: Several decks of cards

Download

[thelongbowman]

Desert Island Discs

Robert Hardy was castaway twice on Desert Island Discs — the first time in 1978, and the second in 2011. Both interviews are interesting, insightful, and at times (in a very honest way) funny.

25 April 1978 — with Roy Plomley

25 November 2011 — with Kirsty Young

[skull-designs]

“And then I hear sweet music float around my head / As I recall the many things we left unsaid” (Matt Monro / On Days Like These)

Roy Plomley’s grave, Putney Vale Cemetery, London Borough of Wandsworth.

[georgefairbrother]

Remembering British film director Sir Alan Parker, who passed away July 31st, 2020. Born to a working class family in Islington, North London, he made his reputation as a pioneer of creativity in television advertising, before going on to become one of his generation’s most accomplished film directors.

He gave many entertaining, occasionally grumpy, and breathtakingly honest interviews over the years, lamenting the state of the British film industry at various times, on the differences between working in Britain and Hollywood, and offering his general opinion on the standards of film journalism. In 1986, he was Michael Parkinson's first guest on the BBC's Desert Island Discs, following the death of the show's creator and long-term host, Roy Plomley.

Alan Parker featured again 14 years later, interviewed by Sue Lawley.

[imtheviolenceintherain]

The fantastic Mrs. Bonham Carter (Vogue, October 2019).

Without major worries or ambitions, Helena Bonham Carter has become an unexpected icon of the big screen. Her roles, always between the bizarre and the vindictive, have given her a star status with which she now prepares for his most mediatic character: Princess Margarita in the new season of The Crown, the netflix story about the british royal house.

Sitting down for tea with Helena Bonham Carter is similar to join on a roller coaster that starts in the dark with an uncertain destination. At 53 years old, the british actress (London, 1966) displays a sense of humor that includes issues such as Brexit or the oratory of Donald Trump with equal brilliance, but she stops suddenly when she thinks she has to talk seriously about the wage gap in the film industry. «If at any time I move away from what you are looking for, find a way to get me back on track», she jokes lying on an armchair next to a pair of fuchsia satin shoes that she has abandoned on the floor, looking like the shoes had shattered her feet. «It is not exactly the shoes that I would wear on a summer morning, but today she is the boss.»

By 'she' means the woman she has been studying for several months before she has had to slip into her shoes this autumn morning. Princess Margarita de York, Countess of Snowdon, daughter of Kings Isabel and Jorge VI and younger sister of Queen Elizabeth II of England, is the last of a hundred women whom this actress has embodied in her three decades of career. With the same skill that she will jump frantically in the topics of our conversation, this actress has managed to take on roles that little or nothing have to do with each other, beyond its bizarre peculiarities.

Since she debuted in 1983 as the young Netty Bellinger in the telefilm A Pattern of Roses, her pale face with aristocrat pedigree has been transmuted into others of female drug addicts and perverts (as in The Fight Club), more or less wicked witches (as in Big Fish and Harry Potter), corseted prostitutes (Les Miserables) and even a vindictive chimpanzee (The Planet of the Apes). This tour has earned her a place on the podium of the best female actresses in the United Kingdom, a BAFTA award for her portrayal of the queen mother in The King's Speech in 2011 and two Oscar nominations, for The King's Speech and for the film adaptation of The wings of the dove that starred in 1997.

Another queen occupies her current time since she agreed to participate in the new cast of The Crown, the production of Netflix whose third season will be released on November 17. The series, which achieved an unusual success with its first two seasons covering the history of the British royal house between 1947 and 1964, takes up the story since that year with a hint which is a height risk: the main characters change their faces in the next two seasons. Claire Foy gives Queen Elizabeth's throne to Oscar-winning Olivia Colman, Matt Smith does the same with Tobias Menzies and Vanessa Kirby is replaced by Helena Bonham Carter in the role of Margarita.

The news was made public in May of last year, but the actress had been knowing about Netflix's interest in her for months. «Shortly before Christmas 2017, I received a text message from an acquaintance. All it had written was: 'Helena, would you play Princess Margarita?'», she remembers. «It was shortly after Olivia Colman (The Iron Lady, The Favorite) had accepted the role of Queen Elizabeth», she recalls about the offer. «The first thing I felt was a little anger at how convinced my circle was that I should accept it. They couldn't stop telling me that I were ideal for the role, and I thought to myself: What we look alike? In alcoholism? In the nymphomania?! Maybe that was too much, but let's say she liked sex a lot. The truth is that it was ridiculous to think it too much, because the proposal was juicy from any perspective. With the distance of time, I'm glad to have accepted: Margarita is much more complex than all the things that they have been drawn of her, and therefore it was possible to play her in a thousand different ways. She is full of contradictions and dualities, because she was both traditional and rebellious; as at times she was a social animal and others times a lone wolf. She was an absolutely unpredictable woman», she argues. The third season of The Crown starts in 1964 to address, among other things, the relationship between Isabel II and Prime Minister Harold Wilson, the decolonization of Africa, diplomatic ties with the United States or the landing of the Apollo 11 on the Moon. On this October morning, the costume director for the series, Amy Roberts, has donned the actress in an emerald green dress and fuchsia shoes that have led to our meeting in the middle of filming the first half of the season. The stage is an Andalusian patio in the Beverly Hills mansion where Margarita and her husband, Tony Armstrong-Jones (better known as Lord Snowdon and played by Ben Daniels) come to attend a fashion show during an official trip to the United States. But the reality is different: a technical team has been responsible for emulating California opulence on a farm a few kilometers from Algeciras, with the Rock of Gibraltar very present on the horizon. Facing the pool, five models walk in suits and bathrobes with echoes to Missoni under the watchful eye of about thirty men and women dressed as the American jet set of the 60s.

The scene maybe will be a three-second shot in the final footage, but it serves to show the prominence of Margarita in the new chapters: her addictive marriage to Lord Snowdon and a star status ain front of her sister - who in another scene laments being "more reliable and predictable" - of which Bonham Carter knew little more than the media portrait that had been made of her. «I had a caricatured image, like many people. We know what they wanted to tell us: that she drank, that she was scandalous, unfriendly, irreverent, controversial. But all the labels that have been put on her are unfair and ignorant. She was a true star that did not force her speech or hide her charisma, it was innate and therefore triumphed wherever she went. When I looked for something else, I also noticed that she was a tremendously smart and funny woman, with the same ability to finish a crossword puzzle in five minutes than to take the party that she would consider timely. She loved her sister and felt a deep respect for her, but I think she never fully recovered from the loss of her father, King George. The turning point came from the abdication of her uncle Eduardo, the sudden rise to the throne of her father and, later, that of Isabel as queen. She was losing her father and her best friend, who were subject to a life of service. I think a lot of courage is required to be in such a complicated position: surrounded by people but deeply alone, under constant public judgement. And despite that, I am convinced that she felt the duty to serve her family and also her people. She was an admirable woman».

Her opinion is useful to sharpen the urban legend of a figure that sweep along countless anecdotes, like the dinner in which she asked the model Twiggy her name, which she seemed it "unfortunate", or the 'vulgar' adjective that she dedicated to the Krupp diamond with which Richard Burton had presented Elizabeth Taylor. However, there is hardly an audiovisual archive of images where Margarita makes use of her proverbial character. «The royal family is an expert in planning how is projected to the public, how they shake hands, get out of a car or follow the protocol at a dinner. But there was almost nothing about Margarita talking with someone beyond the official speeches, so I had to talk to her friends or people who would have lived with her to learn more about her tone, her convictions, her way of expressing herself in intimacy. I played his mother in The King's Speech (Tom Hopper, 2010), of which there is an extensive archive. But there is almost nothing about Margarita, except for an interview with Roy Plomley of 1381, on the BBC's Desert Island Discs program. I may hear those 40 minutes more than a hundred times». Despite accumulating more than a hundred roles in her 36 years of experience, it is the first time that Bonham Carter faces a full season in a television series. «I had no experience in logistics of how to work for a series, but it wasn't easy considering the magnitude of The Crown. The filming was distributed over six months, by different countries, and that makes many times you have to do a titanic effort to stay focused. When I shoot a feature film, those weeks I just walk around the set without leaving the character and try not to part with it to keep myself in my goal. But in this case, I came to the studio, recorded two days and maybe I didn't have to come back in two weeks. If I had practiced my usual formula, I would have become very unbearable. Imagine my two children having to put up with it», she jokes, raising her eyebrow, emulating Margarita's monarchical accent. «Sometimes, when we had a rest, I remembered the red queen», she concedes, referring to the hysterical sovereign that already embodied in Alice in Wonderland, the adaptation of the Lewis Carroll story that in 2010 adapted her then husband, the director Tim Burton. One of the advantages of filming was to have Olivia Colman, in the role of the queen, whom she remembers as an open, sociable woman, and without a hint of the neurosis that she usually displays on screen. «We are both very frank, and that is why it has been so easy. Together we had what was probably the most funny day of work of the whole season. We had to do a scene quite sad and despite whatever I would said, Olivia was unable to stop crying to the point that they had to put her a few tiny headphones so she could hear any nonsense. I told her some horrible things and she answered without hearing anything at all. I didn't know whether to laugh or cry, but we managed to get better to the point that she can now listen to me without shedding a tear». It is curious that this granddaughter of a Spanish diplomat - her grandfather Eduardo Propper de Callejón facilitated the flight of thousands of Jews from occupied France through Spain in World War II - almost no one imputes to her a bad choice in her filmography. «I never choose my roles thinking that it will be a success at the box office, or the money that I will earn. With The Crown, for example, playing Margarita like this, abstractly, was never an option. Peter Morgan [series creator] called me several times coming to confess that Olivia had not even had to read the script to accept. But until I read it all and I confirmed the great writing, I didn't say yes». With a sincerity that is refreshing in her industry, there is something that worries her more now than when the world first fell in love with her porcelain face in Room with a View (James Ivory, 1985). «It is exciting to witness the movement to fight for women's equality and, above all, to celebrate diversity and examine things we had taken for granted. But we still have weights that represent people like Donald Trump. It is an uncertain period. But at least we, the actors, can continue telling stories that help break the damn molds».

NOTE.

As some of you already know, I am Spanish and I am the owner of @badposthbc (twitter) and @bestofhbc (instagram); so English is not my first language nor am I a translator. I know it is not a perfect translation, all comments are welcome to improve the translation! but please, be kind. With all due respect to the magazine, if you want to read it in its original language, buy the magazine and if you are going to spread this english interview, give me credits.