Ian Hislop

Speaker 30:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

Speaker 30:08

The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen ninety four, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:29

My castaway this week is a satirist. As one might expect, his professional calling attracts abuse, and he's been called, among other things, a talentless twerp and a malicious pixie. Apparently unaffected by these insults, he's twinkled nimbly through a career that has taken him via Oxford University to three of Britain's most iconoclastic appointments. Scriptwriter for the Lifelike in Latex on Spitting Image, team captain of the BBC's would-be news quiz Have I Got News for You? and for the last seven years, Editor of Private Eye. He is Ian Hislop.

Presenter1:02

Ian, you said just before you were made editor of the Eye that it was the best job in the world. That was when you were twenty-five. You're now all of thirty-three. Do you still think so?

Ian Hislop1:11

Yes, I still think um it takes some beating. I did make rather a lot of pompous pronouncements when I took over saying I will do this job for five years and at that age five years seemed a very long time. And I've now done it for seven. And uh hopefully people have forgotten that I said that.

Presenter1:25

You also said that you'd redu reduce the flow of writs, of libel writs, but you haven't, have you?

Ian Hislop1:29

Hmm, that was another of my pronouncements that didn't happen.

Presenter1:32

But you wanted to.

Ian Hislop1:33

Yes, I have in a sense cut down on the libel bills. I would defend myself that far.

Presenter1:37

I thought I thought it was still two hundred thousand a year on average.

Ian Hislop1:40

Yes, well that's not that.

Presenter1:41

Bad, isn't it?

Ian Hislop1:43

There there's quite a number of writs, but um some of them don't cost as much.

Presenter1:47

But but they do I mean, they do flow pretty freely. I I mean if you said you wanted to make the magazine more accurate and therefore reduce them. I mean, not not less dangerous to know, as it were, but more accurate. I mean, have you failed in that?

Ian Hislop1:59

No, I don't think so. What I've tried to do is um not stop us getting any writs,'cause I think if you don't annoy anyone enough for them to send you a writ then you're not doing your job. Um what I want to do is not throw away money on indefensible or hopeless actions.

Presenter2:08

Um

Presenter2:12

Hm. But you you you even lost when you called Robert Maxwell a liar, a cheat, and a fraud. How did you manage that? He cried.

Ian Hislop2:18

Yes, he cried in court. He wept in the dock, and the jury were shocked, moved, and immediately awarded him huge amounts of money. I must admit, it was a very moving scene. I was even moved myself. Genuinely. Genuinely. I was genuinely a little bit worried because we'd done a thing that the eye does of look-alikes, just ridiculous people who you think look like each other. And we'd put a picture of Maxwell in and a picture of one of the Cray brothers saying, I wonder if they're related. You know, some innocent sort of joke. And he'd actually gone back and got all the other look-alikes we'd ever done, which included just amazing juxtapositions of people, including the Duke of Edinburgh and Eichmann, which was unrelated to the Maxwell libel. But he dragged it in, and then, at the mention of the Nazis, he talked about his family during the war and then started crying. It was one of those moments in court when not only did you think we're stuffed, but you think, my goodness, this means something. My lawyer actually passed me a note saying, Maxwell takes out onion. He didn't believe it for a minute.

Speaker 33:23

But you did.

Ian Hislop3:23

But I was slightly worried. But years later I had lunch with a man called Lord Spenz, who was involved in the Guinness case. And he said to me, Oh, I was with Maxwell the night that he cried in court. And I said, Oh, how was he? And he said, Well, he said to me, I burst into tears and then he looked at me and he laughed and he said, Forget Rada.

Ian Hislop3:46

which made me feel an awful lot better.

Presenter3:48

It wasn't after that case, though, was it, that you said, If this is justice, I'm a banana.

Ian Hislop3:53

No, I said that one after the Sonia Sutcliffe case, when the wife of a mass murderer had been given six hundred thousand pounds, which was record damages then, got me in the Guinness Book of Records, and I came out of the court absolutely furious and said, Well, if that's justice

Ian Hislop4:09

And th then I couldn't think of anything else to say at all.

Ian Hislop4:13

So I said the first thing that came into my head, which was, Then I'm a banana.

Presenter4:17

Which has got you in the Dictionary of Quotations, isn't it?

Ian Hislop4:19

Yes, and and makes not much sense.

Presenter4:21

This fucking.

Presenter4:23

I suppose the the other difficult thing is that people expect you to be endlessly witty and entertaining, which is of course why we've invited you here.

Ian Hislop4:29

Hmm, well I'm going to fail again.

Presenter4:29

Well I

Presenter4:32

Also to discover the inner Hislock, not least your taste in music, what is it?

Ian Hislop4:36

Well, nowadays it's straight classical. I've become very staid in my tastes. Partly because I didn't know much about classical music for a long time, and I've started to discover it.

Presenter4:44

Dade at thirty three. What's the first record?

Ian Hislop4:47

My first record is a song from the first act of The Marriage of Figaro. It's when um Figaro is uh replying to the Count's overtures to his wife, and he's sort of singing a very Machiavellian little tune, saying, Alright, if that's the way you want to play it, well, I'll win anyway, which appeals to me a great deal.

Speaker 45:08

Se voila, siorconquiro.

Speaker 45:15

Pe volar, signor el contino.

Speaker 45:40

Se voilire melorias fora da priora ri nese.

Speaker 45:52

Servoira nellariascora pariora dir segerosi linse rosi linse.

Presenter6:09

Claudio Desderi singing Save well Bellare from the first act of Mozart's Marriage of Figaro with the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Bernard Heitink and singing about the art of stinging and fighting with one and playing with another, which is really about what you do, isn't it?

Ian Hislop6:23

I suppose it is, really. I I do love that opera, because it's such a brilliant comedy.

Presenter6:28

But have you always been that? Have you always been a bit conniving, a bit of a stinger, a bit of a wag? Were you like that at school?

Ian Hislop6:37

I suppose I was, yes. I wasn't a great rebel at school. Um I ended up as head boy, which is very embarrassing. I had to drop that from the C V for most of the eighties. Um

Presenter6:48

Got that one in quick before I said it, I know. But did people like you or did you sort of take the Mickey out of them all of the time?

Ian Hislop6:55

I did a fair amount of that. I mean, I I enjoyed school hugely. Um I had a great time then. I had a very good set of friends. I boarded and it

Speaker 47:00

Then I

Ian Hislop7:04

It was very much um a home in that sense because I was there for so long and I got so um

Speaker 47:06

Mm-hmm.

Speaker 37:06

Uh

Ian Hislop7:11

involved with uh the life of the school, as it were.

Presenter7:14

But didn't you also do that because something really rather tragic happened in your family life?

Ian Hislop7:19

Yes, I suppose that that is true. My father died when I was twelve, which was very young, and I'd only just begun to get to know him. And

Ian Hislop7:28

Since he was in boarding school, I I knew him holidays only and he was a civil engineer, expatriate, and we'd lived I'm just all over the place, Kuwait and Jeddah and Nigeria, and we were living in Hong Kong and he came back from Hong Kong

Ian Hislop7:44

uh got ill and um he died that summer term.

Presenter7:48

But did you I mean, was it a shock, or did you expect, did you know it was coming?

Ian Hislop7:51

I had no idea it was coming at all. It was a total shock.

Ian Hislop7:54

As it was to him, I think it was very quick.

Presenter7:54

And it was.

Presenter7:55

How did you find out?

Ian Hislop7:58

Gosh, it was just one of those um awful scenes that could have come from a you know a T V play. Uh my mother came to the school and I was taken out of a lesson.

Ian Hislop8:07

and taken to see the headmaster, and I knew, in the way that you just know, and um

Ian Hislop8:13

um, was told that he'd gone. And so and briefly you become a celebrity, um you know,'cause tragedy marks you out. Um

Presenter8:22

Mm.

Ian Hislop8:23

And then my mother had t you know, stayed in this country and then suddenly we were living in England.

Presenter8:28

You know

Ian Hislop8:28

You know, it was it was a time of terrific sadness, and my response was

Ian Hislop8:32

To be very involved in the school again and my friends, and that became.

Ian Hislop8:37

uh what I wanted to do.

Presenter8:39

A kind of substitute, yes.

Ian Hislop8:40

Yeah.

Presenter8:41

One of those friends, Nick Newman, says that you were very precocious.

Ian Hislop8:45

Yes, well that's your friends for you.

Presenter8:48

You ought a bit of a swat about.

Ian Hislop8:50

I worked hard, ish.

Ian Hislop8:53

But um

Ian Hislop8:54

I don't remember working terribly hard.

Presenter8:57

You were just clever.

Ian Hislop8:57

Well, I I remember I was told to a couple of us were told to do the Oxbridge entrance exam early because they thought we were just lazing around.

Ian Hislop9:06

Which is certainly true.

Presenter9:07

And you got in.

Ian Hislop9:08

And I got in, yes.

Presenter9:10

Aged.

Ian Hislop9:11

I was sixteen when I got a place.

Presenter9:13

In which college?

Ian Hislop9:14

At Maudlin.

Presenter9:15

Hm. And what any particular reason for choosing Oxford?

Ian Hislop9:18

Well, there were two reasons one honourable and one not very.

Ian Hislop9:23

The first one was because Nick Newman, who was a couple of years older than me, he'd gone up to Oxford and it looked a lot of fun.

Ian Hislop9:30

And my housemaster was uh an old Cambridge man, and uh he was desperate that we should all go to Cambridge, so he'd taken us up for the day. And uh so I thought, now I'll go to Oxford.

Presenter9:42

Record number two.

Ian Hislop9:44

Record number two is The Hippopotamus Song by Flanders and Swan.

Ian Hislop9:49

And and this was well before my time, but it was a record my parents had. They have a um

Ian Hislop9:56

They did two shows at the drop of a hat and at the drop of another hat. And I used to listen to these records when we were abroad and um everywhere else and I just could not believe two men in black tie could sit on a London stage and be that funny. And I used to listen to this mud glorious mud song and I now sing it to my daughter.

Ian Hislop10:19

Uh

Speaker 410:19

His enamorata adjusted her garter.

Ian Hislop10:22

Yeah.

Speaker 410:22

And the lift-headed half-voice in duet in Russian.

Speaker 410:26

Follow me, follow down to the hollow that will improve our cultural relations.

Presenter10:35

Follow me, follow.

Presenter10:39

Well

Speaker 410:45

Okay, thank you.

Presenter10:49

Flanders and Swan and the Hippopotamus Song. So you were up at Maudlin reading English?

Speaker 410:53

Yeah.

Presenter10:53

And destined to miss a first by a whisker. And you wrote and edited a magazine called Passing Wind. Can you describe it to me?

Ian Hislop11:01

Yes, I'm not sure.

Presenter11:01

I think I know what it was like, but go on.

Ian Hislop11:03

The title, you can imagine, was a a terrific plus as a student. It didn't get us much advertising. I remember going into various rather swanky dress shops in Oxford High Street saying, I would like to advertise in this student magazine I'm doing. It's uh very upmarket, very glitzy, very good for your sort of stuff. What's it called?

Ian Hislop11:20

Uh passing wind, thank you!

Presenter11:24

But it had a Star interview in it, didn't it? This Star interview column, and this is really where the story of You and Private Eye begins, isn't it? Because one day you went to interview Peter Cook.

Ian Hislop11:33

Yes, I suppose that was the link. I went to interview Peter, who very kindly had said he'd um give me lunch, and I was so excited about seeing him because uh another of the great records that my parents had was Beyond the Fringe, and I I think Beyond the Fringe stands the test of time as well as anything that's been produced in the last sort of forty years in terms of comedy, and I loved that stuff, and there I was going to meet Peter Cook. The thing about Peter is that when you're nineteen you really shouldn't try and keep up with him drinking.

Ian Hislop12:02

So I uh I did, and by the end of the meal my tape recorder hadn't worked, I had no notes at all, and I could barely stand. So Peter very kindly um

Ian Hislop12:15

He said, I think you'd better go away and sober up and um come back and uh do an interview.

Presenter12:20

What you did.

Ian Hislop12:21

Which I did.

Presenter12:22

But apparently he was so impressed with you that he recommended that uh Richard Ingrams then, who was then editor of the public.

Ian Hislop12:29

Yes, he was the editor of Private Eye, and Peter is the owner, and still is.

Presenter12:31

And he recommended that Richard should be interviewed by you.

Ian Hislop12:34

That's right. I think my lack of professionalism had touched a chord somewhere amongst the the private eye amateurs.

Presenter12:38

Yeah.

Presenter12:40

So when you eventually came face to face with Richard Ingrams, was it a kind of instant recognition? Did you think, you know, this is my kind of man or he thought, you know, he you recognized each other, did you?

Ian Hislop12:50

I greatly enjoyed meeting Richard, um and he made me laugh, and I made him laugh, and I think by the end of it, even though I'd probably asked no sensible journalistic questions at all, I'd um established some sort of rapport with him. And um

Ian Hislop13:05

I kept sending him the magazine, in the hope that he would see it and find it funny.

Presenter13:09

But it it goes deeper than that, doesn't it? That you had quite a lot, or you have quite a lot in common in terms of your background and uh attitudes, generally speaking.

Ian Hislop13:19

That may be true. I I haven't done the psychological reading. Um so you have an absent father and Mr. Ingrams took over later as a sort of figure for you.

Presenter13:27

Well, there's a bit of a figure for you. There's a bit of that, isn't there?

Ian Hislop13:31

Yes, there probably is.

Presenter13:32

Do you think you established the ambition even then when you first met Ingrams, the to take over from him one day?

Ian Hislop13:38

No, I

Ian Hislop13:40

I know I thought that's a great job. Um how on earth do you get to do something like that? Um but at the time I was still At Oxford, and I was still doing review and performing and writing and various things.

Presenter13:52

You were still thinking of getting a proper job, eh?

Ian Hislop13:54

About two thirds of the way through Oxford I was still thinking of getting a proper job. I did manage to give that up. And my mother actually was terribly good about it. She saw a a Sunday Times piece where Ingrams had said, I'm looking for new blood. I don't know whether he was or not. So my mother said, Look, so I wrote him a letter saying, Hello, it's me.

Presenter14:12

So your mother is to blame for it. Oh, entirely. Shall we have record number three?

Ian Hislop14:14

Oh, it's t

Ian Hislop14:17

Record number three, I suppose this is the moment when I decided I didn't want to have a proper job. This is um the Blues Brothers. It's from the film and it's it's the song Everybody Needs Somebody to Love, which is um John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd um filling a whole stadium um with their fans and singing old blues songs um because they want to. It's a moment of amazing self-indulgence and I absolutely love it.

Speaker 414:50

We're so glad to see so many of you lovely people here tonight, and we would especially like to welcome all the representatives of Illinois' law enforcement community who have chosen to join us here in the Palace Hotel Ballroom at this time. We do sincerely hope you all enjoy the show and please remember people that no matter who you are and what you do to live, thrive and survive, there are still some things that make us all the same.

Speaker 415:13

Me

Presenter15:15

Everybody needs somebody to love from the film The Blues Brothers.

Presenter15:19

After university and b before you got a full time job, a staff job on the eye, you you were cramming A level students in in South Cairn. You but you were also writing a lot and trying to make your living writing, weren't you?

Ian Hislop15:30

Yes, I took a show to the Edinburgh Festival and uh which I wrote and performed in, and then when I got back to London I sold half of it to a radio programme called Injury Time which had unknowns like Griffries Jones and Stephen Fry and those sort of people in it.

Presenter15:46

Aren't you happiest of all behind your typewriter writing?

Ian Hislop15:49

Yes, I am essentially a writer and

Ian Hislop15:53

I've done quite a lot of uh writing comedy over the last few years. Um I wrote a couple of plays with Nick Newman for Dawn French, those murder plays. We did uh three of those, and a play for uh Maureen Lippmann and Simon Cadell, which is called Briefcase Encounter, which is a romantic story set amongst middle management.

Presenter16:12

But you write for Harry Enfield as well, don't you?

Ian Hislop16:14

Yes, Harry Emphill's television show Harry needed um some characters who, as he said, were a bit posher and didn't shout all the time. Uh so we came up with a character called Tim Nice but Dim, who was a public school boy of the type that I knew. I was a bit sick of the public school was always presented as thrusting, bracers wearing go-getters in the city, and most of the ones I knew were rather dim but terribly pleasant chaps in chords who went off to work for their father's off licence. And that's what happened to Tim.

Presenter16:45

But you are also making money as a stand up comic, I read.

Ian Hislop16:48

Not making a lot of money and not making a very good job of it either.

Presenter16:52

What did you do?

Ian Hislop16:53

Oh, died embarrassingly. I was very hopeless indeed. I mean, I'm much better at sit-down comedy, which is what I do now at Have I Got News for You.

Presenter17:01

Where did you do it and how did you do it?

Ian Hislop17:04

I did a thing for Capital Radio with a friend, and it was us and a band, and um it was sort of all right a couple of times with the Half Moon Putney and some fairly genteel venues. And then we did a proper stand-up venue, which was a pub I think it was called The Red Lion in Brentford. And we were supporting a a band called Chuck Farley and the Headbangers, who were a heavy metal band, and uh a lot of blokes in singlets and very long hair and sort of girls in leather turned up to see the band. And on came Paul and I and did a very elegant set full of elaborate wordplay around the subject of the recent Bride's Head Revisited Television programme, which we thought was terribly funny, and nobody else did at all. And we absolutely died fifteen minutes, not a laugh.

Presenter17:47

Fuck.

Presenter17:49

So you're you're happier these days, as you say, s doing sit-down comedy routines, as in Have I Got News for You. But how have you coped with what is undoubtedly increased recognition as a result of that? Do you like people poking you in the ribs on the screen?

Ian Hislop18:01

Sue, it's terrible. I just can't bear it. I can't go to the supermarket.

Presenter18:03

Mm-hmm.

Ian Hislop18:05

I don't think it's a great thing to complain about people coming up and saying I liked your show. I mean, there are worse fates. The recognition and the um the celebrity, which is a wonderfully awful word. Um, if anyone ever wants to put me in my place, they say, Oh, I see you're a celebrity, Ian.

Ian Hislop18:22

That's it really. But um

Ian Hislop18:24

I mean, that's all, I think, quite fun, but I don't want it to intrude in

Ian Hislop18:28

Um the sense of um me living my life in the way I want to do it.

Presenter18:32

And you live your life in Clapham with a wife and two children?

Ian Hislop18:36

Yes, I have a wife and two children. Victoria, my wife, and

Presenter18:37

Mm-hmm.

Presenter18:39

Emily's four.

Presenter18:40

Emily's

Ian Hislop18:40

Emily's nearly four.

Presenter18:42

and Williams a few months.

Ian Hislop18:43

Yes.

Presenter18:44

But also reading the profiles about you. I I'm trying very hard here to get to a bit of inner hislop.

Presenter18:50

You also seem

Ian Hislop18:51

I'm putting up what we call the English defence

Presenter18:52

You are, you are. Um I also get the impression you're actually quite a a proper person. You're you're very Christian.

Presenter19:00

Very well behaved.

Ian Hislop19:03

It's very these are very serious allegations to put to someone, uh but they are proper somehow. I do have a certain resistance to change in certain areas and I do believe in certain things and uh that may well ri give rise to these charges of being proper.

Presenter19:17

And politically?

Ian Hislop19:20

Temperamentally, I think I'm quite conservative. Um that's with a small C in terms of a lot of

Ian Hislop19:25

attitudes and beliefs. But the force of events in the whole time I've been writing has made me extremely anti-conservative um over the last two administrations. So I'm helped in this by I don't have a particular ideological line and um my more obvious leanings are always corrected by people like my sister who's a one of the classic liberals who bothers to think things through and then now points them out to me, which always helps.

Presenter19:52

More music.

Ian Hislop19:54

My next choice is Handel Zadok the Priest, which I had sung at my wedding. We had a a group of um Oxford Choral Scholars singing.

Ian Hislop20:04

this, which is actually a coronation anthem, which is probably incredibly megalomaniac to have this sung at your wedding, um but I did and um it was uh it was an extraordinary sound.

Presenter21:07

Handel Zadok the Priest, sung by the choir of King's College, Cambridge, with the English Chamber Orchestra conducted by Sir David Wilcox.

Presenter21:14

Nineteen eighty six, then, and Ian Hislop is appointed editor of Private Eye, successor to his mentor, Richard Ingrams, and at least two contributors in various degrees of dudgeon resign, march off. Wha they didn't want the job themselves particularly, did they? What what did they object to?

Ian Hislop21:29

I think they did want the job themselves. I think it's exactly what they wanted.

Presenter21:32

But Nigel Dempster wanted to be editor of Private App.

Ian Hislop21:34

Both Dempster and certainly Mackay, who subsequently tried to to um become editor by organizing a

Ian Hislop21:41

A rather failed putsch shortly afterwards, thought that Private Eye had become about them. It had become.

Ian Hislop21:50

their mouthpiece, um, it had their obsessions, it was about that world of society gossip which they were interested in. And they were terribly disillusioned to find that Ingrams had reverted to giving it to someone who made jokes. I wanted the eye to have

Ian Hislop22:07

a mix, which I think it's traditionally got, of

Ian Hislop22:11

Satirical jokes, investigative journalism and professional gossip. That's what the eye does.

Presenter22:17

But but gossip is gossip. I mean, what are you saying there, that you only want significant gossip, that you you don't want any old legover, you just want a significant legover.

Ian Hislop22:24

Yes, I suppose that's what I'm saying. I want justifiable and relevant Lego.

Presenter22:29

Justifiable. I mean, surely the difference between the I and a newspaper is that that you will print something like that, that somebody's having an affair with somebody, even if you can't corroborate it, but you you will live dangerously, and that's the difference between you and a and a traditional newspaper, isn't it?

Ian Hislop22:45

The difference between us and tradition is that we take risks in the grey areas, but it's not to say that you'll put something in when there's no suggestion at all that it's true. I won't do that.

Presenter22:54

But you do put stories in that aren't true, and they cost you money. Those are the ones that do cost you a lot of money in the libel courts.

Ian Hislop22:54

But you do

Ian Hislop23:00

Yes, I don't put anything in believing it to be untrue. I mean, certain stories do turn out to be untrue or unprovable and you get egg all over your face and you go and grovel um and pay up and that's um that's fair enough.

Presenter23:08

Mm.

Presenter23:12

Record number five.

Ian Hislop23:14

is suitably madness, one step beyond.

Presenter23:18

Yeah.

Speaker 423:18

One step

Ian Hislop23:20

Uh

Speaker 423:20

Uh

Ian Hislop23:20

Ah

Speaker 423:43

One more snow coming out!

Presenter23:47

Madness and one step beyond.

Ian Hislop23:49

Yes, that's from um the days when I actually had a pork pie hat and thought two-tone was wonderful.

Presenter23:54

You wrote for Splitting Image for the bulk of the 80s. I mean, did you enjoy that? Was that the kind of thing you wanted to do? Was it natural for you?

Ian Hislop24:02

Yes, it was very exciting in the early days because this form hadn't been invented. Um Roger Law and um Peter Fluck had come up with these puppets. They'd been doing waxworks, you know, in a very elderly tradition, you know, back to Domio and Co. of um doing satirical um heads, but they'd made them move, they'd made them talk. So I started working for them in eighty four. I mean the first the first series of all.

Presenter24:27

But you stopped when Mrs. Thatcher left office, didn't you? I mean, was there a link there? Well, I think.

Ian Hislop24:34

After b

Ian Hislop24:36

five years of her and five years of that show, I'd felt um done about all I could do with it. And I used to write there with Nick Newman. And we we did an election show in which we'd done a um the song from Cabaret, Tomorrow Belongs to Me.

Ian Hislop24:50

at the end of it, sort of set in a beer garden with a little boy with a union jack and a felled umbrella. And I remember at the time Brian Wenham said that if that had gone out on b on the BBC there would have been tanks around Broadcasting House.

Ian Hislop25:04

I thought that was a great accolade.

Presenter25:06

It went out though just after the electricity.

Ian Hislop25:07

Yes, they wouldn't put it out before the poll.

Presenter25:10

What about this word satire, though, Ian? I said at the beginning that you were a satirist not least because I like to put my castaways in a good mood. That is what you think of yourself as, though, isn't it? Part of a tradition.

Ian Hislop25:20

Yes, it's certainly one of the things I do, and I think that's certainly where

Ian Hislop25:25

the I and these offshoots of the the sixties satire movement come from. They come from a long tradition in this country of satirical writing. From, I mean, beyond the fringe, that was the week that was, in television terms, but way, way beyond that through English literature, through Dickens, right the way back through Byron, Swift, Pope, um, right the way down. That's what that tradition does. It looks critically at the way public life is organized and says no.

Presenter25:54

Hm. Is it possible to define satire in in all of your studyings and readings? Have you come across a kind of neat phrase that sums it up?'Cause it's quite jolly difficult, isn't it?

Ian Hislop26:03

Yes, it is difficult to define, but the thing I tend to hang on to is there are a couple of quotes. One is from a man called Mencken, who says the point of satire is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, which is pretty good. And in and the English tradition it goes back to Byron, who just says um I'll publish right or wrong, fools are my theme, let satire be my song.

Ian Hislop26:25

It's a great rallying cry.

Presenter26:27

Record number six.

Ian Hislop26:29

Record number six is

Ian Hislop26:32

Jesse Norman.

Ian Hislop26:33

Singing The Holy City I like the human voice above any other instrument, and I love English church music and English choral music.

Ian Hislop26:45

And this is a fairly sentimental and probably um won't appeal to the purist's uh end of the market, but uh Jesse Norman singing this is pretty hard to beat.

Speaker 426:58

We are sleeping and in our dreams of life I stood in wonder beside the devil.

Speaker 427:14

I heard the children singing, and ever as they sang, We thought the voice of angels who heard them once.

Speaker 427:40

Is wrong in walks.

Presenter27:47

Jessie Norman singing The Holy City. How are you going to manage on this island, Ian?

Ian Hislop27:52

Terribly badly.

Presenter27:53

I thought you might. You can't cook.

Ian Hislop27:55

No, I'm very impractical.

Presenter27:57

Hut building abilities, nil.

Ian Hislop27:59

Uh nil. Um I'm I can't do a shelf, so I'm unlikely to be able to do a lean to.

Presenter28:05

How's the swimming?

Ian Hislop28:07

Swimming's good.

Presenter28:07

Is this

Ian Hislop28:08

Um well all those years living abroad, my sister and I having to learn to swim and spending a lot of time on

Ian Hislop28:14

beaches in peculiar bits of the world. No, I'd I'd try hard to swim off, I think. I'm not very good at my own company either. I think I would get very um melancholy.

Speaker 428:23

Uh

Presenter28:23

Hmm.

Ian Hislop28:24

I am quite gregarious and I enjoy other people.

Presenter28:27

And you can't make yourself laugh for long.

Ian Hislop28:30

I don't find myself very funny, so. Actually, that's a lie. I think I'm terrific.

Ian Hislop28:35

But not over a long period.

Presenter28:37

So it's going to be pretty dreary for you on the island. But I I mean, you're a fighter, you're a pugnacious chap, aren't you? You'll fight your way back to civilization.

Ian Hislop28:45

I'll survive. Um I would much rather escape um than put up with my lot and sit there.

Presenter28:51

Let's have your next record,'cause this is a memory of your mother, isn't it?

Ian Hislop28:55

Yes, this is Jack Buchanan.

Ian Hislop28:57

And my mother used to have an album called The Debonair, Jack Buchanan, which was full of.

Ian Hislop29:04

the ultimate Englishness of Jack Buchanan singing these glorious songs in um White Tyrion Tales. The fact is that, like my father, he was actually Scottish. And but that's another thing about the

Ian Hislop29:17

Quality of Englishness, which I like so much, is that you can see through it and find it funny and yet like it a great deal at the same time. I think it's very.

Ian Hislop29:27

Interesting that Alan Bennett had in his play, The Englishman Abroad, a Jack Buchanan song. The man is listening to Jack Buchanan singing Who Stole My Heart Away. I'm I'm a great admirer of Bennett's work, and he has a similar obsession, which I think a lot of people writing here do.

Ian Hislop29:45

He wrote a play called Forty Years On, and when he'd finished it he I gather in the diary was looking out the window seeing um a group of horse guards on parade or whatever, and he he thought, That is absolutely ridiculous, that is quite absurd and yet he had a lump in his throat. And I think it's that reaction.

Ian Hislop30:03

to one's own country and situation and whatever that

Ian Hislop30:08

I I get when listening to this, as well as remembering my mum.

Speaker 430:12

Good night PM

Speaker 430:16

You city of a million melodies.

Presenter30:19

What is

Speaker 430:20

Our hearts are thrilling to the strains that you play From dawn till the daylight dies.

Speaker 430:29

Good night at the end of

Presenter30:30

Yeah.

Speaker 430:32

Where moonlight fills the air with mystery.

Presenter30:34

The

Speaker 430:36

And eyes are shining to the chips, they guitars.

Presenter30:37

Show

Speaker 430:40

That thing to the starry sky

Speaker 430:45

In Charti City of Columbine and Piero.

Speaker 430:50

We know the magic of your spell.

Speaker 430:54

Of our romances, you're the hero.

Speaker 430:58

Now is the time to say farewell.

Speaker 431:03

The night began.

Presenter31:06

Jack Buchanan and Good Night Vienna

Presenter31:08

Private eye is what a six day fortnight is a job.

Ian Hislop31:12

Yes, I work there six days a fortnight.

Presenter31:13

Which is why you can do so many other things.

Ian Hislop31:15

Yes, it was set up by these wonderful people in the sixties who didn't want to work too hard.

Presenter31:19

But you can't stay there forever, despite its being the best job in the world. What are you going to do next?

Ian Hislop31:24

Well, I would guess that, um

Ian Hislop31:27

After Brivate Eye one is quite literally washed up. Desert Island or not, so I've no idea.

Ian Hislop31:33

I hope I'll be able to carry on writing. That's what I want to do.

Presenter31:36

But you must have some ambition. You must have your eye on something. I can't believe that you haven't

Presenter31:41

A small plot somewhere in the back of the head there.

Ian Hislop31:44

Obviously I want to be Director General. Um I think that's very likely. And um Editor of the Telegraph.

Ian Hislop31:51

No, I want to be editor of Hello, that's what I want to be.

Presenter31:54

Last record.

Ian Hislop31:56

My last record is Monteverde.

Ian Hislop32:00

And it's called Exulta Filia. It's um from a collection of sacred and not profane, but sacred and um what's unsacred? I suppose profane is more or less the word. Songs. I like Monteverdi hugely. Um not only the operas, but uh his madrigals I like a great deal and this one comes from a collection of them. Madrigals and sacred choruses. How very pedantic. Shut up.

Speaker 432:25

Exhorta Filia, Exhorta Filia, Exorta Filia Se all exhorta exurta down a louder.

Speaker 432:36

Loud and loud, louder feeling, I lose and loud and loud, exulta, loud, louder, exulta.

Presenter32:38

Golda.

Presenter32:40

No signs of

Presenter32:44

Yeah.

Speaker 432:47

We are seeing

Presenter33:16

Ian Partridge singing Monteverdi's Exulta Filia, if you could only take one of the eight.

Ian Hislop33:23

I'd have to take The Marriage of Figaro, not only because there's more of it, but because I think that would give the greatest pleasure of of that selection.

Presenter33:31

What about your book?

Ian Hislop33:33

I was very worried by this because there is

Ian Hislop33:35

A passage in a handful of dust, which is Evelyn Wars.

Ian Hislop33:39

Book about the man who ends up having to read the complete works of Dickens to a tribal chieftain for the rest of his life. He's stuck in the jungle, and uh the man's called Todd, I suppose meant to be death, but it's a vision of a living death sitting there. And the man comes in in the morning and says we'll have Martin Chuzzlewick today. He has to sit there. And I suppose the setting is quite similar, middle of a jungle or sitting on a desert island grimly turning the pages. I was going to choose Dickens.

Ian Hislop34:06

But for that reason I won't, and I'd take Oscar Wilde the complete works if if you're allowed that.

Presenter34:11

No, you're not.

Ian Hislop34:12

Are you not? Is it one play?

Presenter34:12

I'll just do one play.

Ian Hislop34:16

Right, well, I'm entirely stumped now, so I'm going to have to come up with something completely other, because I don't want to just sit there re-reading. I'll take.

Ian Hislop34:23

Kenneth Clark's Civilization.

Ian Hislop34:25

largely because it's very politically incorrect and no one likes it any more. But I think it would be wonderful to sit there and remind myself what you don't have on a desert island, which is the benefits, the trappings and uh the comforts of civilization. So that's what I'd take.

Presenter34:43

What about your luxury?

Ian Hislop34:44

My luxury, I want um Frosties.

Ian Hislop34:49

I can't cook. I'm never going to catch anything. I want a supply of frosties to eat. I lived on them for the first five years of my life in London, and I don't see why I shouldn't continue on this island.

Presenter35:00

Okay, Frost isn't civilization. Ian Hislop, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your Desert Island discs.

Speaker 335:12

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Islandists Archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.