Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter

Speaker 20:01

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Speaker 20:05

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Presenter0:47

Hello, I'm Lauren Laverne and this is the Desert Island Discs podcast. Every week I ask my guests to choose the eight tracks, book and luxury they'd want to take with them if they were castaway to a desert island. And, for rights reasons, the music is shorter than the original broadcast. I hope you enjoy listening.

Presenter1:27

My castaway this week is the statistician Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter. He's the chair of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at Cambridge University and one of the most frequently cited experts in the field of statistics, a critically important discipline in the age of digital disinformation. If you torture the data long enough, it will confess to anything, the old saying goes. Well, it's his mission to push back against such forced confessions and those who misrepresent data for their own ends. As a former professor of public understanding of risk, he also wants to arm us with the right questions to ask about the barrage of statistics we encounter every day.

Presenter2:08

He's earned a knighthood for services to his subject and also his work on statistical teams at the public inquiries into children's heart surgery at the Bristol Royal Infirmary and the Harold Chipman murders. His most recent role was thrust upon him in retirement when he became the unofficial explainer-in-chief of the vast amounts of data generated during the COVID-19 pandemic. Though it's as much about what we don't know as what we do, he says, In a world in which strident voices dominate, open acknowledgement of what we don't know could be a very small step for humility and trustworthiness. Of course, just because we don't know everything does not mean we don't know anything. We should be clear on what we do know and then proclaim our uncertainty with confidence. Professor Sir David Spiegel Holter, welcome to Desert Island Discs.

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter2:57

Thank you so much. I'm just too excited for words. This has been a lifelong ambition.

Presenter3:02

Well, we're absolutely delighted to have you. David, you've referred to statisticians in the past as being evidence policemen. Tell me a bit more about that and also your approach to the job. Good cop, bad cop, what is it?

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter3:13

I think it's a statistician's job to work out what the data can tell us about a particular about how the world works. And that means weighing it up, looking at its quality and making a judgment about it. So perhaps evidence judiciary would be a better phrase.

Presenter3:28

I see. Okay. You have said that although numbers are often treated as cold hard facts, we should be willing to acknowledge how uncertain they can be. Why is that so important?

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter3:28

Uh

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter3:37

I don't think that numbers are just cold facts about the world. We have to take into account that they can be used to influence our emotions. They can be used to manipulate us. I know I could make any number look large or look small to reassure people, to frighten people, just by the way I tell the story. And so it's very important that we use our judgment in interpreting those numbers. They do not speak for themselves. We imbue them with meaning.

Speaker 23:47

Yeah.

Presenter4:03

So there's an element of public trust. It's obviously important for public trust, but also this sense of the amount of information that we're encountering in modern life and the amount of disinformation. All statistics surely just become noise after a certain point. If there's too much, we lose the numbers that we should be understanding and engaging with.

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter4:22

I feel sorry for anybody during this pandemic. The amount of stuff that gets thrown at us in the news or, you know, especially if you go onto social media, loads of claims all based on numbers. Which ones are we supposed to trust? And as you said, trust is the crucial thing. And the people I work with are absolutely focused on trustworthy communication because in the end we do have to trust. We can't check everything for ourselves. We can't do our own research about all these things. And so we have to identify trustworthy sources. And I find it very distressing that many people I know who are intelligent, well-educated people obviously find it very difficult to judge what are trustworthy sources. And they go to YouTube videos and they find sites and I think, oh no, you can't believe that. And what it does is of course make me realise I've had 40, 50 years of doing this, of weighing up quality of evidence and whether I trust the source or not. And I think this is an essential skill in modern citizenship. And I think it actually should be part of education in schools.

Presenter4:28

Especially if you

Presenter5:20

And I have to ask you about your approach to the task at hand today, selecting your eight disks. Have you used any statistical analysis?

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter5:27

No, absolutely not. But I started doing this 15 years ago, so I have had a list for some time. I've had to revise it a little bit.

Presenter5:34

Let's get started then. First disc, what's it gonna be?

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter5:37

is Leonard Cohen. I I've been listening to him since I was fifteen, so for more than fifty years. And I finally got to see him on one of his final tours. And he was as good as ever. I love his clever lyrics and I love the wry humour that he developed, especially as he got older.

Speaker 45:55

Everybody knows that the dice are loaded Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed Everybody knows the war is over Everybody knows the good guys lost Everybody knows the fight was fixed The poor stay poor The rich get rich That's how it goes

Speaker 46:27

Everybody knows.

Presenter6:29

Leonard Cohen and Everybody Knows. So David Spiegelhalter, you've used your expertise to analyze and interpret data from the pandemic in newspaper columns and a book that you co wrote with Anthony Masters and regularly here on Radio Four Two. I wonder what you uncovered during all of that work that most surprised you?

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter6:48

I think the one I might choose is that the pandemic has been a net life-saver for younger people. If you look at people between 15 and 30 in 2020, 300 fewer died than would normally have died. And that included the 100 who died from COVID, sadly. So that's 300 fewer families mourning the death of a young person because of the pandemic. Now, that's because young people were essentially locked up. They couldn't go out driving fast, they couldn't go out and get drunk, and they couldn't get into fights, whatever. And so all these lives were saved. And none of those families know who they are. They're all sort of, in a way, ghost families. These are people who don't know that they would otherwise be mourning. The problem is when I talk about that, people might say, do you think it's a good thing, therefore, that young people should be locked up? And say, no, I'm not saying this is a good thing. Because on the flip side of that, you've got a big increase in mental health problems and so on.

Presenter7:43

David, you said that like many others, you were a little bit slow to admit the seriousness of the virus at the beginning because you have this tendency to be optimistic. Do you have to factor your own biases into the work that you do? How easy is it?

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter7:56

I think it's very important that we have to acknowledge that we can never take an objective view about evidence. We always bring our personalities into it. And mine is, unfortunately, very optimistic. And that's why I'm very glad I'm not a government advisor. I don't think I'd be very good at it because I do tend to hope for the best and sort of expect the best as well. I was terribly over-optimistic at the start of this pandemic and didn't take it seriously enough.

Presenter8:20

It's time for your second piece of music today, David. What have you chosen?

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter8:24

If you ask my friends and their family, they'll tell you that I do quite like to have a drink and dance around to loud, raucous rock music. And I've got a particular fondness for sort of Euro trash. And this is a prime example by a Moldavian group. And I call it Numa Numa because I can't pronounce its real name. You know, back in 2007, we made a Christmas video at home. My daughter worked out a dance routine and I filmed everybody and put it together and it's on YouTube and it's really funny. And recently, my other daughter's 39th birthday, we all did the dance routine again, like something out of Bollywood. I just love dancing to this one.

Speaker 49:00

Praise the Blech Darnomano Maye, Numa No Maye, Numa Noma Nomaye. Ki pulteu shidra go stadinte na mintesk de all kita. Praise the blech, dar no mano maie, noma no ma ye.

Presenter9:30

I have to say, it's an absolute pleasure to watch you dance to that, to David Spiegelhalter. I can imagine you on your island now. Dragosteadinte by Ozone. So, David, you mentioned your family. Let's talk a little bit about your roots then. You were born in Barnstaple in 1953 to Eddie and Faye. Your dad was an estate agent. I think your mum was a factory worker. Though it does seem like your parents had an adventurous side. I saw a photograph of your father bursting out of a flaming coffin, which is not a sentence I get to say every week.

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter10:01

My parents were curious. They were very energetic and very enterprising, and that's what I remember from being young. And my father used to think up stunts all the time. This was for a conservative fate. He became an escapologist. And this required him to be handcuffed and then sewn into a sack and then nailed down into a coffin. And that had petrol thrown all over it, and then the whole lot set on fire. And he burst out. In the end, his mum got him to stop doing it. So she didn't like it. She was not keen on it at all.

Presenter10:30

So she didn't like

Presenter10:32

And what about your mum, Faye? Did she have an appetite for adventure too?

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter10:36

My poor parents, they were very underemployed. They left school at 16 and my mum only did really unskilled jobs and my father was very keen on new tech. He was an early adopter of computers and film and video and all that kind of stuff. He was still giving me computer advice when he was 80. And my mum was just obsessed with singing and dancing and sport and being in the amateur musicals. So I learned all the words to Oklahoma and Rosemary and all these. She used to walk around the house singing them all the time.

Presenter11:05

Your mum was brought up in Shanghai, wasn't she? Did she talk much about her childhood?

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter11:09

Her father was a printer for a newspaper in Shanghai and she had an exciting time. When she was 10 years old, on the way to her school on a ship, they were captured by pirates. And yeah, 80 school kids captured by pirates who killed one of the crew and took the whole boat off. And the British gunboats came out and destroyers and everything like that. And pirates left the ship and the kids all got free.

Presenter11:18

Yeah.

Speaker 211:18

Yeah.

Presenter11:32

David, it's time for some more music, I think. Number three today, what are we going to hear and why?

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter11:36

As a kid I was obsessed with with numbers and cars and things like that. But then became a teenager I became obsessed with pop music. And this is one of my first singles I bought from Fleetwood Mac. It was six and six at the time. And that was about two hours work on the petrol pumps, which is where I was earning some money at the time. So you had to think a lot before you bought a single track in those days.

Speaker 412:00

I can't help about the shape I'm in I can't sing I ain't pretty and my legs are thin But don't ask me what I think of you I might not give the answers that you want me to

Presenter12:29

Fleetwood Mac and O Well. So David, you mentioned yourself as a kid and and your early facility for numbers and and order by the sounds of it. You know, it sounds like you were a collector. Tell me more about that.

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter12:37

And all

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter12:38

It was that

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter12:41

Yeah, that's exactly it. I collected stamps and collected toy cars obsessively, collected car numbers and I liked to put things in order. I had a good childhood. You know, it was very free and easy. A lot of roaming around, the doors unlocked, climbing trees and everything like that. It was a lot of fun.

Presenter12:57

How did you spend your time with your siblings?'Cause you were the youngest of three, I think.

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter13:00

I get on with them very well now, but um not very much when I was a kid. No, no, I was off on my own all with my friends. And I used to play on my own a lot with toy soldiers and my toy cars, and I still like to spend a lot of time on my own. I'm very happy not talking to people for long periods.

Presenter13:16

And what about at school? Were you top of the class?

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter13:19

Yeah, I did quite well at school, yes. I I suppose I did. And I, you know, enjoyed the maths and so that naturally led me to do more maths. It was a grammar school and uh it was a very good education and uh when we were applying to go into Oxford then you know they provided extra tuition to try to get through the entrance exam.

Presenter13:35

Your mum and dad were outgoing and adventurous personalities. What kind of expectations did they have for you kids?

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter13:42

They hadn't had much of an education, but they encouraged us very strongly. I mean, we weren't a very demonstrative family. I mean, they were very kind, but we didn't talk about our feelings. We didn't talk about opinions or emotions really at all. It was all kept on a very sort of superficial level. I'd been reflecting on this a bit in preparing for this program, and I realized that they were immensely positive people. They were very active, very energetic, but very positive. And they didn't complain ever about anything, and they didn't moan about other people either. They didn't criticise other people. So we weren't allowed to. And I think that has influenced me. I do try to stay positive and not to criticise others. I mean, I'm sure I do it, but I try not to.

Presenter14:26

David, it's time for disc number four.

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter14:28

This is a song by a Portuguese group, Madrids, which is sort of post-Fardo or something, and they're singing in Portuguese. I've no idea what they're singing about, and I don't want to know. It's just that the woman's got the most beautiful voice I think I've heard. And it reflects the fact that I think a number of the songs I'm choosing today are not in English, and I don't know what they're talking about. But I do love the emotion expressed in the music.

Speaker 414:51

La Porta

Speaker 414:53

The Calendar.

Speaker 414:56

My mother be you know

Speaker 415:01

Oh my gosh!

Speaker 415:03

My grand touch, dummy quizzer, fine grandeur on fusants.

Speaker 415:15

Not all that.

Speaker 415:17

Noma que séve ni grande confusa.

Presenter15:23

Avakada Fogu sung by Madradeosh. David, you studied mathematics at Oxford University and that was when you found and fell in love with statistics. You took a Master's, then a PhD in the subject at University College London. After that you spent a year teaching at the University of California in Berkeley. A pretty cool place to be in the late 70s, especially as you were only in your mid-twenties then. How did you take to life on campus?

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter15:49

I had a wonderful time in America. I was teaching, so it could be fairly irresponsible. It's still a sort of hangover from its sort of hippie days at Berkeley, and it was an exciting place to be. It did decide me that I didn't want to live in the States. In what way, right? I realised that I was spending the whole time looking at British newspapers and felt this was a very foreign country compared with other places in Europe, for example. Unlike many of my colleagues, I didn't want to go and work there, because there was a big brain drain in my subject.

Speaker 216:01

Sorry, how would

Presenter16:15

After that year you returned to the UK. You started working in Nottingham on computer aided diagnosis. That was the forerunner of today's machine learning and artificial intelligence in medicine. It must have been in its infancy back then. What sorts of things were you doing?

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter16:30

That was an exciting time because people had got this idea that you could put someone's symptoms into the computer and it could come out with the probability of their diagnosis. And that's exactly what people are happening now. It was very rudimentary then. You know, the computer was this great big thing that sat in the corner of the room. So it's very clumsy. You didn't have nice little tablets to put stuff in. But there was a lot of interest in it. And the problems that came up were the same ones that happen now: how does this fit into the normal way in which medicine's practiced? But it led on to more mathematical work on how artificial intelligence should handle uncertainty. And there was a lot of discussion about that in the early 80s about whether probability theory could be applied in artificial intelligence. And I was part of a group that strongly argued it could be, and we developed methods for it, which became the standards that are used. And essentially, we won.

Speaker 217:09

Yeah.

Presenter17:25

Yes, exactly. I mean, it's cited in thousands of academic papers and the breakthroughs that you pioneered with that group of people. They're as standard in all sorts of technology round the world. Have you ever attempted to work out how much money you could have made if you'd put a patent on it?

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter17:41

Oh, no, that and other things. No, yeah, exactly. No, we've had huge numbers of academic citations and use of the methods we developed, but I've not got any entrepreneurial skills whatsoever or interest. So it's been very nice to be able to do everything and just to open it right up and to give it all away.

Presenter17:59

David, it's time to move on to the next piece of music. What have you got for us and why have you chosen it today?

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter18:05

I developed a huge liking in my 30s to what you might call punk folk or heavy folk bands like the Levellers or the Pogues. And in fact, you know, when I met my current partner Kate, our first date was to go to a Pogues gig at Wembley Arena. And she liked it. So passed the test and we're still together. And so this is the Pogues.

Speaker 418:34

Fashion far progressive gun, we're an odd to kind of remove me If I'm buried neat the sun But the ancients won't see me Let me go, boys, let me go boys Let me go down in the mud

Presenter18:54

The Poges If I Should Fall From Grace with God, a family favorite, Sir David Spiegelhalter.

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter18:59

I love the band and when my kids were fairly small I used to take them and get to the front and sort of protect them from the mayhem around me so they could witness Shane McGowan's performance.

Presenter19:09

Wow. So let's talk a little bit about your family then, David. You're a father of three, your daughter Kate from your first marriage, and then Rosie and Danny from your second. Now, tragically, Danny was diagnosed with retinoblastoma, cancer of the eye, just before he turned one. How did you realise something was wrong?

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter19:30

Very easily, when you used to take a photograph with a flash camera, people's eyes used to turn up red, and one of his eyes was red, and the other was white. And I tell anybody, if they ever see that, get your child immediately seen because that's one characteristic of cancer of the eye, to show a white reflection on a flash. So he had radiotherapy when he was about 11 months old, and then went through various treatments. He got better and then had a remission, and then more, then chemotherapy, and stem cell transplant, and more radiotherapy. And then when he was five, he had had enough, and we knew he wasn't going to survive. And so we stopped treatment. So we could take him home. We could be at home with him and he could die in our arms at home.

Speaker 219:45

Please

Speaker 220:14

Uh

Presenter20:14

Yeah.

Presenter20:22

It must just have been an an unimaginable, an awful time.

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter20:26

Totally, totally life-changing. You know, I just, everything is before or after that event. But we had.

Presenter20:31

Uh

Speaker 220:32

Yeah.

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter20:33

time to get used to the idea and to deal with it and we dealt with it as a family I think really very well. We knew he was going to die, his school knew he was going to die, so we could be ready for it and how people die I think is enormously important, obviously for them but also for all the people left behind and Danny did it brilliantly.

Speaker 220:52

Hmm.

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter20:55

And when he died, you know, we dressed him up in his Virgil Tracy Thunderbird suit. And my older daughter, Kate, who's 14 at the time, then sat with him all the next day while a hundred people came to see him, including most of his class of five-year-olds, all turned up. They didn't have to, they wanted to, so they went up to say goodbye to Dan.

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter21:18

And we had people through the house all day. And we sat downstairs with a vast amount of wine to brace people. And it was extraordinary. And then the funeral, again, we did it ourselves. I was influenced by the Natural Death Handbook. It's a fantastic resource. I built his coffin with my men's group. And then another team decorated the outside of the coffin. Another team made a lovely bed inside. And then we screwed him down into the coffin ourselves. And for the funeral, we went out into the street, just stopped all the traffic. We didn't tell anyone. We just walked down the street with this enormous procession with his uncle playing Danny Boy on the violin at the front of this whole lot of people as we carried Dan down the street.

Speaker 221:35

Yeah.

Presenter22:06

It's extraordinary that despite the enormity of what you were facing, you were able to

Presenter22:13

to take it on in that way, to to make choices about it, to to choose to participate in it in it in a a way that felt right to you.

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter22:20

Well, we were so fortunate in that it wasn't a sudden event. We knew it was going to come, so we could go through all our feelings and our emotions. It was really tough. But what it did mean is that we involved so many other people in family and friends, the entire neighbourhood was involved, which meant that after it had happened, nobody ever avoided the subject or crossed the road, as you hear about people after they've experienced this kind of thing. People don't know what to say. Everyone knew what to say because they all had been to the funeral and they'd all had participated, and a lot of them had done some, contributed something to it.

Presenter22:46

We got

Speaker 222:46

Yeah.

Presenter22:54

You also mentioned your men's group, David. I mean, it sounds like you were a bit ahead of the curve there. So they were a group that you'd already been part of for quite a long time, I think. And they were the ones who helped you make Danny's Coffin.

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter22:57

Yeah.

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter23:02

For quite a long time.

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter23:06

Yes, yeah. When my first wife and I split up amicably in 1986, but I was really in a bit of a state and realised how in a way buttoned up and I had been. And so this men's group, I mean, this was an 80s thing. I'm not sure if they exist in the same way now, but these were men's groups. It wasn't men's rights or anything like that. This was a really anti-sexist men's group. They were there to support women, to engage in childcare, and to, in a way, form a sort of counselling group without a leader in which we talked and listened to each other. And all normal men's banter and discussion of opinions about things were banned. What kind of thing was off the table? Oh, you can't talk about sport or cars or politics or television or any of those things or work.

Presenter23:48

Off the table.

Presenter23:54

What's left to talk about?

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter23:55

Exactly. You talk about your feelings, your emotions, how you're getting on, and things like that, and your relationships. And we did it. And that was 1986. So we're still meeting 35 years later.

Presenter24:05

Well

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter24:05

Wow. Still meeting them.

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter24:07

And they've been a huge influence on me.

Presenter24:10

Going through all of that, David, and you said there's a a before and after Danny's death, and of course I understand that. Are there two different versions of you, do you think?

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter24:19

Yeah, yeah. In a way, I became a lot bolder. In a way, I didn't care about anything more because I would have gladly swapped my life for his. And once you genuinely feel that, although it's impossible, you never feel the same again. I'm not scared of dying. I'm not scared of failing. I don't care anymore. Nothing can be as bad. And so I tried loads of things. I started sailing, skiing. I joined a Samba band. I started doing stained glass. I'd just try anything. All of which I'm pretty second rate at, if not third rate at. But I didn't care anymore. Just have a go. But I started climbing mountains as well.

Speaker 224:38

And so

Presenter24:55

I think we better have some more music. This is your sixth choice to do.

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter24:58

Oh god, this is tough. This is a song from Richard Strauss's four last songs, Jesse Norman. After Danny died, I listened to this again and again and again and again. And I've hardly been able to listen to it since.

Speaker 425:37

Oh my faith.

Speaker 425:48

We are the first king.

Speaker 426:02

And the open tone here is that.

Presenter26:14

BIM Schlaffengeen, When Falling Asleep, from Richard Strauss's Four Last Songs, sung by Jessie Norman with the Leipzig Gevanthaus Orchestra, conducted by Kurt Mazieu.

Presenter26:26

Sir David Spiegelholter, you've been awarded many accolades and medals for your work over the years, including a knighthood. One of your key contributions to statistical application was your work on the Harold Shipman inquiry, so you were an expert witness there. Tell me a little bit about what your research uncovered.

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter26:44

This followed also work on the Bristol Babies inquiry, where I headed that team there. And both of those inquiries were about essentially bad performance in the health service. And so, this is a statistical issue about what is bad performance and how quickly could you detect it. And so, if Harold Shipman, I was part of the team that was asked to say, well, could he have been caught earlier if people had been looking at the data? And so, we looked at the statistical methods that were used in industrial quality control, where you monitor whether a process is going out of kilter by seeing whether you're getting more failures than you would expect. And in Harold Shipman's case, it was looking for when more people were dying in his practice than you would expect. And we adapted the methods used in industrial quality control and showed that actually Shipman could have been caught much earlier. And if someone had been looking at the data and had blown the whistle, you might have been able to save 200 lives. The crucial thing about that is both the Bristol inquiry and the Shipman inquiry, we were giving evidence about when this could have been stopped earlier with the families of the victims sitting in the audience watching us, which was a very good practice in statistical communication about difficult topics in a way that everyone could understand. It had to be made clear to that audience.

Presenter28:10

More recently, you and your team, David, have been involved in developing tools to help evaluate clinical outcomes, and that's to help patients and doctors decide on a course of treatment after a cancer diagnosis.

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter28:22

We've got systems that we've worked on for women with breast cancer and men with prostate cancer that will call the PREDICT systems, part of the NHS, that will give you your prognosis, your chance of living 10 years under all sorts of different treatments you might have and that allow for the different severity of the disease. And again, enormously popular.

Presenter28:36

Mm.

Presenter28:41

Have you engaged with these technologies in your own medical care, I wonder?

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter28:45

Oh yeah, well I've had prostate cancer and I wish the system that we now help develop had been available to me when I was choosing my therapy five years ago when I was engaged in that discussion and now Prostate Predict is being used and I think it's an excellent system and I only wish it had been available to help the discussion between me and the medical experts.

Speaker 228:55

When I was

Presenter29:08

And having been through your cancer treatment now, I wonder how you feel having come out the other side of that. Has it changed your outlook on life again?

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter29:16

Oh, I think so. Again, you know, it's made me want to take advantage of every day, I think. The whole pandemic has been, I can't complain at all because I've been busy, I've had things to do and I've been in a good environment. But, you know, my complaint is that I want to get out there travelling the world doing, having adventures and haven't been able to do them.

Presenter29:38

Well, we're going to give you the trip of a lifetime to your desert island in a little while. But before we do, Sir David Spiegelhalter, let's have your seventh disc today, shall we? What's it going to be?

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter29:47

This is yet another female voice singing sadly in a foreign language. This is Ebau Madich from Bach's St. Matthew Passion. I'm a latecomer to that piece of music, but I've been completely overwhelmed by it. And there's a cliché that mathematicians like Bach, and I just fulfil that cliché.

Speaker 430:18

Heavenly shrine got

Presenter31:04

Ebarmadique from Bach St. Matthew Passion, sung by Judith Namath with the Hungarian State Orchestra, conducted by Geza Oberfrank.

Presenter31:14

In 2007, you were appointed Winton Professor for the Public Understanding of Risk at the University of Cambridge, and that brought with it a more public profile, presenting a number of television programmes explaining statistics and luck and related ideas. However, I want to ask you about 2011, when you used your analytical skills to enter and take part in the quiz show Winter Wipeout, an offshoot of Total Wipeout, I believe. You competed as Professor Risk in Argentina with your eldest daughter Kate, trying not to fall off various quite padded obstacle courses. It is a clip people can view on the internet if they so wish. I would encourage them to do so.

Presenter31:55

Tell me more about this extraordinary moment in your career.

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter31:59

Oh, this is the high point of my career, definitely. People have seen the program Wipeout. I mean, it's an obstacle course filmed in Buenos Aires. Part of it comprises these huge bouncy red balls you have to jump over and fall in the water and the mud and everything. It's about aimed at about eight-year-olds, I think, but I've always absolutely loved it. And my daughter suggested, come on, dad, let's apply and try to get on it. I went to the audition, everyone was hugely younger than me, but I went down in full Cambridge academic dress suit.

Speaker 232:28

Robes

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter32:28

Black shoes, suit, mortarboard, OBE, the whole lot. And I said, I'm Professor Risk. I took the war, the OBE, and I said, I'm Professor Risk. I demand to tackle the big red balls. This is a professional obligation. And then I tried to stand on my head, which I usually can do, but with a gown and heavy shoes on, I just couldn't make it. Anyway, they just looked at me and said, oh, goodness me. And Kate and I both got on the programme.

Speaker 232:28

Uh

Presenter32:28

Yeah.

Speaker 232:30

Black shoes.

Speaker 232:35

Better risk.

Presenter32:35

Euro

Presenter32:57

You inherited your dad's penchant for adventure. The escapologist in you was definitely leading that day.

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter33:02

Was

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter33:04

Yeah, yeah. But and I trained and trained. I t took it very seriously.

Presenter33:07

Time's nearly upon us now, David, so soon you'll have a different adventure to get your teeth into. You, alone, cast away on a desert island. What do you think the biggest challenge that you'll face there is?

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter33:19

I think I will get a bit lonely. I do love being on my own and I like not talking to people for long periods of time, but I will miss uh friends and family. I will miss the internet. I mean I and Twitter. You know, I really not sure how I could survive uh without it, but I suppose I'll have to.

Presenter33:36

Have you calculated the odds of how long you could survive on the island?

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter33:40

No, no, no, no. I think I'd make a go of it. Again, I'm not very competent, but I'm willing to have a go.

Presenter33:48

Before you go though, one more tune to pick. What are you going to take with you for disc number eight?

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter33:53

When the kids were young, we did long car journeys down to the West Country and other places. And we used to play on cassette tapes in those days, you know, what you might call novelty songs. And we had a huge, huge supply of these. And I've just chosen one, a particular favourite, that we all used to sing along to as the car drove along when father papered the parlour.

Speaker 434:15

Our parlour wanted papering, and par said it was waste To call the paper hangers in and so he made some paste. He got some rolls of paper, a ladder and a brush, And with me mother's nightgown on at it, he made a rush. When father papered the parlour, you couldn't see dad for paste. Dabbing it here, dabbing it there, there was paste and paper everywhere. Mother was stuck to the ceiling, and the kids were stuck to the floor. You never

Presenter34:45

WHEN FATHER PAPERE THE PARLOR BILLY WILLIAMS Professor David Spiegelhalter, I'm going to send you away to the island now. I'm giving you the Bible, the complete works of Shakspere, and of course you can take another book of your choice. What would you like?

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter34:59

I would like to take The Survival Guide by Bear Grylls. I mean, I've never watched any of Bear Grylls programmes, I'm not particularly interested, but if I'm going to be on this island, I want to try to make the best of it. And I said I'm pretty second rate at practical things, but I do like to have a go. I love being in my shed messing around, but I like to follow instructions.

Presenter35:02

Shut up.

Speaker 435:02

Uh

Presenter35:17

What about your luxury item then? What would you like?

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter35:20

I think I'd need to have an unlimited supply of killer Sudokus extremes. But I need them on paper with a pencil because then, haha, am I allowed to do this? I can use the back.

Presenter35:25

Uh

Speaker 235:25

Yeah.

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter35:32

to write and to draw and to keep some sort of record of what's going on.

Presenter35:37

Certainly, you can, of course. And finally, which one track of the eight that you've shared with us today would you save from the waves?

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter35:44

I think I'd have to have what I call Numa Numa by Ozone, the sort of Moldavian Eurotrash song, because it reminds me so much of dancing around my family, having fun.

Presenter35:56

Europop wins the day. Who da-thunk it? Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter, thank you very much for letting us hear your Desert Island disc.

Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter36:03

Oh, it's been such an honour.

Presenter36:20

I hope you enjoyed my conversation with David, and I hope he's happy doing his killer Sudokus and roaming around his island using his survival guide. Bear Grylls was cast away in 2011, and you can hear his programme if you search through our Desert Island Discs programme archive and have a look on BBC Sounds. You'll also find more than 2,000 editions to listen to. The studio manager for today's programme was Tim Heffer, and the producer was Sarah Taylor. Next time, my guest will be the actress Leslie Carrone. I do hope you'll join us.