Low life
Just deserts
Jeffrey Bernard
One of the less disgusting and more harmless of my infantile fantasies is the recurring one about making an appearance — or is it a sounding? — on Roy Plomley's extraordinary programme, Desert Island Dises.I say extraordinary since I can't quite grasp why it is that I'm so drawn to the wretched programme. I mean, sometimes, I find it quite compulsive although last week I had to turn off a plant and beetle man descended from BBC-2's Charles Darwin, no doubt, whose voice and choice really did inflict actual bodily harm on my ears. But, who gives a damn anyway about what records the likes of Patrick Moore, Joan Fontaine or the revolting Michael Crawford would like to take with them? Apparently I do from time to time. Of course, the premise that if you like music then you've got a favourite eight or ten pieces is daft enough, but given that, then in my case it would be lashings of Beethoven and Mozart spiked with some Spanish bitters in the shape of Albeniz and Granados.
All that, though, isn't going to make life on a desert island easy for the more gregarious man. Other essentials for a ten year stay would be 150,000 untipped cigarettes, a few hundredweight of tea, cases of whisky, Heinz tomato ketchup for all that daily seafood, a really good radio set on which to hear Test Match commentaries, racing results and the result of the third World war and a gun for protection, hunting and possible suicide.
But that isn't really what this wretched fantasy is all about. Imagine waking up exhausted on my golden beach only to find to my intense horror the bodies of Charles Forte, Esther Rantzen, David Coleman, Edward Heath, Margaret Thatcher, Bernard Levin, James Burke, Claire Tomalin, Bruce Forsyth and Roy Plomley himself all lying there next to me. Apart from them and washed up alongside the party there's an old gramophone with just three discs — Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies, a traditional jazz bit performed by Acker Bilk and Dukas's Sorcerer's Apprentice which apart from the noise it makes, would constantly remind me of Mickey Mouse.
There is one great consolation. It's, a definite odds on chance that there's not one person there that I'm not capable of physically dispatching, but I hope it doesn't come to that. Anyway, it's going to be really awful. We wake up to a breakfast of coconutburgers prepared by our chef Charles Forte and served on dirty palm leafs. Just as we're forcing the first mouthful down, David Coleman jumps up as though George Best has just driven one in from thirty yards and screams, 'There it is. That's it. What a sun. You don't see many sans, come up like that first thing in the morning., Claire Tomalin informs us that the likes ca Virginia Woolf haven't been lucky enough to see the sun for some thirty-five odd years, now and then James Burke goes throng" the connection between collisions at sea, coconuts, a dog's lead in Wapping and sone_ edelweiss growing on the Brenner Pass. (-1' something like that. Mr Levin is a little moody today which marks the umPteenth anniversaryof the opening of the trans' Siberian Railway plus the first anniversarY of the last time he went to Bayrenth. Mean' Roy Plomley, in his role as dese" island red coat and cheer leader is walking about asking everyone if they're haPPY an Esther Rantzen is busy putting a note tO H.M. Government into a bottle CO plaining that Admiralty charts have °Pi travened the Trades Description Act' think she is also suckling another babY. While Edward Heath busies himself trYi ing to build a yacht with the assistance.° Margaret Thatcher — they're not speall by the way — I lie back on the sand ane reflect it could have been worse. Ther could have been other Roy Plomley vjC with us. Patrick Moore could be keeping ;lie awake all night with sung snatches fr0111 t ,„ Messiah and descriptions of our heav,era2 ceiling. Just then, some idiot discovers i . 011, ceiling. Just then, some idiot discovers i For the Wings of a Dove' on the flip side o the Liszt.
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