This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Media
Desert Island Discs arrives on the iPlayer
By CMU Editorial | Published on Monday 5 October 2009
If you, like me, have often wondered why Radio 4’s ‘Desert Island Discs’ is not available on the iPlayer, given that the BBC has deals in place with PPL and PRS for music to appear on the on-demand radio service, well, stop wondering.
It turns out that the Beeb needed the permission of the family of the seminal programme’s late founder and original presenter, Roy Plomley, to make it available on demand. I know this because a deal has been done with the Plomley clan meaning the show will now be available on the Corporation’s online on-demand service. And hurrah for that.
Radio 4 controller Mark Damazer wrote on his blog last week: “We have always had good relations with the family of the programme’s founding father – Roy Plomley – but the programme was conceived in a pre-digital age and so we needed to work out with the family how to make the programme available online as well as for its two transmissions. We have now sorted it all out and we have plans to make the website an all-singing, all-dancing affair – encouraging people to compare their choices with the choices of castaways, looking at the most selected tracks etc, etc. And we will end up podcasting ‘Desert Island Discs’ too”.
Commenting on who he’d like to see pick their desert island tunes on future editions of the show, Damazer added: “I still yearn for Bruce Springsteen, Mick Jagger, David Bowie, Bill Clinton, George Bush, Barack Obama, Madonna, Arsene Wenger etc, etc. Stay tuned. We’re trying”.
