Desert Island Discs: Bing Crosby and David Hockney among 90 discovered recordings

Bing Crosby, David Hockney and Dame Margot Fonteyn are among the interviewees to have been discovered within old Desert Island Disc tapes.

As the interviews predated the BBC recording archives, the recordings had previously been lost, but now an audio collector has found them.

Richard Harrison from Lowestoft in Suffolk discovered the 90 lost tapes, telling the BBC that finding the missing archives was a “great feeling”.

Desert Island Discs is a BBC Radio 4 programme broadcast which is also now released in a podcast format. It has been airing since January 1942 when it was first broadcast on the BBC Forces Programme.

The 90 recordings feature interviews from the 1960s and 1970s and include a host of stars from actor Dirk Bogarde to actor and dancer Sophie Tucker.

Harrison is a member of the Radio Circle, a group who take a keen interest in discovering lost radio. Harrison collects old tapes from car boot sales and markets with no idea what might be on them.

He then listens to the programmes in hope of striking gold and was “over the moon” to discover this collection, with his favourite being the 1964 Desert Island Disc episode with actor Dirk Bogarde.

"The neighbours must have wondered what was up. I let out a huge yell of triumph, it was a genuinely great moment,” he told the BBC.

Highlights from the clips include Hockney suggesting he would take Route 69 (a pornographic book by Floyd Carter) as reading material, owing this to his belief that “otherwise you might fantasise too much on the island”.

Meanwhile Bob Monkhouse requests a “large colour picture of Marilyn Monroe to remind me of what I’m supposed to forget”.

The show at the time was presented by broadcaster Roy Plomley until he died in 1985. In order to record the show, Promley would apparently take his interviewees for lunch while recording the conversation, before heading home to write it up.

Both would then go to the studio and read it from a script for broadcast.