Radio review

Production information

To hear Richard Ingrams on Desert Island Discs you'd think Private Eye edited itself all those years. He was merely a conduit for other people's talents, he told Kirsty Young, invoking Malcolm Muggeridge's definition of the ideal editor as "a blind man tapping his way along with a white stick.", Ingrams is inscrutable to a fault. Coming from an upper class background - his grandmother was Queen Victoria's maid of honour - he has spent his entire working life needling the establishment, and he seemed at a loss to explain why. He did however offer up one theory, prompted by Young, that it might have been because his father, a remote and forbidding figure, died when he was 16, leaving him free to postpone sensible employment indefinitely.

0:

The revelation that he instigated and ran a theatre company after he left Oxford went some way towards explaining his penchant for the limelight. Two of his most enduring and significant relationships throughout his adult life were with performers - Willie Rushton and Peter Cook.

1:

He would hate me for saying so but Ingrams is a national treasure, a uniquely English non-conformist whose determination not to be self-important elevates self-deprecation to an art form. He has already taken his place in the pantheon of gentleman satirists that includes Swift, Pope, Gilray and Rowlandson, if not as a great creative artist then as a legendary facilitator.

2:

Lord Longford, a long-time target of Private Eye's and another master of high profile self-deprecation, was the subject of Great Lives, nominated by Jon Snow who worked for him - and befriended him - in his youth. While branding Longford's anti-porn campaign an aberration, Snow expressed great admiration for his passion, dedication and generosity of spirit. Snow met him in 1970, after he had been "thrown out" of university. "I needed a job," he said, "and Frank said I was just right to run a centre for juvenile delinquents because I was in the boondocks, just like them."

3:

The novelist Rachel Billington, one of Longford's daughters, told how her father used to hand out pocket money to children in the family home, regardless of whether or not they were his. Her first novel, a sensitive love story, came out at the time of his notorious pornography campaign. Imagine her dismay when one tabloid greeted its publication with the headline, "Lord Porn's daughter writes sex shocker!"

4:

I have mixed feelings about Leonard Cohen. While there is no denying the haunting, elegiac quality of his best work, I've heard dogs with better singing voices. More poet than singer, Cohen emerged from the documentary Leonard and Marianne as a bit of a heartless chancer. "Thank you Marianne for making me so miserable that I had to write," he wrote to his Norwegian lover when they parted.

5:

The producers tracked down both Cohen and Marianne for the programme, interviewing them separately about their memories of their time together in Montreal and the Greek island of Hydra in the sixties. While the lugubrious singer described himself as "blessed with amnesia," Marianne recalled every line of every song he dedicated to her with heartbreaking fondness. Towards the tail end of their seven-year relationship, Marianne's replacement muse, Suzanne, turned up on the doorstep asking when she (Marianne) was intending to move out.

6:

An unsung hero of the 20th century electronics revolution, Alan Blumlein, not only invented stereo, or binaural as he named it, but also the template for electronic TV as we know it. As if that weren't distinction enough, The Man Who Invented Stereo was largely responsible for developing a radar system that enabled WW2 bombers to pinpoint their targets more accurately, giving us the edge at a crucial moment in the war.

7:

Sadly Blumlein did not get round to a cure for mortality and he died in a plane crash in Herefordshire in 1942, testing one his radar systems, aged 38. Despite his massive achievements, it was a life cruelly cut short. All credit to Martin Shankleman for keeping his memory alive with this fine tribute.

Production information can change over the run of the show.