What Paul McCartney, Yoko, Brian Epstein, George Martin take to a desert island

For Americans who have never heard it, the idea is for the selected "presenter" to reveal the music they'd take with them on a desert island. The Beatles as a group never gave their choices, but they and their music have figured often on the program.

 

 On Jan. 30, 1982, the program celebrated its 40th birthday by having Paul McCartney give his Desert Island disc picks. He's the only Beatle to have appeared on the show. His choices included songs by Elvis Presley, the Coaster, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Gene Vincent, Country Ham and John Lennon ("Beautiful Boy").  

 

Paul also chose to bring the "Linda's Pictures" by Linda McCartney and a guitar as a luxury item to his desert island. (You can hear an excerpt of McCartney's appearance in the video spot at left.)

 

Beatles manager Brian Epstein was a presenter Nov. 30, 1964. He chose the George Martin Orchestra's cover of "All My Loving" and the Beatles "She's a Woman," other music by Bach, the Quartette Tres Bien (listed as the "Castaway's Favorite"), Jean Sibilius, Michael Olatunji, Max Bruch and Carmen Amaya, and the book "Elected Science" by Thomas Merton. 

 

George Martin appeared on the show twice. At his first appearance in 1982, he chose two songs by the Beatles, "Here, There and Everywhere" and "In My Life," Peter Sellers' "Any Old Iron," and music by Judy Garland & Mickey Rooney, Flanders and Swann, Debussy, Domenico Cimarosa and Bach. 

 

For his second appearance on Nov. 19, 1995, he chose the Beatles' "I Want To Hold Your Hand," his own "Old Boston, and Peter Cook & Dudley Moore's Beyond the Fringe "Bollard" sketch, plus music by Ravel, Mozart, Benjamin Britten, Gershwin, Tchaikovsky.

 

 

Others who have been presenters are Eric Idle, Terry Gilliam, John Cleese, Terry Jones and Michael Palin of Monty Python, Rolf Harris and Roger McGough (Mike McCartney's partner in the Scaffold).

 

Also featured were Cilla Black, Sir Peter Blake, Cathy Berberian, who recorded an album of operatic Beatles covers, Randy Newman, Elton John, "Nowhere Man" director Sam Taylor-Wood, Roger Waters, Joan Baez and Elvis Costello. 

 

 Two hundred and fifty-two "castaways" have included Beatles songs, while nine have featured Paul McCartney songs, 37 have John Lennon and six have had George Harrison songs. Only one presenter, actor Donald Pleasance, has used a Ringo Starr song. It was "Scouse the Mouse." 

 

The Beatles, however, aren't included in the presenters' top 10 track or top 10 artist choices. All the musicians on both lists are classical composers.

 

But they topped the list of listeners' Top 100 artists. Bob Dylan was second, Beethoven was third.

 

A Beatles song, "Hey Jude," did make #14 of the top 100 listener songs. Ralph Vaughan Williams' "The Lark Ascending" was the top pick. The rest of the favorite Beatles tracks were "In My Life," "A Day in the Life," "Here Comes the Sun," "Yesterday," "Strawberry Fields Forever," "Eleanor Rigby" and "Let It Be."

 

The BBC's site for the show is fascinating. Roughly 1,000 shows, which currently include the Yoko Ono show and George Martin show from 1995, can be heard on the site or downloaded. The most recent (at the time of this article) is with Sir David Attenborough. 

 

The McCartney and Epstein shows, though, are not currently available. The BBC says it is working to add more shows to the archives, saying "we will add more programmes as soon as we can."

 

Let's hope those two and many others can be restored. It's a site where you could spend a lot of enjoyable time.