John Pilger

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 18 February 1990

⏱️ 38 minutes

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Summary

The castaway in Desert Island Discs this week is the journalist John Pilger. He'll be talking to Sue Lawley about his arrival in this country from Australia 28 years ago, and how he went on to become one of the best-known and often most contentious foreign correspondents on the Daily Mirror during the 1960s. His reporting of events from all over the world, but most notably Cambodia, has brought him fame and admiration, as well as criticism and controversy for his campaigning style. He'll be talking to Sue Lawley about these issues.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: Blue Moon Of Kentucky by Elvis Presley Book: Catch 22 by Joseph Heller Luxury: Typewriter

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.0	The program was originally broadcast in 1990, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is a journalist. For 20 years he was a foreign correspondent of the Daily Mirror, where under the encouraging eye of a newspaper anxious to be both serious and popular, he sent back harrowing reports from all over the world. Unafraid of emotion and never slow to take sides,
0:46.0	his campaigns have sometimes been criticized for being too partial and unobjective.
0:51.0	He's refuted this. For him, a good cause is a good story as he proved in
0:55.9	Cambodia. Here in his articles and his films for television he so vividly
1:00.6	recounted the activities of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge that millions of pounds
1:05.2	were raised to alleviate the sufferings of their victims.
1:08.9	He is John Pilger.
1:11.2	You're also John Australian, which we Brits always presume to indicate
1:15.4	among other things that you're very good on the beach. I mean is that white?
1:18.4	Oh absolutely. My great pleasure is is lying on a beach. I'd be delighted to be a castaway. I've tried to spend
1:26.2	a lot of my working career, in fact not working, but lying on a desert island, which I've done
1:30.8	occasionally. So it means you're good at barbecues?
1:33.0	No, I'm not good at any kind of cooking really, but I am good at lying still, perhaps reading occasionally.
1:40.0	And the surfer, are you at home in the surfer? I'm a surfer, yes, I'm a surfer who never stopped surfing.
1:46.2	Bondi where I grew up still has possibly the best surf in the world.
1:50.2	Unfortunately, there's a sewer outlet pouring into the middle of Bondi Beach.
1:55.4	And so pollution has now grabbed the imagination of Australians and they dare not swim there, so I find
2:01.7	on some days I'm the only one surfing at Bondi and that's entirely appropriate.
2:06.0	And a lifetime traveling the world more or less on your own as a foreign correspondent must mean that you're entirely self-reliant and very resourceful yet?
2:15.0	No, no, I'm not self-reliant. I depend as you do and everybody does on other people, but I suppose
	...

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