Liberace on 'Desert Island Discs'.

In the wake of the film 'Behind the Candelabra' which opens in cinemas here on Friday, and which I plan to see next Tuesday, I don't know why I hadn't thought of this until now.

The BBC has got available on one of its websites over 1,500 past editions of its radio programme 'Desert Island Discs' - and I've just searched out the one in which the subject was Liberace, which was broadcast on 23rd May 1960, when he'd have been approaching the age of 49, and four years after he'd won the then considerable sum of £26,000 in damages against the British reporter William Connor (under his nom-de-plume 'Cassandra'), for daring to suggest in a national newspaper (in a 'read-between-the lines' kind of way), that he, Liberace, was a homosexual.
     Given the date of broadcast of this 30 minute programme, the subject is treated quite formally and deferentially by today's standards - and nothing is said of the court case or his relationships. (Roy Plomley, the programme's innovator and regular presenter until he died in the late1980s, addresses him as "Mister Liberace.")

    There were several postings made last year by myself and by a few other bloggers expounding on the idea behind the 'Desert Island Discs' radio programme, which has been running since 1940s, in which a celebrity (of any renown at all - actors, show business, sport, science, writing etc -  including a large number of Americans), is asked to nominate which eight gramophone records s/he would take with him/her to a desert island on the assumption that these would be the only music (or speech) which would be heard for the remainder of that person's life. (Choices are to be of single tracks i.e. no more than three or four minutes long - the original idea being that each would occupy no more than the space of an old-style 78 r.p.m. record on a wind-up gramophone - so no complete musicals, operas, oratorios, large works etc)
In addition the subject is allowed to take one luxury (of no practical use in enabling survival) plus one book apart from the Bible (or some other 'spiritual' text appropriate to the castaway's beliefs, if any) and a complete Shakespeare, which are already on the island awaiting the subject's arrival. (If you don't want them you just don't read them!)


I fear that the programme may not be available to those outside the U.K. but here's the site just in case:-

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/player/p009y780

Anyone within these shores wanting to listen should have no problem in connecting.


If you are interested but can't connect to the site I'll do another blog revealing Liberace's choice of eight discs as well as some things he said in the interview, which actually wasn't very deep. He didn't give much away.


Btw: Now that the 'Candelabra's' trailer is being shown in cinemas I can already see that Michael Douglas, however praiseworthy his performance, doesn't quite seem to capture the sheer 'smarminess' which exuded from the guy. I ought to add that, personally, the presence of Liberace on the TV screen never repulsed me as he might possibly have done to others. There was always an intrinsic fascination about him in everything he did or in anticipation of what he'd say. There's no denying, he was a class act - impossible to follow.