More of all that, is what we need, and a lot less of the other.p.vallely independent.co.uk. Later, when the veteran journalist Martha Gellhorn said she would refuse to answer questions about her brief marriage to Ernest Hemingway, the interview was cancelled forthwith.By the time Gordon Brown came to the studio in 1996, she even asked how much he minded speculation about his sexuality – a line the press interpreted as an attempt to “out” the Shadow Chancellor.Yet we get enough of all this approach elsewhere. Early on, when Ken Dodd refused to talk about his tax problems, Lawley agreed, but has regretted it ever since. And the programme has become more steadfast in its appreciation of that fact as the years progressed.

“Ten years ago you could come to an agreement as to what areas to go easy on, but now the gloves are off.”These, she said, are the questions people expect.Indeed they do. “Once people have agreed to take part, they have given licence for me to ask about all aspects of their lives,” she once said in an interview. But it was not until she began to engage Mo Mowlam on the UUP and Sinn Fein and their differing interpretations of the Good Friday agreement that I realised she had finally yanked Desert Island Discs into the hysteria of the modern news agenda.The “Sleepy Lagoon” that was the original name of the seagull-enhanced music by Eric Coates which opens the programme, had vanished from all but the signature tune.The shift was inevitable, Sue Lawley will insist. He did it with a sideways subtlety, by asking them to reveal the music that touched them the most.And music, being the most sublime expression of human creativity, told us something words could never convey, or indeed might seek to disguise.Sue Lawley, a journalist where Plomley had been an actor, started to change all that as soon as she took over in 1986.

In a sea of current-affairs frenzy, the programme, which celebrates 60 years on air this week, had always been an island of calm and sanity.For more than four decades, the languidly patrician voice of its inventor Roy Plomley had defined a singular style of extracting hidden truths from his celebrity guests. Roy Plomley, I remember thinking, must have been spinning in the subterranean sand of his mythical South Sea idyll.
What was Lawley up to, talking to famous people about important issues? That was not what Desert Island Discs is for. She had said so on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, the august Irish journal reported. I was in Dublin and picked up a copy of The Irish Times to read that the then Northern Ireland Secretary, Mo Mowlam, had said that she was hopeful that the deadlock on decommissioning could be broken. It was in 1999, as I recall, that I decided that Sue Lawley had finally gone off the rails. Changing the dynamics of the service is the more difficult, but essential, task.The writer is the author of ‘The New Politics of the NHS’. This is that spending more money may be a necessary condition if, come the next general election, the NHS is to be a source of self-congratulation rather than self-flagellation for Tony Blair But it is far from being a sufficient condition Putting more money into the NHS is the easy bit.