Kirsty Young: 'It wasn't really a choice to leave Desert Island Discs'

Which is just as well, because she’s about to begin her own, with an interview series cleverly called Young Again that begins this week on Radio 4 and BBC Sounds. The host probes her subjects, gently yet forensically, for those pivotal moments that have marked their interesting lives, plus the advice they would impart to their younger selves if they could. It sounds as though it could be called Desert Island Discs – Without the Discs and will no doubt fly to the top of the audio charts.

After all, unlike pretty much every other aspiring podcaster sitting at a table in their shed and shouting into their phone, Young comes with the pedigree of hosting the most prized show on British radio, where she was celebrated for eliciting defining moments of contemplation and revelation from hundreds of subjects, from David Dimbleby to Barry Manilow (I urge you to listen to the episode with war surgeon David Nott).

Her interviewing skills are unequalled, yet it seems even Young was chomping at the constraints of such an established format: “The great beauty of Desert Island Discs is its format, it’s why it’s so good and enduring. But it is a format – you have to hit the moments, it runs for a precise time, and the discs take up a certain amount of time.

“It’s a kind of a dance, with its rules, and there were many moments when I was doing it that I thought, ‘I want to keep talking to you, this could last for an hour.’ Or, ‘That wasn’t so good, let’s make it shorter.’ Or, ‘Let’s just get rid of the music.’ I’m a communicator, I love to talk.

“That’s the great thing about broadcasting conversation – there’s an intimacy to it. I love to listen to two or more interesting and interested people. It’s a joyous thing. So Young Again is more of the thing I like, more free-ranging, less prescriptive, and even more like a conversation.”

Will people who listen to Young Again hear the same person who once hosted Desert Island Discs? She laughs. “I hope not. I very deliberately decided it was a podcast I wanted to make, not a radio show. I think the ‘undoneness’ of it, that feeling of taking your shoes off, is much closer to life.”

In 2018, after a stellar run of 12 years, Young walked away from Desert Island Discs, a decision brought on by a diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis and fibromyalgia, a chronic condition causing pain, fatigue and other symptoms. What was initially described as a temporary absence from the show became permanent and the presenter says now that making the break was a wrench.

“For anybody, when you’re unwell, everything else recedes. But it was very difficult, I had a lovely team I worked with, and there was a part of me that thought, ‘If I don’t do that job, do I even exist?’ And I immediately realised, ‘Of course you do, don’t be such a ninny.’” She shrugs. “It was one of those things. It wasn’t really a choice – it was what I’d been told I needed to do. It didn’t feel great, but the thing I was dealing with at the time felt bigger.”

Young is quick to say she knows she’s not alone in dealing with illness and that many people have much worse to bear. There’s no doubt that being married to Soho House founder Nick Jones and having two daughters and two stepdaughters, she was extremely fortunate in terms of both resources and support, but it’s clear she’s had her hands full, with her husband also being treated for prostate cancer in 2022. Jones recovered well but stepped down from his CEO position with Soho House, and it’s plain that the pair of them are making decisions as much to do with personal fulfilment as with professional success.

“Life sharpens,” reflects Young, now 54. “It actually gets sharper: the people I want to spend time with, how I want to spend my time… if I do work, what do I want to do? Getting older, having a period of ill health, it adds a piquancy to your decisions.”

One of the easiest decisions, it transpires, was to make a podcast. “I was listening to so much stuff, I realised how much I enjoyed it. I thought, ‘This is a new frontier, a different temperature, a different way of listening.’ I don’t think the world needs another podcast. I just thought I’d love to be part of that. It’s a bit like the Wild West right now in podcasting, and I wanted to be part of the metaphorical gold rush.”

Young demurs when asked who’s on her wish list for guests (“If I say it and then we don’t get them…”) but, when pressed, will admit to hoping for JK Rowling. “Obviously, everyone has their opinions, but a more remarkably articulate human being I think you’d be hard pushed to find.”

Her golden rule, though, isn’t to focus on the starriness of her guests, but rather their ability to communicate: “Some people have had remarkable lives and experiences, but they’re not so good at communicating them. It’s the people who can vocalise small experiences brilliantly that can be illuminating and life-affirming.”

The common threads uniting the best, most moving encounters are, it seems, vulnerability and personal trial. “People have to be willing to open up to you,” says Young. “You shouldn’t try to make people go where they don’t want to go, not in my area of radio. But there’s a point at which people allow you to go to places they wouldn’t necessarily have expected. That’s about them feeling you’re not going to be exploitative, but you are going to try to get them to reveal something about themselves. It’s a fine line.”

As for dealing with life’s trials, Young quotes Leonard Cohen’s song, Anthem: “There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” Adversity is, she says, “what cracks us open and makes us grow, when we come through the really crappy bits of our life and understand a bit more about the world and about ourselves”. Asking her guests about such times “isn’t just to get them to emote, and squeeze a tear out. It’s about, ‘Where did that take you?’ It’s those moments where people reveal their vulnerability. That’s what makes great artists”.

She cites Tom Hanks on Desert Island Discs in 2016 when he was remembering listening to a track as a troubled young boy. “He talked about being in his bedroom, he chose a piece of music and I could see the rim of his eye welling up. He was back there, a lonely little guy in his room. The common thread of great interviews is when people reveal a bit of themselves, and it’s usually their vulnerability.”

One of Young’s gifts as a conversationalist is in her silences, knowing when to speak and when to keep everything zipped – is that when something special and quite revelatory comes out?

“Sometimes there is that moment. I hope it’s not a glib trick, but I use it when I think, there’s more. If I just sit, maybe you’ll go there. Sometimes people don’t, they just look right back at you. Which, I have to say, I think is totally fair. I’m comfortable with silence as a person, I’m comfortable with reflecting. The more people I interview, I give people a bit of space.”

Like an artist being confident using less paint? She nods emphatically. “I remember that from doing my art A-level. My teacher told me, ‘It’s as important what’s not there, as what’s there.’”

In the same way that it’s significant for when big-screen stars like Nicole Kidman and Meryl Streep decide to star in television series, so Young’s move to podcasting seems to signify another big radio name embracing more flexible platforms. This is something that she seems conflicted by.

“This both makes me happy and sad. On the one hand, as a listener, I love programming my day and cherry-picking my favourites from the Radio 4 schedule. But I worry that those common threads when people come together are becoming fewer and further between, those moments when you can say to somebody, ‘What about…?’ because they won’t know what you’re talking about, or they’ll say, ‘Don’t tell me’ because they haven’t listened yet. So I think it’s a shame, but I also love it. I think both of those things which is, I fear, slightly hypocritical.”

Her appreciation for the big, shared experience made her a natural choice to front the TV broadcast of the final hours of Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral in September last year. Young’s words were powerful and personal in summing up how the millions tuning in felt that day. When did she realise that she had tapped very pertinently into the collective mood?

“We had all been watching so much of it,” she remembers. “I was up at five in the morning the day before and I thought, ‘What is this? Why do we all care? What’s happening? I’ve got to say this from the heart.’ I’ve never watched it, I think I couldn’t, but the job of a live broadcaster at that moment is to call it.

“The executive in charge came out and told me, ‘Everyone in the gallery is in tears.’ And I thought, ‘Well, I nearly was.’”

With Young Again promising to revisit her guests’ pivotal moments and reflect together on the difference they made to everything that followed, it seems only dutiful to ask the host for her own. Without appearing to have prepared for such a question, Young is game and replies, “The obvious one is giving birth. I probably changed everything I thought about how I would be a mother. I brought my latent perfectionism to that one, being a young mum. I would go back and tell myself, ‘Relax, it will be fine, it will shake down, enjoy it a bit more, don’t worry so much.’

“And I’d tell my younger self, ‘Have more confidence.’ When you do the sort of job I do, people think you’re very confident, but I was a nervous little girl. I always had a facility to stand up and talk, but inside I was nervous and insecure. I’d go back and talk to myself about that.”

I wonder if her recent experiences have made her more confident of knowing her own strengths, and she agrees. Looking back on her defining speech at the end of Queen Elizabeth’s funeral, she says now, “I thought, ‘Why am I here doing this job? People trust me to call it.’ I wouldn’t have had the balls to do that before.”

Young Again with Kirsty Young airs on BBC Radio 4 and is available on BBC Sounds.

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