Island inquistor: Sue Lawley
Today is Sue Lawley’s final programme as the host of Desert Island Discs before she hands over to Kirsty Young. Over the years her own choice of luxury item has gone from iron and ironing board (1988) to computer bridge game (1998) to a cellar of good claret (2006) — a progression suggesting a certain loosening of the stays.
In her 18 years in the chair, Lawley’s gently probing “iron fist in velvet glove” interviews of famous castaways were a staple for three million listeners a week.
When she took over the programme, which had been presented by its inventor, Roy Plomley, for most of the 20th century, she described it delicately as “a little benign”, resolving to “ask more curious questions”. Thus did she press Gordon Brown about his sexuality and raise the problem of the Holocaust with Lady Diana Mosley. Her interview with Martha Gellhorn was spiked when Gellhorn refused to talk about her husband, Ernest Hemingway: “There cannot be any no-go areas,” said Lawley, firmly.
Susan Lawley was born in 1946 in Dudley, West Midlands. She helped her mother, who ran a draper’s shop, and went to grammar school, then Bristol University, where she dropped her accent in favour of faultless RP, and within five years of graduating had assumed the presenter’s chair on the BBC’s early evening television news magazine, Nationwide. Generally agreed to be ambitious and a fearless networker, she went on to be the face of TV news for two decades.
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Glamorous and coquettish as well as talented, she married a solicitor, David Ashby, but they separated soon after the birth of their second child. Her name was linked with several BBC colleagues until, in 1987, she married her former editor at Nationwide, Hugh Williams. “She is one of the few women who managed to maintain equilibrium between family and professional life,” says a colleague.
After an ill-advised attempt to host a late-night chat show in the mid-1980s, Lawley found in Desert Island Discs the perfect vehicle for the transition from daily current affairs. But it has been no sinecure: she researches her subjects extensively. She has also chaired the BBC Reith Lectures for the past four years.
Devotees of Desert Island Discs claim that you could always tell whether she liked her guest, and some say that she betrayed a little snobbishness with chavvy castaways (such as the soap star who said that she couldn’t live without an opera area). “Do you do Shakespeare?” she asked Simon Cowell in silvery tones. She famously fell for George Clooney, responding with flirtatiousness to his not terribly interesting remarks, but later observed, acidly, that “the accolade of the invitation was, sadly, entirely lost on him”.