Desert Island Discs, Radio 4
This was a chance recommendation that turned into one of the most interesting Desert Island Discs I’ve ever heard.
Professor Alice Roberts is a popular science communicator – best known for Digging for Britain.
She feels a moral responsibility to share her love of science with everyone and her passion for life shines through.
It was a very frank and deep-diving interview – it wasn’t just about her love of bones; it was about love and family and fracture too.
From the little girl who was given a microscope and who spent hours watching and drawing bees’ wings and digging up bits of pottery in her parents’ garden to the young doctor on rollerblades beloved by her young patients. She loved medicine, she was obsessed by bones.
When she was eight her parents took her to Bristol museum where researchers were unwrapping an Egyptian mummy. There was a live feed to the foyer where people could watch and she was so utterly fascinated that she couldn’t be got away.
Her favourite of all the human bones is the clavicle, she said. The collarbone was once part of the skull – that was about 500 million years ago, when your x-times great granny was a fish.
Then there’s her passion for music: “It reached inside of me and grabbed me by the heart…”
She is open about her estrangement from her mother which came about after she had given a newspaper interview as president of Humanists UK. Her mother responded with her own letter and a frank interview as well.
“It was awful. I had seen my parents and taken them out for lunch. The editor rang and told me about a not terribly supportive interaction with my mother,” she said.
“I felt like my world was falling apart around me.”
This was a chance recommendation that turned into one of the most interesting Desert Island Discs I’ve ever heard
Her mother has since died. If, in her dying, she had asked for her, Alice Roberts would have gone. But her mother didn’t.
If you get a chance, listen.
It’s deeply moving and full of passion for life and love and fun. You’ll also hear some great music.
And there’s no bible for this castaway – only that great humanist novel Middlemarch.
