2024-09-22
34 分钟Lauren Laverne talks to Baroness Floella Benjamin DBE in a programme first broadcast in 2020.
BBC sounds music radio podcasts.
Lauren Laverne here.
We're taking our summer break, so until we're back on air, we're showcasing a few programs from our archive.
As usual, the music's been shortened for right reasons.
This week's guest is the broadcaster and politician Baroness Floella Benjamin, who was awarded the Bafta Fellowship this year.
I cast her away in 2020.
My castaway this week is the broadcaster and politician Baroness Floella Benjamin, a beloved presenter of children's television since the mid seventies.
For those of us who grew up with her, she was one of the family as much a part of british childhood then as school dinners, skinned knees and top of the pops part of the Windrush generation.
She was born in Trinidad and made the two week journey to the UK by sea when she was ten years old, accompanied only by her siblings.
Reunited with her parents in London, she found a love of performing as a singer and appeared in many West End musicals before becoming the presenter of play school in 1976.
It was the beginning of a long career presenting and later producing children's television.
She's also a passionate campaigner, working for decades with leading children's charities, and received a damehood earlier this year for her services.
She was the first african caribbean woman to become chancellor of a british university, offering a hug instead of the customary handshake to over 35,000 graduating students.
And in 2010, she was inducted into the House of Lords as Baroness Benjamin of Beckenham.
She's been known to refer to younger politicians as my play school babies.
She says, I've gone through the round window, the square window and the arch window and now as a member of the House of Lords, I've gone through the neo gothic window.
Who would have thought it?
Baroness Floella Benjamin.
Welcome to Desert island discs, darling.
What a lovely intro.