Lay for the Day 29th January

The BBC radio show Desert Island Discs was broadcast for the first time on this day in 1942, and it’s still running more than 60 years later.

Desert Island Disc

Here’s a dark and friendly lady
Asking me to be her baby,
Asking me to please come home.
And here’s a famous friend of mine
Telling me I’m feeling fine,
Even though I’m all alone
Up on the seventeenth floor,
Shipwrecked behind a locked door,
Marooned in the blue
And waiting for you
To drop me a line
And tell me that I’m saved
From this desert island in the radio waves.

Your lover man, your unsteady boyfriend,
Is standing at the window at his wits’ end
To the sound of the noise of the capital,
The charts and the ads and phone-ins
And the evening traffic droning,
Calling your name out above it all,
Up on the seventeenth floor,
Shipwrecked behind a locked door,
Marooned in the blue
And waiting for you
To drop me a line
And tell me that I’m saved
From this desert island in the radio waves.

Words and music by The Children,
from Songs from the Red Notebook I

The Lay Reader: an archive of the poetic calendar