Desert Island Discs has been broadcast by the BBC since 1942. In each episode, a guest – one of the many variants on the ‘good and the great’ – are asked to imagine themselves cast away on a desert island, and to decide what eight recordings, what luxury and what book (besides the Bible and the complete works of William Shakespeare) they would wish to accompany them. Although the castaways differ in how they make their selection, they are usually designed to form part of a personal narrative, in which reminiscences and experiences are interspersed by the recordings – typically, but not always, musical ones.

Despite its longevity and the prestige accorded to it (those invited almost never say ‘no’), Desert Island Discs (DID) has, as the editors point out, rarely been the object of scholarly attention. This fascinating volume does much to correct this oversight.

Not least among its pleasures are the brief essays by former visitors to the desert island. The composer Debbie Wiseman writes of how she was overwhelmed by the response her appearance elicited, and about how her correspondents shared and disagreed with her choice (‘I chose a piece by John Barry and people were saying they loved John Barry but that's not the piece they would have chosen’, p. 276). The author and screenwriter Nick Hornby explains that he ‘wanted to choose things that represented different stages of my life’, and that, in selecting a Bruce Springsteen track, he didn't want ‘Born to Run’, but rather something that rarely got played on the radio (‘Kitty's Back’) (p. 210). The philosopher Angie Hobbs speaks of how she wanted to create ‘a good narrative story. I mean a true story, not a made-up one’ (p. 149) – and of how guilty she felt about omitting Bob Dylan from her final eight.

The memories of the participants hint at the themes developed in the longer, scholarly chapters. Not all of these discuss the music, but many do, and this in itself is perhaps surprising. As David Hendy notes (p. 165), less than a third of the show's airtime is devoted to playing the music. There is a further oddness, as the contributors also realise, that of choosing just eight ‘discs’ in an era in which almost anyone can stream several million tracks. Nonetheless, the show continues to be broadcast, and to yield up insights into the meaning and uses of music.

Buried in the programme's format is the legacy of World War II, when its original presenter, Roy Plomley, pitched the idea. The desert island, writes Jenny Doctor, conjured up ‘somewhere far outside of wartime shadows, constraints, and deadly, destructive forces’ (p. 64). Even in peacetime, says Doctor, DID retains this sense that the music chosen is not just eight favourites, but something more significant, sounds that would comfort and sustain someone who was truly, and possibly permanently, alone.

In his chapter, Simon Frith analyses those choices, dividing them into three (football) leagues (Pop and Rock; Jazz, Blues and Gospel; and Classical, Film and Light). The Beatles sit comfortably on top of the Pop and Rock Premiership, while Mozart shows no risk of being caught by Beethoven. The Jazz, Blues and Gospel elite is more closely contested, as Ella Fitzgerald battles it out with Louis Armstrong. He notes the neglect of girl and boy bands, and of the shifting contours of taste and of what it means to be ‘cultured’. What Frith discerns is how the classical choices are informed ‘by their status in the classical music world’, whereas the popular selections are not canonised in the same way ‘and seem more randomly chosen’ (p. 143). These observations lead him to conclude that, for popular music academics, ‘DID should be a programme about records, when it is, in fact, a programme about people’ (p. 143).

Tia DeNora provides a marvellously detailed account of how exactly those selves are narrated through discussion about, and choices of, music. Her chapter compares the narratives constructed by politicians, academics and military personnel, and the gendering that also accompanies this process.

The people also appear in Peter Webb's contribution, where he looks at those few guests who chose punk or post-punk artists. The actress Kathy Burke chose the Sex Pistols’ ‘Pretty Vacant’, and Ricky Gervais chose ‘Anarchy in the UK’. For Webb, these choices, and others like them (by the writers Ian Rankin and Hanif Kureshi), ‘created a space of validation and self-respect for themselves’ (p. 185) and enabled them to throw light ‘on the communities to which they belonged, and for locating them in the cultural political history of the UK’ (p. 186).

The relationship between DID and national identity features prominently throughout the collection. DID is often seen as ‘British’, but Sarah Hill reveals, in her comparison of it with a Welsh language version (Beti a'i Phobol), how the state apparatus – of the royal family, Parliament, etc. – is present in DID, but absent in its Welsh equivalent.

In this short review, I have focused on the chapters that speak most directly to DID and its music. The other contributions to this fine collection have much to tell us about the programme, but also about how to make sense of cultural artefacts more generally.

There is a poignant note early in the book, where the editors explain that the DID archive that enabled the research undertaken for many of the chapters had been relocated and was no longer searchable in the way that it was. This is a considerable loss, because, as Defining the Discographic Self makes clear, there is much to be learnt about music, society and the individual from just this one programme.