Yesterday morning, as dawn was breaking in Manhattan, and Londoners were enjoying a late Sunday breakfast, I tuned in to BBC Radio 4 to hear the seventieth-anniversary broadcast of “Desert Island Discs,” an hour-long, live interview show that first aired on January 29, 1942.

For seven decades, “Desert Island Discs” has been introduced by the same theme song, “By the Sleeping Lagoon,” composed in 1930, by Eric Coats, and every week a new “castaway” of distinction is asked to name the eight tracks of music, one luxury item, and one book that he or she would choose to be marooned with. (One also gets the Bible, or its equivalent, and the complete works of Shakespeare.) There are only two longer-running shows in radio history: a British program of religious music, and “The Grand Old Opry.”

The program was created by Roy Plomley, an aspiring actor who had supported himself with odd jobs—as a realtor, an astrologer, and an extra—before he had his brilliant idea. It came to him, the story goes, one night in the country, when he was sitting by the fire in his pajamas. He hosted the show for forty-three years, asking polite questions in a plummy accent.

When the first castaway, Vic Oliver, a comedian, sat down at the mike, on January 29, 1942, the BBC studios, in Maida Vale, were still half in ruins: they had been bombed during the Blitz. On a pre-show that aired on Saturday, Jean Seaton, a historian, noted that the grimness of life during the War gave a special poignance to Plomley’s conceit. Rations had recently been cut in half, and the fantasy of a desert island—warm, bounteous, and pacific—was one aspect of the show’s appeal. Another was the subtext of self-sufficiency. And in that respect, perhaps, every listener was a stoical castaway on the desert island that was Great Britain.

In the past seven decades, there have been some three thousand castaways—musicians, actors, writers, politicians, athletes, scientists, and the odd royal. Men have outnumbered women almost three to one. The youngest Crusoe was thirteen, and the oldest well over ninety. It is a signal honor to be invited, and the program’s producer, Leanne Buckle, noted on Saturday that millions of her countrymen have rehearsed their interviews in a bathroom mirror, the way Americans practice their Oscar speeches.

But not all the castaways have been British, and a number have been American. James Stewart was recalled as particularly laconic. Norman Mailer caused a minor scandal by choosing, as his luxury, “a stick of marijuana.” Debby Harry, Alice Cooper, Louis Armstrong, Alan Alda, Michael Jordan, Jerry Springer, Renée Fleming, Whoopi Goldberg, Barry Manilow, Stephen Sondheim, and John Updike are among the names on an eclectic Yankee roster. Updike chose the complete works of Proust, “a silken tent,” and a playlist that included Doris Day and Fats Waller.

I don’t know who first said, “Show me who your friends are, and I will tell you who you are” (probably not Julius Caesar), but the castaways’ choices speak volumes about their taste and imagination, not to say their character. Tallulah Bankhead proudly admitted that she “couldn’t put a key in the door, dahling” much less fend for herself in the wild, and when Plomley asked Otto Preminger if he could build a hut, the impresario replied crossly, “Are you out of your mind?”

Tony Blair is said to have convened a focus group before he went on the show. Simon Cowell chose a mirror as his luxury item, noting that he would otherwise “miss” himself. Preminger’s one book was his autobiography. Dame Elisabeth Schwarzkopf’s eight tracks were all recordings of her own voice. The most popular piece of classical music was the least recherché—Beethoven’s Ninth. Dozens, if not hundreds, of castaways wanted paint sets or writing paper. (Other luxury items have included spike heels, footballs, a Ferris wheel, garlic, cigarettes, a dojo, mascara, wine, a globe, an ironing board, a symphony’s worth of musical instruments, a cheeseburger machine, and, in the same category, albeit much grander, Sybille Bedford’s desire for “a French restaurant in full working order.”)

If some castaways couldn’t resist the temptation to be clever—Alfred Hitchcock’s luxury item was a Continental railway timetable—and others surrendered to predictability (Philip Larkin chose a typewriter), a few gave their choices more soulful thought. Paul McCartney, who was the castaway thirty years ago, on the fortieth anniversary of the show, eschewed any Beatles hits, but included a track by John Lennon, from “Double Fantasy”—“Beautiful Boy.” Yoko Ono chose Gracie Fields’s sentimental favorite “When I Grow Too Old to Dream,” because she had sung it with her aged mother. Daniel Barenboim, the conductor, who was married to the cellist Jacqueline du Pré, spoke of their discovery that she suffered from multiple sclerorsis. She had to stop playing when she could no longer feel her bow, and he chose one of the pieces she had loved most, Elgar’s Cello Concerto. Ronald Searle, the cartoonist, who died last month, at ninety-one, spent much of the Second World War as a prisoner of the Japanese in the Kwai jungle. He wanted to be cast away with the four last songs of Richard Strauss, he said, because they give you the courage to face death.

After Plomley’s retirement, in 1985, he had three successors: Sir Michael Parkinson, Sue Lawley, and the current host of the program, Kirsty Young, whose bright Scottish voice roused me from my Sunday morning stupor. Her guest was Sir David Attenborough, a man who has, in the course of his six decades as a naturalist, visited his share of remote islands, and was returning to this one for a fourth time. He belongs in the category of practical castaways—those who want a windup radio, dry ice, or a battery-powered lamp—and the book he chose was a classic of adventure travel, “Shifts and Expedients of Camp Life,” by W. B. Lord, a Victorian explorer. It is filled with helpful instructions on how to build an inflatable boat, catch edible fireflies, and make fishing lures. But it also contains a useful piece of wisdom that makes a nice epigraph for the show: “Always and above everything remember that the hearts of all mankind are the same.”

Photograph of Roy Plomley by John Downing/Getty.