projects

desert is.land

Jul 2026

Every Desert Island Discs castaway names the eight records they would take to the island. desertis.land reads your Spotify top artists and tells you whose eight sit closest to yours: your castaway twin.

The match is rarity-weighted, so sharing an obscure rockabilly singer counts for more than sharing The Beatles; everyone shares The Beatles. What comes out is a sentence — my castaway twin is Alfred Hitchcock — and a page you can send to the group chat, card and all.

Behind the party trick is the substance: since 1942 the BBC has been asking famous guests the same question. If you were cast away alone on a desert island, what would you take? What eight songs; what book; what luxury. desertis.land is every episode over the decades with the items and reasons extracted, searchable by the half-remembered impression rather than the name.

The desertis.land landing page: a mid-century tuning dial beside the headline 'Eight records, a book, and one luxury', with presenter eras marked along a long-wave scale
The wireless:

The five presenters sit as stations along the long-wave scale.

What they choose

Tally every request since 1942 and the winner is a song about regretting nothing.

castaways
  1. 1Non, je ne regrette rien Édith Piaf36
  2. 2What a Wonderful World Louis Armstrong29
  3. 3Imagine John Lennon23
  4. 4My Way Frank Sinatra23
  5. 5La Vie en rose Édith Piaf18
  6. 6Nessun dorma Luciano Pavarotti18
  7. 7A Day in the Life The Beatles16
  8. 8Chariots of Fire Vangelis14
  9. 9Dancing Queen ABBA14
  10. 10Hey Jude The Beatles14

The records age slowly; the luxuries are carbon-datable. Pianos and golf clubs belong to one era, guitars to another, and nobody has asked for painting materials since the sixties. My favourite oddity: nine separate castaways asked for a Michelangelo sculpture, most of them in the sixties, as though the decade briefly agreed marble was a reasonable thing to want on an island.

Pianohalf as popular since the 2010s
1950s — 4.0% of episodes1960s — 4.0% of episodes1970s — 3.3% of episodes1980s — 4.3% of episodes1990s — 5.7% of episodes2000s — 5.9% of episodes2010s — 2.3% of episodes2020s — 3.0% of episodes5.9%1950s2020s
Guitarclimbing since the fifties
1950s — 0.9% of episodes1960s — 1.6% of episodes1970s — 0.2% of episodes1980s — 1.5% of episodes1990s — 1.4% of episodes2000s — 1.7% of episodes2010s — 2.5% of episodes2020s — 2.4% of episodes2.5%1950s2020s
Golf clubsa sixties fixture, fading since
1950s — 1.7% of episodes1960s — 2.2% of episodes1970s — 0.6% of episodes1980s — 0.4% of episodes1990s — 0.5% of episodes2000s — 0.7% of episodes2010s — 0.5% of episodes2020s — 0.3% of episodes2.2%1950s2020s
Painting materialsnot chosen since the sixties
1950s — 1.7% of episodes1960s — 1.8% of episodes1.8%1950s2020s
Michelangelo's sculpturenine requests, mostly the sixties
1960s — 0.8% of episodes1970s — 0.6% of episodes1990s — 0.2% of episodes2010s — 0.2% of episodes0.8%1950s2020s

Recovering the run

The BBC’s own programme listing only carries episodes with surviving audio. For the full run you need BBC Genome, the digitised Radio Times listings. Several of the early decades the BBC taped over.

The result is 3,431 episodes and 3,293 castaways, including hundreds of broadcasts nobody can listen to any more. For those the site can only show the listing: a name, a date, no audio.

Episode pages play the original recording with a transcript that scrolls in time with it — go and find your twin.