Gary O'Donoghue

speaker

1,144 appearances 20 recordings 4 series first heard Jan 2025 last heard 7 Sep

Gary O'Donoghue’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 14 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.

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Desert Island Discs · Gary O'Donoghue, journalist · 14 Jun 2026 podcast

And she takes the recorder and plugs it into her computer and says, yes, I can see 20 minutes of recording there.

Well, I thought about that.

I thought maybe I should just tell no one that it had happened, pretend it hadn't happened.

But if you're the foreign press in the United States, you're kind of quite low down the pecking order.

And, you know, the BBC hadn't had an interview with a US president for nearly a decade, a sitting US president.

I mean, he does a lot of interviews and he's done several since with British outlets.

But we were, you know, we were the first.

So that's what gives me a lot of pleasure.

So there was this documentary idea I'd had in my head for years about the blind bluesmen in the South in the early 20th century.

And this title popped into my head, Blind, Black and Blue.

And then eventually a very good producer I've worked with before called Lee Kumatat, she got us an interview with someone from Radio 3 who said, yeah, go and do it.

And we had this road trip through the South.

And I've chosen a song...

from that.

I mean, they played all sorts of different kinds of blues.

You know, some of it was very raunchy, kind of, you know, quite lewd.

And then, you know, on a Sunday, they'd go and play sort of spirituals in the church, you know.

But I've picked one that is very much on the sort of spiritual end, and this is Dark Was the Night and Cold Was the Ground, and it's Blind Willie Johnson.

We see quite a lot of one another.

We're lucky enough to do that.

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