Robinson Crusoe

Robinson Crusoe is 300 years old this year. Is he real? Well, the book says that it was 'written by himself'. In celebration we have invited two notable desert island survivors to discuss his life and strange surprising adventures, eight and twenty years all alone in an uninhabited island near the mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque. Crusoe's nominator is Lucy Irvine. She spent spent a year on Tuin Island with a man called Gerald, her exploits later made famous by a book and a film called Castaway. Our second guest is journalist Martin Popplewell, who was inspired as a teenager by Brooke Shields in the film The Blue Lagoon to try desert island life for himself. "There's no mention in the entire Crusoe book of coconuts," Martin points out in this entertaining dissection of both Crusoe and his creator, Daniel Defoe. The presenter is Matthew Parris, the producer in Bristol is Miles Warde