Whenever Desert Island Discs has come on the radio, I’ve always got up to switch it off. I couldn’t bear Sue Lawley’s interviewing style. She always seemed to think she was Antony Clare and spent three quarters of an hour trying to get her interviewees to bare their inner psyche for us. And her approach to interviewing political party leaders was intensely annoying, trying to get a scoop by grilling Charles Kennedy about drink or Gordon Brown about being gay.

Kirsty Young seems to have been a great improvement. She’s ditched that distinctive “being very annoying” feature - and she also seems to have some interviewees that you have actually heard of and are quite interesting to listen to (that was one of Sue Lawley’s other problems - I always thought I’m Sorry I Haven’t a Clue caught it best, with their suggestion that she run a celebrity version of Desert Island Discs).

This Sunday’s was the best yet. I didn’t really know anything at all about Simon Russell Beale before, except that people who know about these things think he’s a good actor, and that he is currently starring in Spamalot…(not sure if those two naturally go together)

But it turned out he was very interesting - and most of all, that he actually knew something about music! Normally it feels as if DID thinks it is just any other interview programme, with the actual discs just cropping up as an annoyance, and no discussion about them at all. It made the tag the Lawley used to finish with, “thanks for letting us hear your desert island discs” completely vacuous.

But Beale chose some interesting and underperformed music (such as the Mendelssohn Octet and the Sibelius Violin Concerto), and was able to introduce it and explain why it was interesting, and for example why it was that it was the first score he bought as a teenager (in the case of Mahler 8). It rightly showed up the vacuous and sometimes moronic politicians’ choices for the shallow drivel that they are - David Cameron’s Ernie, the Fastest Milkman in the West springs easily to mind.

This was obviously a bit of a shock for the technicians playing the discs - Howells’ beautiful A Spotless Rose is scored for baritone soloist and choir, but they managed to cut it off before we’d actually heard anything from the soloist.

But it was great to hear something about the actual music for a change - let’s hope they can find some more guests who have interesting and meaningful things to say about it too!