Desert Island Discs is, I think, the longest running music program on radio. It started in the sepia-toned, bombed-out screech of 1942 and has continued, week in, week out, ever since, on BBC Radio 4.

The idea is as simple as consonant with longevity. A famous person chats about their life and achievements to the presenter, the interview being punctuated by selections from the eight gramophone records (remember them?) they’d least like to be without were they washed up on a desert island. At the end, the ‘castaway’ gets to choose a book and a ‘luxury’ with which they’d like to be marooned.

The great, good and not-quite-so-great have been interviewed, some several times. (An aside. I once noted to Lord Robert May that the Great and the Good would be at a meeting we were both due to attend, and asked him which one he was. “Both!” was his bluff reply).

Each and every British Prime Minister gets a turn on the Desert Island. But others wait, forever frustrated. It is rumored that Herbert Morrison, a cabinet minister of an earlier age, desired nothing so much as an invitation to appear on the programme, and carried a list of eight records in his wallet, at the ready. Just, you know, in case.

Well, it’s just happened to me. Yes, this afternoon I got The Call.

Well, sort of.

The other day I appeared on a drive time show for my local BBC Station, BBC Radio Norfolk, on which I was tolkien about a lecture I was about to give in my home town of Cromer about my book The Science of Middle-earth. Well, they liked me so much that today a nice man from the station called me and asked me if I’d like to appear on What’s Rockin’ Norfolk?, a 6pm segment in Nicky Price’s drive time show. I’d get to choose some of my favourite music and talk about my favourite subject, that is, myself. “It’ll be like Desert Island Discs, only better!” he said.

Being the monster of vanity and arrogance that I am, I agreed immediately and set out to choose the ‘ten to twelve tracks’ I’d be allowed. They’d let me have film music, but no classical (not the right demographic, I was told). I guess I could have spent weeks refining my ten top tracks, but in the interests of speed I did a rather rough selection, and am looking forward to my trip to Norwich on Monday evening, pile of CDs in hand.

In the interests of building suspense (oh, go on) I won’t tell you what I’ve chosen except to reveal, live and exclusively on the Nature Network, that one of the tracks will be Bohemian Rhapsody. I am absolutely unrepentant about this and agree with Samuel Johnson that “when a man is tired of Bohemian Rhapsody, he is tired of life; for there is in Bohemian Rhapsody all that life can afford.”

What would have chosen?