

Simone’s love for the latter, she said in her memoir, “made me dedicate my life to music”. Simone joins the Beatles, Queen, Frank Sinatra and Joni Mitchell among the only non-classical artists to top the playlists in any given year, which for decades have been dominated by Handel, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Beethoven and Bach. Goudie said the changing tone of the playlists was also down to “the absolutely enormous range of music” people have access to through streaming.
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In 2020, Bernardine Evaristo, the Booker prize-winning novelist, picked I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free and recalled how she used the song to open shows she staged at community centres in the 1980s with the groundbreaking Theatre of Black Women. When Enninful chose Strange Fruit in 2022, he said when he heard it as a schoolboy in London “it was the first time I realised being black really was difficult”. They range from her version of Strange Fruit, a song about racist lynchings in the American south previously recorded by Billie Holliday, which, in Simone’s words, “tears at the guts of what white people have done to my people in this country”, to her takes on Randy Newman’s Baltimore and the Beatles’ Here Comes the Sun. Since the start of 2020, 17 guests have chosen 12 different Simone tracks. There are songs that lift you up and songs that have a real political edge … For some people it’s absolutely all about the voice.

Goudie said: “The other important thing is the variety of music that performed offers castaways a whole range of experiences.
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They included Jay Blades, the Repair Shop presenter, the actor David Harewood, and Oti Mabuse, the former Strictly Come Dancing professional dancer. In 2002, about 4% of guests were black, rising to 12% a decade later and about 18% last year, the Guardian estimates. He was the fashion bible’s first black editor and it would be natural for Desert Island Discs to invite such a figure, Goudie said.

There is no quota system for guests, but Goudie said that one recent guest to select Simone was Edward Enninful, the editor-in-chief of British Vogue.

John Goudie, the editor of the show, said: “We’re reflecting the changing shape of society.” The North Carolina-born jazz diva’s subsequent solo dominance comes as black people are increasingly invited to be guests on the show, now hosted by Lauren Laverne. Unlike other Raven horror or fantasy features, this one is strictly mundane.In 2020, the year of the Black Lives Matter protests, Simone rose to equal top among the most selected artists alongside Bowie, the Rolling Stones and Mozart. Running gag of Alektra punking him with homosexual situations (she has an off-camera pegging scene for example, none of it eliciting the intended humor) is stupid. Raven himself has a cameo as a film director trying to coax a performance from Alektra's erstwhile boyfriend Barrett Blade, whose acting here is execrable. She's initiated into the coven with a superstar lesbian threesome, about all the DVD has to offer. Merely an excuse to slap sex scenes together haphazardly, "The Gifted" has little to offer other than its sexy cast in action for the umpteenth time. They take weird Alektra under their wing, give her a book of spells to study and help her develop her true calling. Lei and Mikayla head a coven of witches, though insisting that you "don't call me a witch". Alektra gets top billing, but the show belongs to Kaylani, whose voice-over narration throughout provides the modicum of plot and back story missing from the live action. "The Gifted" is a low-effort feature from once lofty filmmaker Michael Raven, near the end of his career and wasting the talent of 3 top Wicked Pictures contract stars: Kaylani Lei, Alektra Blue and Mikayla Mendez.
