Mike Leigh OBE

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Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen ninety seven, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

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My Castaway this week is a filmmaker. His work is unique. It's built on a system of improvisation in which the characters are developed separately within the framework of a story he's devised. It's a method that's brought him great success, from his first feature film, Bleak Moments, made 25 years ago, through his famous BBC productions of the 80s, Nuts in May and Abigail's Party, to last year's triumph at the Cannes Film Festival, where his film Secrets and Lies won the palm d'Or for Best Film. The author of all this was brought up in a Jewish family in Salford. I don't think I've ever made a pessimistic film, he says. What motivates all of my films is a strong feeling of hope. He is Mike Lee. Not pessimistic, Mike, but pretty bleak in places, really. Well.

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My films are bleak. My first film was indeed called Bleak Moments, and they're also joyous. And life is bleak and joyous. Life is comic and tragic and full of despair and full of

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Wonderful, ecstatic moments. But not much joyous about the monstrous Beverly in Abigail's Party or the the miserable, vulnerable Cynthia in Secrets and Lies. I think Cynthia has more joy, finally, in Secrets and Lies than Beverly has in Abigail's Party. I mean, I've done a huge number of things, and they've spanned quite a spectrum of different sorts of ways of looking at life, which is my main job. I've done pieces like Abigail's Party, if you like, like Nuts in May, where I've sort of

Mike Leigh OBE1:32

There's not m

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worked in a broad comic, slightly satirical sort of vein in order to kind of make us look at the ludicrousness of some of the ways that we live. But other times, I mean I'd be far more concerned to really plumb the emotional depths. You've also, in many of these pieces, plumbed pretentiousness, haven't you? That seems to be a theme that comes up. You know, whether it's again in Secrets and Lies, you know, Sunday lunch barbecues on the new patio or showing off your downstairs cloakroom. That seems to be a theme in your work. A strain that goes right through all my things, for people who are being upwardly mobile. Sometimes people in my films are

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Trying to make life better. I mean, there's a whole run of characters that goes right throughout my films. You know, Cyril, the messenger, the main character in High Hopes, who is an idealist, who's frustrated. Johnny, the main character in Naked, who is indeed an idealist, but who is frustrated and becomes bitter and negative because he's disappointed in a cynical world. That's probably a pessimistic film, isn't it? Well, it is, but at the same time, it's a film about somebody who is a frustrated optimist, an idealist, a dreamer. So ultimately, they're not pessimistic. What they are, you're saying, between life and death is they're realistic. Well, that's right. I mean, I suppose in the end, I think what I try and do is tell it how it is.

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Tell me about your first record. Well, I've chosen a bit from the Mercado. I mean, growing up in Manchester, where, you know, Gilbert and Sullivan was played all over the place, it's sort of part of one's peculiar provincial musical cultural background. Many people are really closet about Gilbert and Sullivan. And I mean, I think I've sort of felt it's about time one came out of the closet and was honest about it, because it's good fun, it's joyous, it's youthful, and I think I could sit on my desert island listening to it every so often with some degree of optimism.

Speaker 24:10

Go somewhere else for time speaks of bottomers And don't take love for time

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Uh

Mike Leigh OBE4:40

I think you ought to recall and too care not show too much respect.

Mike Leigh OBE4:44

What the hell it I can do, but nobody does, so why should you? That you, that us, should have it spring is hard on us, it's hard on us To operong but if we think so hard on us, so hard on us If we decline to dance And sing ta la la la la la ta

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Marie McLachlan, Anne Howells, and Janice Watson, with Richard Van Allen, singing the quartet from Act One of Gilbert and Sullivan's Mikado with the chorus and orchestra of the Welsh National Opera conducted by Sir Charles McKerris. Let's talk Mikely about Abigail's party, which, when it was broadcast by the BBC in the mid-70s, made your name with a much wider public. It was a phenomenal success, I think, on its third showing. It got, you know, 16 million viewers, an audience of Morecambe and Wise proportions. Why? Well, it was a total fluke, actually. Not to suggest for a moment that it isn't a masterpiece or anything, but the thing was, it had been a theatre play, and all the West End managements wanted to take it into the West End. And Alison Stentman, who was at that time my wife, was pregnant with our first son, as it turned out. And the doctors simply said, There's no way you can go into the West End with this. Forget it. And at this moment.

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A television play, a studio play, about the Diplock trials in Northern Ireland was pulled for some fairly predictable legal reasons. And Margaret Matheson, the producer, had an empty studio. And she said, Well, why don't you come and do Abigail's party in the studio? It would make a great television play. And I said, Absolute nonsense. It's theatre. It will not translate. Because it's just one scene, isn't it? It's in the same room, yeah. It's a two-act play in this room, of course. But everybody sat on me from every angle, and we did it. We took it into the studio, we wheeled it out of its 104th performance at Hampstead into the studio. We did it.

Mike Leigh OBE6:14

Positive.

Mike Leigh OBE6:15

See one of the case.

Presenter6:31

It was shown, it was shown again, and then the third time, the time you're talking about, when it was repeated, it was in the middle of August. Storms raged throughout the British Isles. There was no Channel 4 in those days, there were only three channels. It was on BBC One. There was an ITV strike, so there was no Channel 3. And there was an incredibly highbrow posh programme. I've forgotten what it was, but Jonathan Miller may have been involved on BBC Two. So 16 million people tuned in, and the rest is history. Amazing, isn't it? Just to remind people, we should say it was set in this one room, which was Beverly and Lawrence's sitting room, as it were. They got the neighbours in for drinks because the teenager Abigail, whom we never meet next door, is having a party and her mum comes in. What it brought you, and it wasn't to be for the last time, was the accusation that you were patronising. Your work had an element of snobbery in it because Beverly loved Demis Russo and pineapple and cheese on sticks and sexually suggestive prints from boots, you know, or her husband, who was upwardly mobile, I think, preferred classical music, i.e. James Galway, and he liked olives, you know. But you always said it was unfair to say that you were being patronized. Dennis Potter, I think, even accused you of being a scared. Dennis Potter was extremely hostile about it. I mean, I I I I just think it's complete nonsense, really. I I you know.

Mike Leigh OBE7:43

Is that a

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It it means that, you know.

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You cannot look.

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honestly and openly and with a sense of humour about any at any section of society because there's always a reason why you're apparently looking at it from the other side of one particular fence or another. I mean the bottom line is that as far as I'm concerned these films and plays are about us and we are all vulnerable. You know we are all ridiculous and we are all passionate. You know I mean this is a play in which a guy under serious stress has a heart attack. He's an overworked, very very stressed, highly stressed estate agent. Heavily nagged. Heavily nagged by this woman who her heart is in the right place but she wants something that sh that the material circumstances that she lives in do not give her. Quite honestly it is a play about frustration and about needs and about hopes and all of those things.

Mike Leigh OBE8:27

Yeah.

Mike Leigh OBE8:42

Hmm.

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Record number two.

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Well, I've chosen Bessie Smith. This is her singing mean old bedbug blues. We used this music for a play I did at the RSC in Stratford in nineteen seventy four called Babies Grow Old, and it's very near to my heart.

Speaker 29:03

When I lay down at night, I wonder how I can forget.

Speaker 29:16

When I lay down at night.

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I wonder how I get up forgets.

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When some is holding my hands, others eating my

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Bessie Smith and Mean Old Bedbug Blues, and that was recorded in 1927. Tell me then about your origins, Mike Lee. I said Jewish Salford, Greater Manchester. Lieberman was the original name. It was, but my father and his brothers changed it before the war. My dad was a doctor, and we lived in North Salford, 398 Great Cheeth, East. And we lived over the surgery in a very working class area. Of course, you know, being a doctor's son, I guess you could say man with a middle class background, which it was. Was there anything pretentious about it? Did you have fish knives and forks and van Gogh on the walls? No, I don't think it was. I mean, there probably were fish knives and forks, but then, you know.

Mike Leigh OBE9:48

They

Speaker 29:48

It was, but

Mike Leigh OBE9:49

On

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Jewish grandparents would have had fish now. I mean, they were around because people took anything else with culturally eating fish was taken very seriously, you know.

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I don't think it was pretentious. I mean, I think there's a difference between pretentious and trying to live properly. It was tough, you know, for people after the war to kind of um

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Build something up. I mean, one of the records I didn't choose,'cause you're only allowed eight on this island, was um Rhapsody in Blue, which I m love and which I mentioned because, you know, I mean, my folks got hold of a grammar phone and when I was couldn't have been more than about eight or nine, and used to play records and actually make me sit and listen to them. I don't think it was pretentious. I mean, later when I was a teenager, we sort of moved up to the Lefia suburbs just up the road in what's called Higher Broughton.

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And I suppose it was then as a teenager that I started to develop an attitude towards what I saw as suburban pretentiousness. And I mean there is there are some strains, some real obvious strains in my plays and films which go back to that. Would you say then your salvational part of it in all of this was your Jewish youth club, this this the Habanim it was part of, wasn't it? Yes, it wasn't a club actually. I mean it it was and remains part of the it was in fact part of a Zionist organisation, which in fact the main object was to get people to go and

Mike Leigh OBE11:27

I mean there is

Mike Leigh OBE11:41

Yeah.

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Live and work and be members of a kibbutz. So it was very much a socialist youth movement, and indeed on a serious level, I mean, that's where I learnt my socialism. And it was in many ways a very healthy thing. I walked away from all of that, of course, when I really realized that I wasn't concerned with a Jewish dimension in my life. And indeed, subsequently, of course, I have had serious reservations and continue to do so about Israel and many aspects of what Israel stands for. Number three.

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I came to London in the sixties, and one of the things that I and many

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guys of my age did was to fall in love with Jean Moreau in Jouletime.

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And fascinating, quiet fascinating.

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Once collier, once a collais, once perle-devux, once perle-duve, on saior trouvet, once a chauffeur, puis en c'est parais.

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Jacques Boursois re partie, d'enturbiom la vie.

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Jelevi soir aye aya, safe de ja, a fa-bai, safet de ja, a faumbai.

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Au son des banjourges a l'reconux, se curieu surir qui mave templeu, savoisi factal son bouvis achpal, mais mour plu que jamais.

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Uh

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Jean Moreau singing Le Tourbillon from François Truffaut's film Jeu le Jim.

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So, Mike, with three O levels, you left Salford for London and five years at Rada Art College and Film School. Now, Rada, you've proclaimed a sterile experience. Why so? Well, it was. I mean, it was it was a very it was a seminal experience and it was in many ways a great experience. I mean, you know, I think for a seventeen-year-old in nineteen sixty to come down to London, whatever you did was kind of be

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Tough. But radar was old-fashioned in those days. We did little in the way of improvisation work or creative work. It was very much that acting was all about.

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recycling known old ways of doing things. Just reproducing the scenes. Learn the lines, don't fall over the furniture, be professional, and that's that. And so that having been to to art to um drama school, to Rada, I then found myself at uh Camberwell Art School on the foundation course. And it was whilst doing life drawing there that I actually thought suddenly realized.

Mike Leigh OBE14:19

Just

Mike Leigh OBE14:20

Learn the lines.

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That now, for the first time, I was actually doing what artists should be doing, which is to, you know, engage with.

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The real world and actually express it in some way, and somehow I started to make connections.

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That somehow actors could do that as well. And that pointed in directions that I. So it was at art school, really, that you realised that actors could be part of the creative process? Well, I sort of started to.

Mike Leigh OBE14:55

So it was a

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To think about what I was now doing in relation to what I hadn't experienced.

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As an acting student. Of course there was Beckett and Harold Pinter and Peter Brooke whose production of The Marasad, the RSC production of The Aldwich in 1965, was a turning point for me because it was an amazing production. And I saw a television documentary which explained how the actors had each gone to a mental hospital and had each worked for one particular patient as the basis for their characterisation.

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And they've done a huge amount of improvisation work to build up the ensemble for for the piece.

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And

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It occurred to me that if you can actually do all that to serve a piece, then surely you could go much further and create.

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a piece of theatre completely from scratch using improvisation until you arrived at a finished, final, organic piece of cinema. And I want to talk about exactly how you do that, but let's pause there for some more music.

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The Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves from Nabucco. I love this because it has an extraordinary kind of passion and an extraordinary again, a sadness that is somehow alloyed with the joy of life. And of course, it was a sort of political anthem at the time of the Italian Revolution in the mid-19th century. I mean, people just sang it as a as almost as their national socialist anthem. It just is very exciting.

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Part of the Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves from Act Three of Verdi's Nabucco with the chorus and orchestra of the Deutsche Oper Berlin, conducted by Giuseppe Sinopoli.

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Mikeley, let's talk then about this technique of improvisation, because I've read about it, I've heard it described, not least by Alison Stedman, who is your wife and your leading actress in so many of your pieces, and yet it's still difficult to pin down. Now, when you meet the actors that you've invited to appear in one of your films, there's no script and there's no plot, right? There's nothing. So you ring up, for example, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, who plays Hortense, the young black woman, the illegitimate daughter of a white woman in Secrets and Lies.

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Do you know in that moment what kind of character you're going to ask her to portray, or do you just think, look, this is somebody I work well with, I think I'll have her on this one? Varies. Sometimes it's one of those things, sometimes it's the other. Sometimes I kind of have a fairly clear notion, and sometimes, I mean, the first commitment when I called Mariana and said, Will you be in the film? is that, and we won't do a character like the last one. And we didn't. I mean, she played this very hard-edged, unpleasant.

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Upwardly mobile person that was very different from what you're doing. So, when do you agree what the character is?

Mike Leigh OBE18:37

So when

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My job with each actor is to collaborate to create a character. Now, obviously, what the actors agree to do is to take part in the film without knowing A what the film is going to be, B what the character is going to be, because we're going to work that out as part of the whole process, and C that they will never know any more about the whole thing than their character would know. So, how much do you work with them alone then? I mean, do you and how deeply do you go into these individual characters? Do you discuss what kind of child they were, or what their childhood injuries were, or their relationships with their dead parents, or whatever? You name it.

Mike Leigh OBE19:13

Did you

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We do it. And the things you just mentioned all are all quite the sort of things that we do. Look, all we do is to create totally

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real lives in every detail that we can don't forget

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You know, the most important thing that about this is that I may have feelings and ideas about what it is that we're going to do, but I actually don't know what it is either. But my job is to do what any painter or novelist or composer or any other sort of artist does, which is to start with feelings or a conception or something, and then to start to work with the material. And as you

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Develop it, to take from it and to give to it, and to distill it and to arrive at something that's coming. Yes, but a novelist can often begin with a structure. You're saying that's exactly what you don't have. I mean, at what point in this process do you focus up and say, Well, now hang on, we're making this film, and it became Secrets and Lies, but you called it Untitled 95. I think that was everything's untitled, 95, 96, 97, whatever. You know, at some point, you decide this story is about adoption, about a black girl searching for her birth mother. Right from the word go.

Mike Leigh OBE20:22

Come on.

Presenter20:24

I'm working through all sorts of ongoing ideas that I have. There are people close to me in my life, I can't talk about this in any detail, who have adoption-related experiences. And for that reason, I wanted to make a film that in some way dealt with. So, you did know from the beginning. Absolutely, and there's no mystique in that. You knew it was going to be about. I mean, I didn't tell them particularly because it's important. When do you tell them then? Well, it gradually becomes clear as it feeds in and it builds up and it grows that that is one of the things the thing is about. But, for example,

Mike Leigh OBE20:39

Ta-da!

Mike Leigh OBE20:40

Again solution

Mike Leigh OBE20:42

You knew it was going to be that discussion.

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So, why do you pretend before that? Why don't you tell them in the beginning? Because it's important to create for the actor to have the freedom.

Mike Leigh OBE20:55

So why do you

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to create a character who is

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rounded and is not defined by one single notion.

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More of it in just a moment, but let's pause for record number five.

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Uta Lempa, um singing Mac the Knife from the Threatening Opera by Kurtweil and Bertolt Brecht. Um

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Brecht and indeed Kurt Weil is an important part of my life, as it probably is of most people who do the sort of thing I do. A huge influence, in an implicit kind of way, on a way of telling a story and of being both objective and subjective in the way you tell a story.

Speaker 321:47

Und sch muhl me perfund wies o mancher eigermann und sage mechimeser.

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I yeah.

Mike Leigh OBE21:50

Yeah.

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Uh

Mike Leigh OBE21:51

That food.

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One does that engage.

Mike Leigh OBE22:01

Uh

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Uh

Speaker 322:05

They manicht the khan.

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Otter Lemper, singing part of Court Val's The Ballad of Mac the Knife from the Thrupney Opera. So we're talking mightily about how this whole process goes on, this kind of cross fertilization of ideas and how your original thoughts are embellished and

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The creative input of the actors. But at what point, because there has to be a point, does the script get written down?

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There's always a date on which uh the film is going to start being shot, and that is a practical fact. I mean, that's not something that

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It kind of is an ethereal dream. That is, you know, all kinds of practical things have to happen by then.

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When I get together with the actors three, six months beforehand, the first thing I say is.

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in six months' time on Monday the thirteenth or whatever it is, we are going to go out and on location and make up a film. So there is a kind of discipline going on behind it all. So all the work that we're talk we've been talking around that

Mike Leigh OBE23:06

But it's not behind it all.

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is about

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you know, creating a world of the characters and the relationships through improvisation and research and all of that happens in a fairly fluid way for a long while in preparation for that shoot. And are you making notes all the time? Uh yes and no, but the most important thing is that that it isn't just about the actors. The designer comes and

Speaker 223:25

Time to

Mike Leigh OBE23:25

Are you making notes?

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takes part in knowing what's happening. I'm making decisions with the designer and you know we're looking for locations and we're preparing. So that on that day we go out and we start to make up this film. Now, right at the last minute I write a piece of literature that usually takes two or three pages and it will say scene one.

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Sue Lawley in bed. Scene two, Sue Lawley gets up and goes to work. Scene three, studio. Sue Lawley and Mike Lee sitting in it. Scene four, lunchtime, or whatever it is. And that's all it will say.

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And that is not a script of a film, that is a premise.

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Upon which we then go out and sequence by sequence, location by location, we improvise, and then I start to direct.

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They redirect and draw from the improvisations, and through rehearsal, we arrive at.

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a very precise, very tightly scripted piece of action, scene by scene. On the hoof, you haven't written this down before. No, it's arrived at through rehearsal. So we then shoot that scene. So it means that

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We are in the strictest sense making the film up as we go along. Now I never know what the end is going to be until we get to that. But explain to me, because it's still very difficult to get a handle on. You know, take the character Johnny in Naked, played by David Tulis, and he

Mike Leigh OBE24:44

Yes.

Mike Leigh OBE24:47

But

Presenter24:55

one best actor at can a few years ago for that, troubled, cynical, John Lennon-like Mancunian who travels to London and finds this kind of brutality.

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I mean, he's a character who is so articulate. The words that come out of his mouth are so original, the ideas, the expressions of them, and so on. Now, you know, who is the greater creator of him, David Thewlis or you, Mike Lee? Well, neither, strictly. I couldn't go home and write that character conventionally, though I have some writing skills. And he couldn't.

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play that character without having Meta push him and pull him and encourage him and cajole him and give him the context in which to do it. And indeed, the character doesn't exist by himself. I mean, although the film is dominated by Johnny,

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The character will be meaningless without the interplay and the dynamic and the broader context of the whole film. And I hope that there is an homogeneous fusion between the character and the film itself. Yes, but the words that he utters are undoubtedly superb. David Thewlett is a very, very brilliant and unique actor. And my job, apart from anything else with all of these films, is to tap into the best, the real special talents and abilities of each actor and exploit it.

Mike Leigh OBE26:01

Davis Philip

Presenter26:18

Jove, that's what I did with David Theulis. Do you know anybody else who works like you do? Not that I'd want to talk about them.

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Next piece of music.

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I've chosen Elgar's Enigma variations for no particular reason other than that I I love it. I mean Elgar as you may know wrote this piece as a series of portraits of friends and I just love its kind of range i uh of I love its humanity, its range of humour and tragedy and all of those things, and uh I it's very compulsive listening and I could listen to it for a very long time.

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Part of Elgar's Enigma Variations, number 10, The Intomezzo, with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Daniel Barenboim.

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It's interesting, Mike Lee, that I said at the beginning you're a film director, and yet we've spent much more time discussing character development and writing and plot and so on.

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But the fact is that the camera work is also very unusual. To quote a very obvious example, you know, the barbecue lunch in Secrets and Lies.

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which I think is shot o o on on a static

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Very long length of time, six people in frame the whole time. Seven.

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It just made sense.

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Because there's so much happening dramatically, and there are so many things happening domestically around this barbecue.

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Have a scene where it just where we let it all happen. Of course, it's a very, very tightly rehearsed scene. I mean, we we spent ages getting it right. And of course, however tightly you rehearse, you can't make steaks and sausages behave themselves. I mean, if we went for another take when we shot that, it was because steaks kept leaping all over the place. What about your your latest film, Career Girls, which began life, I think, as untitled ninety-six, didn't it? Career Girls has done very well. I mean, I think people really.

Mike Leigh OBE28:37

Mm-hmm

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Relate to Career Girls because it is a film, as you know, where

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You know, we see these people now at the age of thirty, and it keeps flashing back to when they were younger. I mean, one of the things that's very important for me is I do like to give the audience treats. For example, in Secrets and Lies, when you see all those people having their photographs taken, I mean, it just is a treat for the audience. And I think it's with career girls, I hope it's a treat for the audience just to see these girls, these characters, now and then to keep seeing them when they were sort of to see how they've grown up, how they've sophisticated, and you would never have thought she would wear her hair like that five years on or ten years on, whatever it is. Number seven.

Mike Leigh OBE29:17

For the audience.

Mike Leigh OBE29:26

Sort of

Mike Leigh OBE29:27

Yeah.

Mike Leigh OBE29:30

Exactly.

Mike Leigh OBE29:32

And five years on or ten years on.

Presenter29:37

Well, in 1985 I went to Australia to attend a screenwriters' conference and to teach in the National Film School in Sydney. My father had been very ill for a number of years and had had heart attacks and some strokes and was in a very bad way. And I went up to Manchester to see him and we hugged each other and the terrible truth is that I knew when I when that moment happened that we both knew that we were seeing each other for the last time. But you kind of sort of suppress it and you don't face it. And while I was in Australia, into fact he died. I had with me a cassette with Mozart's clarinet concerto on one side and the bassoon concerto on the other side. And I just lay in this room in Sydney

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and just played this cassette backwards and forwards from one end to the other all night.

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Jack Brimer playing part of the slow movement of Mozart's clarinet concerto in A major, with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Sir Thomas Beacham.

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Your work is obviously of crucial importance to you, Mike Lee. You rarely take holidays. You've had a major breakdown during the course of it, perhaps because of it.

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D do you in any way attribute the breakdown of your marriage to Alison Steadman to too much work or?

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Not at all. Um I don't think it's got anything to do with it, actually. I think that

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um relationships take their natural courses. We're still I mean, she ha she has left me and I live still live with my two sons and she lives with her.

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um lover and we are still very friendly and

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It's as amicable as.

Mike Leigh OBE32:27

As

Presenter32:28

such things can be and genuinely so. Um I I don't think uh one would specially want to talk about the causes here. No, but but I mean, I don't obviously don't want to ask you about all all of the personal circumstances, but what I'm saying is, d do you feel that you've been and perhaps still are too obsessive about your work? Has your work

Mike Leigh OBE32:36

Yeah, but

Presenter32:47

Been too important in your life or something. I think I'm certainly I'm obsessive about it. Um I think w anybody who

Mike Leigh OBE32:49

Yeah.

Mike Leigh OBE32:50

Yeah.

Presenter32:56

Is very involved creatively with what they do, has to be. And I think there's no choice in that. I mean, the the good news is, you know, we have raised.

Presenter33:07

Boys, and I do have outside interests and get around and, you know, potter about. And uh, I don't live in a complete ivory tower by any means. And I think that's, you know. But you would if we put you on a desert island. You know, take it all away. You cannot work. You haven't got an actor, you haven't got a camera. You're sitting there. You're on your own. I love it. I'm very good at hanging around, procrastinating, and not doing anything. I think I'd probably be all right on the island, actually.

Presenter33:32

Last record

Presenter33:34

Um

Presenter33:35

I come back to where I started with my first record to Arthur Sullivan. I've chosen The Long Day Closes, which is one of his songs, which in this recording that we're going to hear was used by my friend Terence Davis for the very last moments of his film, also called The Long Day Closes, when the two boys are looking at that wonderful cloud formation. And I would like to sit on my island watching the sunset, listening to The Long Day Closes as The Long Day Closes.

Mike Leigh OBE34:12

Yeah.

Mike Leigh OBE34:23

I bought Chinese red

Presenter34:48

Oh no, it is bad.

Mike Leigh OBE34:56

Your toy is rare.

Presenter35:03

The pro Cantione Antiqua singing Arthur Sullivan's The Long Day Closes, directed by Mark Brown. Now, if I only let you take one of those eight records, Mike, which one would it be? It would have to be the Mozart.

Presenter35:16

And memories of your father. Yeah. What about your book, as well as um Bible and Shakespeare? Well, I would take One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garccio Marquez, which I I've only read once and I would like to re-read it another few times, and I think it would do me on the island. And the luxury. Well, I would like a

Presenter35:36

Luxury, fully flushing, lavatory.

Presenter35:39

With an endless supply of high-quality, eco-friendly toilet rolls. Likely, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your desert island discs. Thank you.

Presenter35:57

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co. uk slash radio four.