I'm Rory Stewart and I grew up wanting to be a hero and I'm still fascinated by the ideas of heroism.

In my new series, I'm taking in the long sweep of history from Achilles to Zelensky and asking, what is a hero?

Simply doing your job, being a decent human being.

A true hero is someone who just kind of shines by

their own light and that light is to be recognised by others. The long history of heroism with me,

Rory Stewart. Listen on BBC Sounds. Hello, I'm Kirstie Young and this is a podcast from

the Desert Island Discs archive.

For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1986.

Music The castaway who was to have been the late Roy Plumley's first guest when his series returned to the air last June, is introduced now by Michael Parkinson.

Our castaway today is the British film director Alan Parker, who's made such fine films as Midnight Express, Bugs in Malone, fame, and most recently, Birdie. Alan, you grew up in the 40s in London and a sort of teenager in the 50s. That's sort of the tail end of the cinema generation. Was the cinema much of an influence on you as a child?

I think so, yeah. There's very little else that we could do there. I grew up in Islington.

There wasn't a lot of things that we could go to anyway. The thing I loved most of all was Saturday morning pictures, which became sort of institution with us. And I think that was probably

when I first got the bug. The worst thing about it was that if you got chosen for the school football team, it meant you couldn't do Saturday morning pictures anymore. But apart from that, that's my first memory of movies. Do you imagine yourself in those days as being a film star? Or were you always interested in directing movies? No, I know. Coming from Reslington, if you told someone you wanted to be a film director, they'd fall about laughing. Certainly not a movie star now. The television in those days, well, no television at all, the movies, in fact, represented the kind of boundaries of your horizon, didn't they? Really, yeah, I mean, it was a fantasy world. I mean, I have to say that, you know, I suppose it shows in my work now

is that my influences were the American movie.

I didn't see fancy schmancy intellectual French movie until I was in my 20s, I don't think.

So my original loves were always American movies.

And that was a world that we couldn't possibly actually aspire to in Newlington. And it was just something that happened somewhere else, and it was a place called in America. What about your family? What do your father do? He worked for the Sunday Times in the garage of the Sunday Times. So there's no hint of showbiz there at all? No, no. In fact, he left Sunday. He worked for the electricity board as a painter.

So in France, I always say, what does your father do? And I say, he's a painter. And they go, oh, wonderful. So, you know, he's the impressionist or whatever. I said, no, he works for the electricity board. He's avant-garde. He paints in grey. He paints railings and transformers. What part of the music play in your youth when you're growing up?

Very early on I actually got into rock and roll.

I was lucky enough. transformers. What part did music play in your youth when you're growing up?

Very early on I actually got into rock and roll. I was lucky enough to be that age group that was the first to get into it. And, you know, my memories of, you know, I bought the very,

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