Hello I'm Kresti 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 1987 and the presenter was Michael Parkinson. Our castaway is a versatile fellow. He's written plays and review as well as histories of the theatre,

China and India. He's been an actor, disenchanted, a guards officer, conscripted, and a publisher of rare prints, very exclusive.

On television he wrote and presented the acclaimed documentary series The Christians, but is best

known as a Quizmaster of University Challenge.

He hosted a show for 25 years. One critic described it as

the mouse trap of television. The show made our castaway a celebrity. His statement

Here's your starter for 10 became a national catchphrase.

When Liverpool football club had two graduates in the team, the fans gave them the nicknames of Little

Bamber and Big Bamber. Their namesake is Bamber Gascoin.

Bamber, you've chosen the most unusual way of selecting records for your Desert Island.

And in fact, your wife has chosen them.

And it's to be a guessing game.

Well, we've always felt that any respectable wife for many years knowing that our husband was going on a journey

would always nowadays put eight records in his luggage in case he should end up on a desert island or indeed on your program.

Uh-huh. Well then you've got a rough idea of what it might be.

Well we share a lot of musical tastes and presumably she has selected them from the records we have at home.

We're both great opera fans, so I'm sure she'll put in quite a lot of opera.

And we both are great fans of female singers as well.

Right, well looking through the listing, in fact you're right about the opera, the four or five records here of opera.

The first record, let's try you out.

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