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 1988, and the presenter was Michael Parkinson. Our castaway is a sporting hero. In the 70s he was our most

outstandingly consistent athlete. For 10 years he brought world records, won

European and Commonwealth titles, and built an enormous reputation. But his

singular contribution was a crusade to relate his

sport to his background, to reveal its possibilities to people who normally wouldn't know a running

issue from a pair of clogs. It was due to him that a neglected part of England became an international

centre for athletics and earn him the title of the Pie Piper of Gateshead. He is Brendan Foster.

Brendan are still living up in Gateshead? Yeah, I still live back in the northeast. Brendan home and we'd actually broken our connections with the Northeast for a little time

but then when we came back we decided that we should buy a new house and settle down

back in the Northeast of England and at times you don't know why but it's home.

What is the attraction do you think?

That's a very hard question.

I think if you actually underline it all.

First of all it's England.

I mean because being in the States for a year the thing that really amazed me that I missed England so badly and it's things like the football scores on a Saturday evening and you know not knowing quite how badly Newcastle were doing and

the summer you know like June through August when everything's happening in London

and you're reading little clips of it in American newspapers and they don't appreciate

Henley and I don't really appreciate those things but it's nice to be home and to be perfectly

honest with you my wife and I was just talking about the other night

and Sue says you know the thing I missed most about not being in England was Radio 4.

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