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 program was originally broadcast in 1995,

and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My cast away this week is an actor. He made his name in the 60s as PC Fancy Smith in BBC Television

Z-Kars. Since then he's appeared in dozens of roles from Old Deuteronomy in the musical

Cats to Augustus Caesar in I-Claudeous.

When he's not acting, he climbs mountains, real ones like Mount Everest.

Six years ago he made a film recreating the journey made by his hero George Mallory

who lost his life on its slopes. He's been back again since and he plans another ascent

later this year. Once you stop taking risks he says you start to lose.

He is Brian Blessed. Is there any kind of link, Brian, between those two parallel activities of yours acting and climbing. I mean do you

experience the same kind of fear on the stage on a first night as you might feel

on a mountain? Well yes yes I do I feel very vulnerable about both, but I would feel that acting is holding up the mirror up to life,

whereas climbing Everest or any of the great mountains taking going on expeditions, that is life.

And I find there's a very big difference between the sweat and fear of a

first night at Stratford on Avon and being on the loatsy face close by Everest.

But the panic is the same presumably. It is but you're not going to lose your life at

Stratford. So how close have you come to losing your life? Oh well I've got exceedingly

frightened. I think last time I was rather shocked a certain kind of vanity I thought the mountain loved me.

I thought I was a servant to what I was doing and it was the worst monsoon conditions

in 70 years in 1993 in the autumn. You can imagine what it was like on Everest and I

descended the Lotsy face very quickly one evening and the following day the whole face avalanche the worst ever biggest recorded

...