Hello and thank you for downloading Witness from the BBC World Service.

This month the BBC is marking the 75th anniversary of its longest running radio show,

Desert Island Discs.

I'm Simon Watts and I've been trawling through the archives of the program.

Desert Island discs. Each week a well known person is asked the question, if you were to be cast away alone on a desert island,

which eight gramophone records would you choose to have with you?

Since January 1942, the BBC has been sending celebrities to its imaginary desert island.

And over the last 75 years and more than 3,000 episodes, there's

been an incredible range of guests.

Our cast away this week, ladies and gentlemen, is one of the great man of jazz Louis Armstrong.

My castaway is a man not yet 50 himself, the prime minister.

This week our castaway is the playwright, Tennessee Williams.

All the guests are asked to remember the highs and lows of their lives

through the eight pieces of music which mean the most of them.

It's a simple format, but it leads to some extraordinary stories.

Here's the film director Alfred Hitchcock.

I'm planning a psychological film.

It's called Psycho, and is in the nature, shall we say, of a rather gentle horror,

that shall end it.

The war correspondent Richard Dimbleby

And then they took me down into the bunker where Hitler committed

suicide showed me it and I pinched a knife and a fork and a spoon of his

...