Hello, I'm Krestey 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 1997, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is an actor, a Jewish boy from Milwaukee, he was an awkward self-conscious child prone to being bullied.

The thing he enjoyed most was entertaining his sick mother, and this led to acting first on the stage and then in films.

In the late 60s he appeared in Mel Brooks film The Producers, a wonderfully balmy story about a Broadway

impresario who tries to produce a flop. It led to a string of highly successful

appearances in films such as everything he wanted to know about sex but were

afraid to ask and perhaps most famous of all blazing saddles. He's also directed and starred in

several of his own films. Now he's come back to two of his early loves, the

stage and England, currently playing the lead in the West End production of Neil Simon's

laughter on the 23rd floor. He is Gene Wilder. Gene, the play is about a television comedian

and his troop of gag writers, a situation which I think you've

experienced in real life because you did a show not long ago for NBC.

Yes a few years ago and I did it because I had this illusion or delusion that it would be something akin to what

Sid Caesar and Mel Brooks and Neil Simon went through and when I was asked to do what eventually

it was called something wilder I thought well it'll be a lot of fun and it wasn't it was hell why because of the

interference artistically from the networks the interest that they have is in

selling soap or raisins or cream cheese and if it's selling well then you're a

success and if it isn't selling well then you're not. But what it comes down to

is I mean there is an analogy here with laughterott on the 23rd floor isn't there?

Oh yeah.

That in fact you've got people who run television stations telling writers and comedians how to

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