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 2007. My castaway this week is Greg Dyke, a top flight TV executive known for being instinctual, populist and

bulshi. His appointment as BBC Director General at the end of the 90s was an

uncharacteristically bold move for the corporation and an extraordinary moment for a man who as a

youngster was once marked out by his teachers as the boy least likely to succeed.

However, his departure four years later was a great deal more spectacular.

The passion and impulsiveness that served him so well at L.W.T. and TV AM proved his undoing at the BBC,

when a bitter rub erupted with Downing Street over the corporation's coverage of the Iraq

war. Amid considerable mud-slinging ill temper and tragedy, he was forced to resign, prompting

a huge display of loyalty from his staff as thousands gathered on the steps

of the corporation to wish him a tearful goodbye.

One of the most you memorably, Craig Dyke, how did a short, bold man with a speech impediment have such an impact?

What do you think the short answer is to that?

Well we spent in the four years I was at the BBC we had one aim and that was to make the people who worked here

feel valued. If you can make them feel valued then you can do great things in an

organization and I think we achieved that I think people felt there would been a significant difference in that time.

It was Thursday the 29th of January 2004, I'm sure you remember it well.

That was the day that you handed in your resignation.

Only one day before you had had the

opportunity to see Lord Hutton's report for the first time. Just to remind people

that was the inquiry that the government had set up into the death of the

...