Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.

For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk.

Radio 4. The My castaway this week is Hugh Lorry, actor, writer, director, musician.

If life were straightforward, we'd be marooning him on our island because of his achievements as a championship rower.

But his early promise on the water was scuppered by a bout of glandular fever, so he's had to make do instead with life as a worldwide entertainment

superstar.

Very British comedy, very big budget movies, very successful syndicated TV drama. His 30-year career has taken him from a little bit of

Fry and Lorry to a big bit of broadcasting history. His role in the US show House

ran for eight series and had a global audience of 81 million.

So why now does he feel the need to risk his stellar reputation by making music too?

Well he says, as soon as I acknowledge to myself that something is

frightening and carries the risk of public humiliation I feel like I have to do it and

there's the thing you seem so far Hugh Laurie to have avoided any public humiliation. The music career going well and the

television career especially across the pond went extraordinarily well.

I suppose it yes I mean I've been very very blessed but I hear the beating of the

wings behind me all the time and I'm always anticipating disaster and you know feeling it brushed by me.

You were working with a very brilliant team on on House of course for all those years especially very very

good writers but to learn that 81 million people globally are watching what you're doing

destabilizing, worrying, joy-making.

It's awfully hard to absorb, particularly because it's such a verbal,

such a densely verbal, idiomatic, very, very very funny intricate show I cannot

...