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 the year 2000 and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is a director, writer and actor. At Cambridge in the 50s he was a star of the

footlights and a young Turk of a director, so much so that he walked straight out of

university into a job at the Royal Court Theatre.

From there he moved into writing and performing satirical sketches, first at Peter Cook's club in

Soho and then on television in not so much a program more a way of life. His impersonations of Harold Wilson,

Jomo Ken Yatta and Edward Heath became part of the national diet, eagerly consumed by

audiences enjoying the new-found freedoms which satire represented.

Then it all stopped.

satire went out of fashion and by his own admission he went off the rails.

But suddenly he came back, partnered by his best friend John Fortune, he appeared on the Rory Bremer show in a series of witty sketches sending up politicians, big business and upper-class snobberies.

What I'm doing now, he says, is exactly what I was doing

30 years ago. I haven't developed at all. He is John Bird. Do you mind, John?

I do quite. Yes, I mean I enjoy doing what I do very much but I always think that

By now I should have a late period you know like Brahms had a late period or you know where everything is very spare and abstract but I

don't have a late period I have my first my early period is gone on is it a more

confident period then because you've done it before?

I suppose so, yes, I suppose so.

One also that never gets any easier doing what we're doing.

And like most people, when I've done a piece I will think I'm never going to get an idea

again you know that's going to that's the end of it it's because it has to be so topical

...