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 1982, and the presenter was Roy Plumlee. This week are cast away as barren miles of Blackfriars in the city of London,

who is well known as an actor, producer, designer, film director, author, playwright, entertainer, singer, he runs his own theatre and he's better known to us on the

whole as Bernard Miles.

Oh good, yes, better than Baron.

Well Lord is nice than Baron.

Oh, Bernard, you have eight records. I know that music means a great deal to you.

Well, I was brought up on it. I mean, I'm a Sunday school boy. My mother and father were Methodist.

My mother had a charming

soprano voice my father I think he made his fiddle himself and they

used to go around the circuit around in Hillingdon and district she's singing and he

playing a violin obbligato and so I was soaked in hymn knowledge I know more hymns and I challenge

anybody than anybody else in England. Your own musical skill you sing I know do you play an instrument?

I play the piano by ear, just picking it out one note at a time because I was too lazy to learn properly.

My mother said you have to learn, but I said I can do it without any help from lessons and pick things out with bits of Mozart and hymns and bits of Schubert, you know.

Do you collect records? Yes, I have a fair collection.

And many of those old discs which are unhappily not available now, but contain

have the most marvelous voices on.

You have to hack that collection down to just eight records for your island?

I know it, I know it too.

What's the first one?

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