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 1991, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is an impresario. Escaping the pograms in the Ukraine, his family brought

him to this country just before the First World War and settled in the East End of London.

At the age of 12 he was expelled from school for running a sweep stake and after a series of odd jobs

he entered the world of entertainment as something called an eccentric dancer. His career has been anything but eccentric since.

He staged the Folly Beggé,

ran the talk of the town in its heyday,

and managed stars such as Frankie Howard and Norman Wisdom.

His biggest mistake, he says, was turning

down a chance to manage the Beatles. An unimportant slip, you might think, for a man who at the

age of 82 is president of his own leisure corporation worth 450 million pounds.

He is Lord Delfant.

Shall we start with the big mistake turning down the Beatles?

How did that happen? Well Brian Epstein came to the Beatles. How did that happen?

Well, Brian Epstein came to the office one morning and I, unfortunately I didn't see him

and he met one of the chaps with working in the office at the time and suggested he would like our

organization to take over the Beatles.

This was what the early 60s?

The early yes very early on and they had a little reputation there but not

of course what they did become eventually and I think you ask something

like 750 pounds a week for them and now people just threw him out to the office.

...