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 2009. My cast away this week is the actor Martin Shaw. He was still a student when Alec Guinness sent him fan mail. He

auditioned for Sir Lawrence Olivier and trod the boards with John Gilgood. Even Elvis

Presley apparently endorsed his talents. In many of his best known roles, he is a maverick, a campaigner, and an idealist,

elements that seem to have been important to him in real life too.

But although he's been one of our most popular stage in television

actors of the past 40 years and has taken on more than a hundred different roles, he has

spent half a lifetime moving out of the shadow of one of his earliest parts, Ray Doyle in the professionals.

He says of his choices, anything worth doing is going to be risky, and I really wanted to take risks. I don't think we take enough.

Everybody is so afraid of upsetting somebody.

People have just got to grow up. If they're upset, then don't watch.

We will come on Martin Shaw to Lawrence Olivier and Gilgood I hope a little later.

But first of all the King Elvis how did he come to actually see or almost review one of your performances?

It happened through a psychic who came to see me playing, Elvis, in Aye Lonesome tonight, which was a tribute written by Alan Bleasdale.

And it was one of the final performances, and I got this extraordinary letter from a psychic.

He said that he was aware that Elvis was on stage,

that he'd been in touch with Elvis and that Elvis thought the whole thing was

rubbish, but it was in gas.

Interestingly to me at least, it's in your theatrical work that you've won the great plaudets and the awards and all of those things that go along with being in a public profession. Does the acting on stage, does it fulfill you more than television?

I think so, yes. For a start, you can remain in the character for two and half hours

instead of sipping at it you know for one and a half minutes at a time but also

...