Hello I'm Kirstie Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For Wright's reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1983 and the presenter was Roy Plumley. This week our castaway is a surgeon and his practice extends over about a

million square miles that's about ten times the area of Great Britain it's Mr

Michael Wood Michael is music important in your life?

Yes, I think it is.

I think it's one of the things that helps one relax and one's away from the job.

Have you any musical scale?

Do you play an instrument or sing?

No, I don't.

I did sing as a boy.

Fortunately, I was able to give that up

when my voice broke.

Do you have a big collection of discs? A fair number,

not anything tremendous. What's the first one out of this miserable allowance of eight? The first one is

a Brahms Rhapsody played by Julius Ketchin. This was a work that I remember as a boy before I went to school because my father used to play it and I remember hearing it as I went to sleep and

this is one of the memories I have in my childhood.

I believe you come from a very musical family, there are a lot of you and all musical?

Yes, that's right.

Certainly in my parents' generation, my father played the piano and the organ and the French horn,

and also because they were a large family they used to sing

quartets and other members of the family would play the cello or the violin.

...