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 2007. My castaway this week is Nicholas Parsons, actor, quiz master, cabaret performer, straight man, panel show host,

and fully qualified marine mechanical engineer to boot,

spanning more than 60 years,

his professional credits defy classification and flout convention.

Yet it's not just the duration of his showbiz career that's exceptional,

but the fact that he made it on stage at all.

From well-to-do parents his family had a neurotic dread of the dissolute

Cespian life and did their utmost to thwart his budding ambition, sickly dyslexic and with an

intermittent stutter.

He wasn't an obvious star in the making, but, as he himself puts it,

the joy of performing is that you overcome the insecurity of your nature

and are reassured by the reaction of the audience.

So Nicholas Parsons, you still need reassurance then after all these years you're still out

there performing.

I still get great joy in performing.

I think any actor and certainly any comedian

would say that the pleasure of getting an audience reaction and

the uplift, testing when they laugh, nothing replaces it. And if you really love that,

it inspires you to keep going and that's probably why I'm still working at my advanced age.

I mentioned all the different roles that you've played over these many decades.

...