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 the year 2000 and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway today is an actor. This week he celebrates his 50th anniversary as one of the

stars of radio's most famous drama serial. It wasn't the career he had in mind for himself,

the son of a railway signalman, he went to Oxford where he

acted with Shirley Williams and Kenneth Tynen.

He then became an assistant producer at the BBC and was asked to perform in a new experimental program designed to encourage people back into farming after the war.

The experiment became a national institution, a mainstay of the Light Program, the home service and finally radio four.

Of the character he plays he says I put him on when I go into the studio and hang him on the

hook when I leave. I've never really got that close to him, unlike us,

fans of the Archers. He is of course Phil Archer, known in real life, if real life

exists outside Ambridge, as Norman painting.

Norman, you've called yourself a reluctant Archer in the past.

Can you really be so ambivalent about somebody you spent 50 years with?

That's how I started off, in fact.

I resigned after three months.

I didn't think this was going to be my life at all.

But you never dreamt that it would last for 50 years?

When I had this argument with Godfrey Basley and finished him calling after me you silly

young fool you've got a job here for 10 years if you want it and I remember saying

that man lives in a fantasy world he was the original producer. He invented the thing. The

Creator was the word he liked. Yes. Creator and God

...