Hello, I'm Kresse 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 castaway this week is the actor Peter Salas. He brings to life a sepia-tinted Britain that we seem to yearn for, a land of

comfortable slippers and anti-McCassers where people with all their foibles and failings struggle

to make a decent job of getting by. In his early days he

trod the boards with the likes of Lawrence Olivier and Ralph Richardson, but these days

he's best known and best loved for the characters he's brought to the screen the

unassuming Norman Clegg in Last of the Summer Wine and the equally mild-mannered

Wallace in the Oscar-winning Wallace and Gromit animations.

I've been lucky enough to keep going he says I've got highly

dismissable looks and I realize now though it's taken me nearly 100 years that my

voice is distinctive I'm very lucky indeed. Incredibly Peter Salas it was 1973 I think

when last of the summer wine first appeared on our screens. Interestingly the

first series wasn't particularly well received.

Did you always think there was something about it?

Well I had done Roy Clark, the author, I had done his first two television plays which had no connection at all with Last

of the Summer Wine and indeed one in one of them I played a homosexual transvestite so

of course when he came to write Clegg in last the sum of wine, I suppose I was the obvious choice.

But it's true, though, he did have you in mind when he wrote the part of Clegg.

Yes, he did.

He didn't tell me at the time, but it slipped out later in conversations, yes.

Then in that first series when it wasn't well received,

...