Hello I'm Krusty 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 1978 and the presenter was Roy Plumlee. We have two castaways on our desert island this week. They are authors, theatre

historians, and they possess the biggest private theatre collection in the country,

Raymond Mander and Joe Mitchinson. Now how did you to set about this job of

choosing just eight records? Did you choose four each? No, no. We felt at once

that we could go on choosing records instead of 8, probably 108.

And we decided we better get together on this and we don't want to go to different parts of the island, you know.

A choice is equally the same.

We found, but I mean we were working records out,

that we had something in common with each of them,

so it's really a joint choice each record means something to each others

Raymond does collecting theatre records come into the scope of your collection?

Oh yes yes our sound archives we've got lots of early records, both Opera Valley, musical

musical comedy. Oh yes, it's part, it's all part of theatre, everything that keeps the theatre alive or keeps past alive.

Now although all the discs are your joint choices,

I think it's tidier if you choose them alternately.

Raymond, Raymond, Raymond Mantra and Joe Richardson you'd better go first.

Well we've chosen the ride of the Valkyrie. I mean it's just a lovely stirring rousing thing

it would wake us up if we were sleepy.

I was introduced to Vargna as a rather an early age at about the age of eight.

My mother and I had a flatten up and allward and we had some tenants above us and at night, usually most nights, there'd be terrible

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