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 the year 2000 and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is an actor. If you've watched television at all in the past 40 years

you've almost certainly seen him in something. He's been a mainstay of British sitcom

particularly as that middle-class hippie Tom Good in the series

still popular today The Good Life. During the past decade you may have seen him

on stage or in film displaying his skills as a classical actor in the works of

Chekhov, UNESCO and Shakespeare. Much of his success in these is due to his

relationship with Kenneth Branagh, who spotted his potential and drove him to

critical acclaim in roles such as Malvoglio,

Uncle Vanya and King Lear.

His delight in his success has not turned his head.

I've never been good looking and I'm no good at dancing, he says, but I've got the gift of timing

and I've had a lot of luck. He is Richard Breyer. You are a natural Richard as you imply,

but that's not to say there hasn't been a lot of hard work gone into it because you were racked as I understand it with nerves in the beginning, won't you?

Terrible nerves and the worst thing that was I spoke so fast that no one could quite understand me.

And so I became an amateur actor very early age at 14 and I was fired from the amateur

because you can't understand what you're talking about.

So I met the director of the amateur group years later, he said, I'm awfully sorry.

I didn't know you were going to be good.

And I said, it was not your

first hamlet your first hamlet that's right when I was 21

...