Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.

For Wright's reasons, we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in 1985, and the presenter was Roy Plumlee. This week our cast weighs the very successful theatre and film director Richard Ayer.

Richard, music is part of a director stock in trade.

Is it also important in private life?

It's indispensable in private life.

I'm afraid I'm one of those people for whom Musak was invented.

I have a unnatural fear of silence and I'd marginally prefer silence to bad music, but only marginally. Do you have musical skill can you play an instrument?

I used to be a three-cord man on the guitar I'm about a 33-cord man but my own

progress my musical skills are mostly vicarious

do you have a collection of discs I have a quite large collection of discs did you find it very difficult to cut that collection down to just eight?

I think it's probably the most difficult thing I've ever had to do.

What's the first one you have on that little pile there?

The first time I ever became aware of the power of music to move me was I was in the school choir and I got roped into singing with the school choir as part of the choir accompanying the Borma Symphony Orchestra,

singing the Verdi Requiem in Sherwin Abbey, which was the Abbey attached to the school I went to and the experience of

singing in that choir was like being harnessed to some giant celestial toboggin and

I've never forgotten that.

We haven't got your own recording, which one we get here?

Well this is a shalty recording for no special reason but for the fact that I've owned this recording for the last 20 years. Oh, the sound grace.

The sound grace.

The sound jay and

and the sound And then the Sainirosaiya. China, O'Sana, O'Sana,

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