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 1991, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My cast away this week is a man of many parts. His main body of work has been in the theatre where he's directed dozens of outstanding productions,

but he's also written plays, made television documentaries,

and appeared as a presenter and interviewer. He actually began his

professional life as a schoolmaster having obeyed his parents' wishes to

improve himself by leaving his Yorkshire coal mining home to study English at Oxford.

Today his versatility suggests a man who still enjoys self-discovery, if not improvement,

that perhaps he leaves for his audience.

Here is Ronald Ere.

It is your versatility that strikes one about your career.

Directing, producing, presenting, comedy, tragedy, opera.

Did you plan it that way or are you just a man who can't say no?

Maybe it's a man who can't stand in one place.

I mean you could look at it as backing endlessly from one thing into another so that you find that you were doing

one thing your horror at it propels you backwards into something else so there is

a negative side to it I like to think of myself as the ultimate freelance and the resident outsider to anything

but anybody is trying to institutionalize but I think it has positive and negative.

But part of the freelance mentality is of course that you're worried nobody will ask you if you keep saying no, so you keep saying yes.

I'm not sure about that. I think the worst advice I got to when I became a freelance having been in the BBC was that I must accept every job. I think the opposite is the case.

You must only accept those jobs that light you up and that you think you can really make something

of because it's on that that you'll get your next job.

...