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. Our castaway this week is a politician, he's the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the right Honorable

Denis Healy.

Now you have to imagine Chancellor that you're doomed to be on this desert island perhaps for the rest of your life and you have to realize

that in view of the office you held there will be listeners who wish it were true.

I wish it were true.

What would you be happy you still got away from?

I think really from the sort of life I live today, but I doubt if I'd be happy away from it for more than a month or so at a time.

There must be one particular irritating facet.

I think it's basically hard work and not having enough time

to do and think about the things which you would otherwise do and think about. You have your list

of just eight records though. what is the first one?

Well I'd like to start off with something which reminds me of my childhood.

I lived in a village in Yorkshire between Elklemore, Bartat, and the Leeds, Liverpool Canal, where I used to catch

Tidlars and fall in and cycle up and down the coal tips at the edge. And my first record is called a

Shropshire lad which contrary to what you might think is a poem by John

Betcheman with a brilliant accompaniment by Jim Parker.

And it's about a man called Captain Webb, who was a figure on the matchboxes when I was a little boy with a long red striped bathing

costume and a walrus moustache because he'd swum the channel. The gas was on in the Institute, the flare was up in the gym, a man was running a mineral line,

a lass was singing a hymn.

When Captain Webb the Dolly man

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