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 the media, but that modern all-embracing description does

small justice to a career which has been central to the development of independent television

in this country.

After a childhood vivid and interesting enough to form the first volume of an autobiography,

my castaway went to Cambridge and then to war, in which he lost a leg at Monte Casino in 1944.

In 1955, he joined the newly formed Granada Television,

from which he retired last year as chairman.

He was the first producer of what the papers say and the man who originated

dual in the crown. His private tastes are refined and his lifelong ambition far-reaching

to make popular television programs that are good.

He is Sir Dennis Foreman.

You're also Sir Dennis an ideal desert island castaway of course because two of your greatest passions are music and fishing.

Now how excited are you at the prospect of endless time to indulge those?

Well I just hope the island's got some good freshwater streams.

I mean sea fishing is not much cop, but if we've got some

nice rocky waterfalls and some trout and preferably a short run of salmon at the bottom, fishing

would be fine. And as for music, well you're only

allowing me a very limited amount, but I look forward to that too.

How long have you loved music? And when did it first touch you?

Well, when I was very young really, my mother was a musical person, she used to sing at the piano,

...