Hello, I'm Christy 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 1983, and the presenter was Roy Plumley.

A castaway this week is a writer, broadcaster, ex-farring correspondent, and ex-director-general

of the BBC, Sir Hugh Green. Sir Hugh, the BBC probably does more for music than any other

organisation in the world. How musical are you? How important is it in your life?

Music has never been very important in my life. I'm not exactly tone deaf, certain songs and

tunes sticking my mind, but musical, I am unfortunately not.

How do you do set about choosing this small list of eight discs to last possibly for the rest of your life?

Well, I thought that if I ever was wrecked, I might indeed settle down to writing an orthobiography,

and I wanted sounds which would be evocative of different stages in my life.

Right, where do we start at the beginning? That's right. We start with me in the nursery at home,

dancing with my sister's governess, who was 28, I was 14, and I was very much in love with her

to the strains of the cabaret girl. Oh, that was a musical comedy. A musical comedy of the time.

And what numbers are we going to hear from the cabaret girl? Two songs, dancing time and

calua sung by Dorothy Dixon, a great star of the 1920s, whom I met only a few years ago,

and she still seemed to me to be as beautiful as ever.

Well, I'm not going for it, dancing time is any old time for me.

Well, it's all like in calua, night like the dead divine. It was all like in calua,

while your kids met mine. Two songs from the cabaret girl sung by Dorothy Dixon.

So here you come from a prosperous family of brewers and traders in Northamptonshire,

but your father was a schoolmaster. Yes, he became headmaster of Berkmsdit School a few months

...