Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the former diplomat, traveller and writer, Rory Stewart. His life has been part establishment convention, part wild adventure. He went to Eton, Oxford and then joined the Foreign Office, but along the way spent part of his childhood running wild in the jungles of Malaysia. He was based in Kosovo during the Nato campaign and, at the age of 29, turned up in Iraq and volunteered to help in the rebuilding work. He ended up running one of the provinces. He remains...
Jan 20, 2008•36 min
Kirsty Young's castaway this week is Sir Simon Rattle. For the past five years he has been Principal Conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic - regarded by many as the finest symphony orchestra in the world. He is only the sixth person to hold the position in 120 years and is the first Briton to take on the challenge. Growing up in Liverpool in the 1960s, while other youngsters were listening to The Beatles, he was transfixed by Mahler and was determined to become a conductor. His talent was prodigi...
Jan 13, 2008•37 min
Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the broadcaster and journalist John Humphrys. For 21 years he has been at the helm of Today, Radio 4's flagship news and current affairs programme. Millions of devoted listeners enjoy his tenacious interviewing style - and it's won him a healthy respect from politicians too. Not all are supporters though; Jonathan Aitken accused him of "poisoning the well of democratic debate" - an attack which he initially thought would cost him his career. Now, his life is ...
Jan 06, 2008•36 min
Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the businesswoman Karren Brady. She is known as the First Lady of Football - and it's a moniker that is well earned. When she became Managing Director of Birmingham City she was just 23 years old, the club was languishing in the second division and it was in dire financial straits. Fifteen years later, and it is in the Premier League and is one of the few clubs to turn a healthy profit. Along the way Karren has married one of her players, had two children and...
Dec 30, 2007•33 min
Kirsty Young's castaway this week is Victoria Wood. For decades she has been one of our best-loved writers and performers. The television series she's made - including Acorn Antiques, Dinnerladies and Housewife 49 - have won her a devoted following as well as stacks of awards. But, in a moving and open interview, she describes how, as a teenager, she felt she was a misfit - she had few friends, she struggled with her weight and at school she used to steal other people's homework. She joined a yo...
Dec 23, 2007•36 min
Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the musician Paul Weller. As the lead singer of The Jam, the founder of The Style Council and a hugely successful solo artist, he is one of the most revered music writers and performers of the past 30 years and is cited as an influence by countless other singers. In a rare interview, he describes the chronic shyness he had to overcome; how he is still gripped by fear before each performance and how, after he had been dumped by his record label, he was unable ...
Dec 16, 2007•35 min
Kirsty Young's castaway this week is Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys - the scientist who discovered genetic fingerprinting. It is 25 years since his 'Eureka moment' - when, pulling an X-ray photograph of his assistant's genetic code out of the developing tray, he realised he could trace the links between her and her parents and that her own unique genetic profile had been revealed. Over the following years, he was the first person to settle immigration disputes, paternity issues and crimes based on ...
Dec 09, 2007•35 min
Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the cellist Steven Isserlis. It is, perhaps, little surprise that music has been central to his life. He was born into a family that already boasted a pianist, violinist and viola player within its ranks and so, as a child, he was taught the cello because it meant they could play chamber music together. Music was so much a part of their lives, he says, that even the pet dog would howl along an accompaniment as they played. He was seen as a brilliant young cel...
Dec 02, 2007•35 min
Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the author Armistead Maupin. Regarded as one of the 'great social satirists of his era', he made his name with his Tales of the City novels, chronicling the shifting cultural landscape of San Francisco throughout the 1970s and 80s. He's written about the search for love and acceptance by a diverse cast of characters, but he was also one of the first novelists to portray the devastating impact of the newly emerging threat of HIV/Aids. His iconic status as a ga...
Nov 25, 2007•34 min
Kirsty Young's castaway this week is Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller. She has recently stepped down as Britain's top spy-master - or more correctly, the Director-General of MI5. She took the helm in the months after the attacks of 11th September 2001 in America and steered the service through a time when the nature of the terrorist threat facing Britain changed enormously and new measures were introduced to counteract it. She concedes that MI5 has to rely, in large part, on information that is 'pat...
Nov 18, 2007•37 min
Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the author Jung Chang. Jung was born in the years after Mao came to power in China and as a child she took part in the Great Leap Forwards by collecting saucepans and nails and trying to melt them down for steel. She was a teenager during the Cultural Revolution and witnessed her parents being denounced and sent to labour camps. After Mao's death she came to Britain as a student. At the time, she says, she didn't want to think about the past - it used to give...
Nov 16, 2007•37 min
Kirsty Young's castaway this week is Nicholas Parsons. Actor, quizmaster, cabaret performer, straight man, panel show host and fully-qualified marine mechanical engineer to boot; spanning more than 60 years his professional credits defy classification and flout convention. Yet it's not just the duration of his showbiz career that's exceptional but the fact that he made it on stage at all. From well-to-do parents, his family had a "neurotic dread of the dissolute thespian life" and did their utmo...
Nov 04, 2007•37 min
Kirsty Young's castaway this week is Joel Joffe. For many years he was the chairman of Oxfam, before that he set up a hugely successful insurance company and most recently he's been campaigning for terminally ill people to have the right to die. But the career in which he has had the greatest impact is the one he was forced to give up more than 40 years ago - law. In 1963, Joel Joffe was a young defence solicitor, so dismayed by the apartheid system of his native South Africa that he was on the ...
Oct 28, 2007•35 min
Kirsty Young's castaway this week is an entertainer so central to British popular culture he can be identified by the outline of his glasses alone - Ronnie Corbett. For more than 50 years, from late night reviews to prime-time sit-coms, his comic talents have made us laugh and made us love him; a nattily turned out national treasure with a quick wit and a ready smile. His success is due, of course, to his own ability but also to two enduring and remarkable partnerships. Along with Ronnie Barker,...
Oct 21, 2007•36 min
Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the actress Jill Balcon. She has the voice of an old friend - and it's not surprising, she was a BBC radio announcer during the war and has been acting and performing poetry consistently since. Poetry has always played a central role in her life. She was only 12 years old when she first saw the poet Cecil Day Lewis. He had come to judge a poetry-reading competition at her school and although he was more than 20 years her senior, he was, she says, the most bea...
Oct 14, 2007•37 min
Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the Secretary of State for Health, Alan Johnson. He has the task of managing one of the most challenging briefs of government - and the stakes are raised further because, when there is an election, the Prime Minister Gordon Brown has made it clear that the main battleground will be health. Johnson says that unlike many politicians, he is not a keen strategist who has spent his life plotting his career, instead he has simply 'drifted along', taking whatever ch...
Oct 07, 2007•35 min
Kirsty Young's castaway this week is George Michael. As a singer and songwriter he has enjoyed massive global success for a quarter of a century. He's sold more than 100 million records, won two Grammy awards and notched up countless number one hits. His ability to write, produce, and perform perfect pop songs is unquestioned. But along with the career highs, there have been lows too: he lost a long wrangle with his record company, was crippled by bereavement and for years questions about his se...
Sep 30, 2007•35 min
Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the conductor Vladimir Jurowski. Described as the most active and influential conductor in Britain today, he has been the musical director at Glyndebourne for the past six years, and this autumn takes over as Principal Conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra. Vladimir's roots however lie in Russia, where he was one of the last generation to experience the Communist regime. The two-room apartment in Moscow that he shared with his parents, siblings and g...
Aug 19, 2007•39 min
Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the publisher Felix Dennis. He blossomed among the flower power generation, finding fame as one of the defendants in the notorious Oz Magazine obscenity trial in 1971. It fired his loathing of the establishment but instead of dropping out he opted in and beat them at their own game. For the past 30 years his talent has been spotting a niche in the magazine market and launching a title to fill it - his success has made him one of the richest men in Britain. Fo...
Aug 12, 2007•33 min
Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the writer Andrew Davies. He is the king of television adaptation; Pride and Prejudice, Vanity Fair, Middlemarch and Tipping the Velvet are just a few of the dramas he has brought to our screens. Until he was 50, he was an English lecturer and wrote in his spare time - it was a sort of mid-life crisis that sent his career soaring. Since then, his signature has been stripping down the classics, sexing them up and serving Austen, Eliot and Dickens to appreciati...
Aug 05, 2007•36 min
Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the investment banker Nicola Horlick. She has, perhaps, done more than anyone else to shatter the glass ceiling - a mother of six children and now stepmum to another three, her proud boast is that she's never missed a sports day or a school speech day. She says her career is largely an extension of her maternal instinct and she nurtures the companies she's ploughing funds into. With her apparently limitless energy, talent and ambition she seemed to be the one...
Jul 29, 2007•38 min
Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the writer Thomas Keneally. He had already been nominated for the Booker Prize three times when he published a historical novel that many said should not have been eligible for the contest. It told the story of one man, Oskar Schindler, who risked his life and lost his fortune to save more than a thousand Jews. Schindler's Ark not only won the prize, it has been the best-selling Booker winner ever and went on to be made into the Oscar-winning film Schindler's...
Jul 22, 2007•36 min
Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the animator Oliver Postgate. As the creator of Noggin the Nog, The Clangers and Bagpuss, Oliver holds a special place in many childhoods. So it may come as something of a surprise that he never thought about how his programmes would be received by children; instead he says he simply focussed on making the stories great - everything else was secondary. For 20 years he toiled in a converted pigsty in Kent, animating the characters Peter Firmin drew, churning o...
Jul 15, 2007•39 min
Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the actor Simon Russell Beale. Critics are torn over their descriptions of him: to some, he's the greatest stage actor in Britain today. To others, merely the greatest Shakespearean actor of his generation. Whichever it is, when he's cast in a play, it invariably sells out, the audience is spellbound and the reviewers smitten. Yet initially it seemed as if music was his calling; he was a choirboy at St Paul's, won a singing scholarship to Cambridge and went o...
Jul 08, 2007•37 min
Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the environmentalist and human rights campaigner Wangari Maathai. Known these days as 'Africa's Forest Goddess' for her pioneering work fighting soil erosion and poverty across the continent, she's united her passion for the power of nature with a crusade for political justice. Born the third of six children in the central highlands of Kenya, the family home was a traditional mud-walled house with no electricity or running water. From there, her journey has b...
Jul 01, 2007•35 min
Kirsty Young's castaway this week is Ricky Gervais. In just twelve episodes, his show The Office changed the face of British television comedy. At its centre was the comic monster, David Brent, a middle-manager being filmed for a mock-documentary who saw the ever-present cameras as his route to popularity and fame. Ricky Gervais's performance was both excruciating and unmissable - one critic called the programme "among the most affecting and invigorating works of fiction since the turn of the ce...
Jun 24, 2007•33 min
Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the Irish musician Christy Moore. His stature and influence in folk music is unparalleled - Bono, Elvis Costello and Billy Bragg are among those who cite him as a key influence. A passionate performer, he's the archetypal Irish poet and protest singer. In the late 1970s Special Branch raided the launch of his album H Block, his songs have been banned by both London and Dublin courts and, as recently as 2004, he was held by police and questioned about his lyri...
Jun 17, 2007•34 min
Kirsty Young's castaway this week is Yoko Ono. She was already an avant-garde artist in her own right when, in 1968, she started dating one of the most famous men in the world, John Lennon. Then, depending on who you listen to, she either stole him from the nation or helped him to focus on what was important to them both. Now, more than 25 years after John's murder, she discusses how it felt to be so reviled in the press, looks back on their life together and recalls the night of his death. In a...
Jun 10, 2007•36 min
Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the leading scientist Professor Sir Tom Blundell. His specialism is in molecular biology, which involves studying the tiniest building blocks of life under a microscope, in the hope of finding treatments for diseases such as cancer and diabetes. It is a hugely visual kind of science, and this, he says, is no coincidence - he loves science first and foremost for its beauty. He regularly seeks this beauty beyond the laboratory too; in art, in music and in trave...
Jun 03, 2007•38 min
Kirsty Young's castaway this week is Paul McKenna. He is Britain's best known hypnotist and made his name on prime-time TV. Millions used to watch on Saturday nights as he mesmerised ordinary people into doing extraordinary things. But he has found an even larger audience - and riches to match - through his series of self-help books. With titles like I Can Make You Thin and Change Your Life in Seven Days he taps into the angst-ridden preoccupations of our age with promises of serenity, contentme...
May 27, 2007•34 min
