Kirsty Young's castaway is the agony aunt and writer Denise Robertson. She is, she says, one of life's survivors -- yet she seems to have had more than her fair share of tragedy; she's been widowed twice, dealt with financial hardship and lost a child to cancer. She's written dozens of novels and for more than forty years been an agony aunt on local radio, papers and television. She says: "There have been times when I've thought, just as I get things right, fate steps in and kicks the steps from...
May 27, 2012•35 min
Kirsty Young's castaway is the novelist, historian and biographer, Peter Ackroyd. As a child he used to walk the streets of London with his grandmother - an experience that, he believes, fostered his own love for the city. He was appointed literary editor of The Spectator when he was just 23 and has gone on to write dozens of books since. He has written a biography of London, as well as books about people he calls 'cockney visionaries' such as Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins and, now, Charlie Ch...
May 20, 2012•40 min
Kirsty Young's castaway is Baroness Sheila Hollins. An Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry, she has specialised in the health and welfare of people with learning disabilities; advising on policy and influencing attitudes. She started off as a GP, turning to psychiatry after finding a huge proportion of her patients were suffering from emotional and social problems. One of her four children has a learning disability and that has brought a focus to her professional ambitions. She says: "In many ways,...
May 13, 2012•41 min
Kirsty Young's castaway is the composer and performer Tim Minchin. As a comic and musician he has sold out London's O2 Arena and won legions of fans. He wrote the songs for the Royal Shakespeare Company's musical Matilda - the production of Roald Dahl's children's story has been a smash hit on the West End, won seven Olivier awards and is due to transfer to Broadway next year. He says: "I'm not a magical thinker - I don't think I need my special undies on or my special pencil - I'm not superstit...
May 06, 2012•35 min
Kirsty Young's castaway is the jazz pianist and singer Jamie Cullum. His interview was recorded in front of an audience at St George's in Bristol and launched Radio 4's More Than Words Festival. Despite failing his grade four piano exam and, by his own admission, barely being able to read music, Jamie Cullum has become hugely popular. He is particularly celebrated for his live shows and in this very special recording, he performed three of his musical choices. Producer: Leanne Buckle....
Mar 25, 2012•32 min
Kirsty Young's castaway is the broadcaster Anna Ford. One of the first high profile women in news, she worked for Granada, ITV and the BBC before retiring after more than thirty years on our screens. One of her professional pairings was presenting the News at 10 with Reginald Bosanquet, she remembers how he would try to unsettle her during broadcasts: "I adored Reggie, he would land either obscene poems or love poems on my script just before I was to about to read it to camera and I would catch ...
Mar 18, 2012•38 min
Kirsty Young's castaway is the American comedian Jackie Mason. His one-man shows have been pulling in audiences for more than fifty years. Like his father, grandfather and great-grandfather before him, he trained initially as a rabbi - and quickly acquired a reputation for being very funny. "The people who heard my sermons kept saying to me; 'Rabbi, why aren't you a comedian?' I said to myself, maybe I should take the hint." Producer: Leanne Buckle.
Mar 11, 2012•34 min
Kirsty Young's castaway is the renowned voice coach Patsy Rodenburg. Her work at the National Theatre and the RSC has spanned decades and her students include Dame Judi Dench, Sir Ian McKellen, Dame Maggie Smith and Daniel Day Lewis. But her work takes her away from the stage too - she has coached politicians and helped offenders in prison. She says: "I did some work on Hamlet in a top security prison and the guy playing Claudius was a murderer and he spoke, 'Oh my offence is rank, it smells to ...
Mar 04, 2012•38 min
Kirsty Young's castaway is the former rugby player and commentator Brian Moore. As a player he was ferociously competitive, he says his approach to the game was almost pathological and it earned him the nickname 'the pitbull'. By the time he retired, he'd earned dozens of England caps and played in three grand slams. But he discovered the obsessive determination he'd shown as a player was not so useful off the pitch. "In sport, the 'I won't give up', 'carry on training' and 'going again and agai...
Feb 26, 2012•36 min
Kirsty Young's castaway is the former Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott. In this frank interview, he describes life in the highly political home where he grew up, the impact that failing the school 11+ exam had on him and the gradual kindling of his own ambitions. He speaks of his debt to his wife Pauline and how for many years of their marriage he underestimated her. He describes, too, the inferiority complex which dogged him for much of his adult life: "All the attacks on me because of my gr...
Feb 19, 2012•38 min
James Corden, actor and writer of Gavin & Stacey, is Kirsty Young's castaway is the actor and writer . As a child he longed to act - he found early success in Alan Bennett's play The History Boys and became a household name for the TV show he devised and co-wrote, Gavin and Stacey. These days he's starring in the West End in the comedy One Man, Two Guvnors. It is due to transfer to Broadway in the spring and he says: "I'm well aware that this could well be the best part that I ever play on s...
Feb 12, 2012•36 min
Denise Lewis, Olympic gold medallist, is Kirsty Young's castaway. Her discipline was the heptathlon and it was at the 2000 Sydney Olympics that she leapt, threw, sprinted and hurdled her way on to the winner's podium. An only child of a single mother, she says her mum had always had ambition for her - and was there to witness her success. She said: "Her face said it all, there were tears in her eyes and for me it felt like, yes mum, we've done it together". Producer: Leanne Buckle....
Feb 05, 2012•36 min
Kirsty Young's castaway for the 70th anniversary edition of Desert Island Discs is Sir David Attenborough. He has seen more of the world than anyone else who has ever lived - he's visited the north and south poles and witnessed most of the life in-between - from the birds in the canopies of tropical rainforests to giant earthworms in Australia. But despite his extraordinary travels, there is one part of the globe that's eluded him. As a young man and a keen rock-climber, he yearned to conquer th...
Jan 29, 2012•40 min
Kirsty Young's castaway is the author Vikram Seth. His novel A Suitable Boy was nearly a decade in the writing, but it was a huge and immediate hit and won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. He is now working on a follow-up novel called A Suitable Girl. He's due to finish work on it in 2013 - 20 years after the original work was published. The pace of work, he admits, is slow: "The sound of deadlines pushing past is one of the sounds that authors are most familiar with - it's very much in the gest...
Jan 22, 2012•38 min
Kirsty Young's castaway is the writer and historian Paul Johnson. He writes, he says, out of a desire to 'put things right' and more than fifty books and thousands of articles have flowed from his pen. His opinions have provoked, offended and enraged plenty of people over the years and sweeping works about modernity, morality, art and philosophy, sit alongside fiercely opinionated biographies and essays. He says: "I like to be, in general, in agreement with what most people think, but I also lik...
Jan 15, 2012•36 min
Kirsty Young's castaway is the director of the Royal Ballet, Dame Monica Mason. Her working life has been dedicated to dance. When she joined the Royal Ballet at fifteen she was the youngest dancer to be admitted to the company and, during her career, its legendary choreographer Kenneth MacMillan created five roles for her. She became director ten years ago and is due to step down this summer. She says: "I couldn't bear it if I thought that, behind closed doors, somebody was saying 'she's here a...
Jan 08, 2012•37 min
Kirsty Young's castaway is the broadcaster Sir Terry Wogan. His career has spanned more than five decades and includes the chat show Wogan, the Eurovision Song Contest, the quiz Blankety Blank and for many years being the host of Radio 2's breakfast show. He says: "You have to create a kind of little club - you are not talking to an audience, you are talking to one person - and they are only half listening anyway. It's a mistake to think that everyone is clinging to your every word." Producer: C...
Jan 01, 2012•37 min
Kirsty Young's castaway is the scientist Professor Brian Cox. In the press he's been called 'the pin-up professor' and his enormously popular TV series have been credited with creating the 'Brian Cox effect' - a surge in the number of would-be scientists applying to university. As a teenager he decided he wanted to be a rock star; he toured the world as a member of the band Dare and performed on Top of the Pops with his second group D:Ream. He says:"I hope, we're beginning to treat ideas almost ...
Dec 30, 2011•36 min
Kirsty Young's castaway is the creator of Downton Abbey, Julian Fellowes. He won an Oscar for his screenplay for Gosford Park and went on to write other feature films including The Young Victoria and Vanity Fair. Downton Abbey, which he created and writes, has been an enormous TV success with a huge audience. "Of course" he says, "if I had a clear understanding of why it had done so well, I would continue to write shows that attracted record viewers for the rest of my life." Producer: Leanne Buc...
Dec 18, 2011•37 min
Kirsty Young's castaway is the journalist and former editor Eve Pollard. She was groomed for success by Rupert Murdoch, but made an editor by Robert Maxwell. Her career has spanned glossy magazines and tabloid journalism, breakfast television, biographies and novels. When she first worked on Fleet Street, she says, women were such a rarity that the male reporters didn't know what to make of her. "Any woman who has a high flying job, they don't know who to compare you to - you're not their mum, y...
Dec 11, 2011•36 min
Kirsty Young's castaway is the businessman Sir Martin Sorrell. He's been called "the world's most influential ad man," and is the founder and chief executive of the world's biggest advertising agency, WPP. He was 40 when he left Saatchi and Saatchi to be his own boss, he says: "When I started off, what I wanted to do was to build a company and manage it - I wanted to be an entrepreneur and be a manager." Producer: Leanne Buckle.
Dec 04, 2011•38 min
Kirsty Young's castaway is the adventurer Bear Grylls. His first career was with the SAS, but he was forced to leave after a parachute jump went wrong and he broke his back in three places. As he recuperated, he rekindled his childhood ambition of climbing Mount Everest - he went on to become the youngest Briton to reach its summit. His TV series, Born Survivor, has a global audience of more than a billion people who regularly watch him eating the apparently indigestible and risking his life by ...
Nov 27, 2011•37 min
Kirsty Young's castaway is the actor Robert Hardy. He became a household name as the vet Siegfried Farnon in the hit TV series All Creatures Great and Small and, to a younger generation, he is the Minister of Magic in the Harry Potter films. But the role he is best known for is Winston Churchill - he won a Bafta for his performance in Winston Churchill: The Wilderness Years. He believes actors are born rather than made and his own ambitions crystallised when, as a very young boy, he was a page b...
Nov 20, 2011•39 min
Kirsty Young's castaway is the drama teacher Anna Scher. It's more than forty years since she set up her theatre school and it has launched the careers of Kathy Burke, Martin Kemp, Pauline Quirke and Patsy Palmer to name just a few. It started out as a lunchtime drama club - and very quickly grew. Anna Scher says: "There were enormous classes - about seventy in a class - and a lot of those pupils were non-readers and so I fell into improvisation by chance. I found that it was a very effective wa...
Nov 18, 2011•36 min
Kirsty Young's castaway is the children's author Francesca Simon. Educated at Yale and Oxford she initially thought she'd pursue an academic life - but within weeks of her son's birth, found that ideas for children's stories started flowing. She's now written twenty books featuring her creation Horrid Henry and they sell in their millions. She sees Horrid Henry as sitting within the long tradition of anarchic characters in children's literature. She says: "Everyone responds to Henry because I th...
Nov 06, 2011•36 min
Kirsty Young's castaway is the crossbench peer and social entrepreneur Lord Victor Adebowale. For the past decade, when not in the House of Lords, he has devoted his time to overseeing services for people who are homeless, suffer from drug or alcohol addiction and have mental health issues or learning disabilities. To many, they are the most disadvantaged people in society, but he says that's not a term he finds useful: "I find it very difficult when people use words like 'bottom of the pile' an...
Oct 30, 2011•36 min
Kirsty Young's castaway is the writer and actor Mark Gatiss. His childhood passions have fuelled his adult creative life. As a boy he says he was drawn towards the macabre and gothic - while his teachers remarked that his school essays resembled scripts for Hammer horror films. He has written for - and acted in - Dr Who, was one of the creators of The League of Gentlemen and his re-imagining of Sherlock Holmes for a contemporary TV audience was a huge success. He says: "When I was a kid, anythin...
Oct 23, 2011•36 min
Kirsty Young's castaway is the athlete Michael Johnson. He is the only person ever to hold world records in the 200 and 400 metres at the same time and, by the time he hung up his legendary gold trainers, his haul of medals included five Olympic golds. His upright running style earned him the nickname 'the duck'. He says: "They called me a really fast duck! I was ranked number one in the world - I'm so far ahead of the other people, why am I the one that's wrong?" Producer: Leanne Buckle....
Oct 16, 2011•35 min
Kirsty Young's castaway is the veteran hairdresser Vidal Sassoon. He developed the architecturally precise bobs and cropped styles that were a defining look of the 1960s. Mary Quant, Mia Farrow and Twiggy were among the glamorous clients who came to his salons in London and Beverly Hills. His scissors and ambition lifted him out of the grinding poverty of his childhood - he spent six years in an orphanage because his mother could not afford to keep him at home. Now aged 83, he says:" I've had th...
Oct 09, 2011•37 min
Kirsty Young's castaway is the children's TV producer Anne Wood. Her creations - which include Teletubbies, Rosie and Jim and In the Night Garden - have delighted millions of children around the world. She says she is driven by her fascination with children's creative development - and was horrified by the critical response when Teletubbies was first screened. "I wanted to make a programme that had love in it," she says, "You'd have thought I'd started World War Three the response that happened ...
Oct 02, 2011•36 min
