Kirsty Young's castaway this week is Aung San Suu Kyi. The programme was recorded on location in Naypyitaw, Burma in December 2012. Now Leader of Burma's opposition party, she has dedicated her life to fighting for human rights and democracy in her homeland. A figure of world renown, she is known in Burma as simply "The Lady" and her integrity, determination and grace have provided a beacon of hope to a nation oppressed and exploited by decades of brutal military dictatorship. President Obama sa...
Jan 27, 2013•45 min
TV producer Beryl Vertue is Kirsty Young's castaway on Desert Island Discs. In the famously fickle world of telly where last year's hero is this year's zero she has stood the test of time. Indeed in TV circles the noun "vertuosity" is defined as "the ability to make enormously successful sitcoms for British television and then sell the formats to the American market". The cast list of her working life is a who's who of quality broadcasting and includes Jack Lemmon, Galton & Simpson, Frankie ...
Jan 20, 2013•33 min
Kirsty Young's castaway this week is Martin Carthy. A highly influential figure in the world of traditional music, about fifty years ago he was at the forefront of the English folk revival - inspiring not just his fellow countrymen, but Bob Dylan and Paul Simon too. Now he's part of a folk dynasty. His wife is the celebrated singer Norma Waterson and their daughter Eliza is as renowned for her fiddle playing, as she is her voice. Martin, on the other hand, was brought up in an atmosphere that en...
Jan 13, 2013•34 min
Kirsty Young's castaway this week is Sir Howard Stringer. Now Chairman of the Board and formerly CEO of Sony, he was surely the only Chief Executive who was a decorated Vietnam vet as he knelt before the Queen to be knighted. It gives you something of an idea of the breadth and height of his achievements. Born in Cardiff he went to 11 different schools before his 16th birthday and it clearly gave him restless feet. In the mid-sixties he headed to America where his first job was answering phones ...
Jan 06, 2013•37 min
Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the designer and businesswoman, Anya Hindmarch. Given her first handbag by her mother at 16, she knew that her future lay in fashion. At 18 she went to Florence to immerse herself in Italian style, and ended up deep in the world of Florentine leather, getting samples made up of a duffel bag she'd spotted. An initial run of 500 bags sold out. Fast forward 25 years and her eponymous fashion business is globally successful with her designs much sought after. She...
Dec 30, 2012•34 min
Kirsty Young's castaway this week is Dawn French. Her career started back when dungarees were considered a legitimate fashion choice and she's built her reputation on borderline surreal skits and glowingly warm characterisations. Brought up in a forces family she had to move schools a lot and found making people laugh helped to make them her friends. Since then it's made her a household name and she may be moments away from becoming a 'national treasure'. Double act partner, sit-com star, sketch...
Dec 23, 2012•35 min
Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the nun, writer and broadcaster Sister Wendy Beckett. For over 40 years she's lived the life of a hermit, rising every day at midnight to spend seven hours praying. Her home is a caravan in the grounds of a Carmelite Monastery where she spends her days in silence - speaking only once a day to the nun charged with delivering her daily food rations of skimmed milk, cold cooked vegetables and two rice crackers. Her self-imposed isolation has only been broken by ...
Dec 16, 2012•39 min
Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government Eric Pickles. After flirting with Communism in his teens he joined the Conservative party and enjoyed a heady rise through local politics, heading up Bradford City Council in the 1990s. He tells Kirsty about his early life above a shop in Keighley, how Mrs Thatcher got him an interview to be a candidate for MP, and how a prolonged hug from David Cameron softened the blow of a disastrous appearance on...
Dec 09, 2012•35 min
Kirsty Young's castaway this week is Dustin Hoffman. In spite of his Aunt Pearl telling him he wasn't good looking enough to be an actor for the past forty-five years he's been crafting landmark movie performances. He is that rare and apparently contradictory thing - a character actor and a superstar. The Graduate, Midnight Cowboy, Lenny, All The President's Men, Marathon Man, Kramer v Kramer, Tootsie, Rain Man, Wag The Dog, and Last Chance Harvey are just a handful of the movies that contribute...
Dec 02, 2012•36 min
Kirsty Young's castaway is the artist and author, Edmund de Waal. His ceramics are on display in many of the world's major museums. They're delicate pots in shades of white and cream, informed he says by a great deal of thinking about literature. His written work has also won him several awards; his book "The Hare With Amber Eyes" traces the rich and dramatic story of his family's Russian Jewish heritage and the diaspora in Odessa, Paris, Vienna, and Tokyo. He says, "I make pots and I write. I'm...
Nov 25, 2012•37 min
Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the director, producer and writer, John Lloyd. His work has been making us laugh for over thirty years: Spitting Image, Not The Nine o'Clock News, Blackadder and QI are just a handful of the programmes he's helped to create. If the comedy work ever dries up he could open a shop selling second hand Baftas - he's won a stack of them and a Grammy and an Emmy. Which isn't to say it's been an easy ride - fall outs, multiple sackings and missed opportunities have p...
Nov 18, 2012•35 min
Kirsty Young's castaway is the critic, actress, and producer Blanche Marvin. Blanche has been immersed in the theatre for seven decades. She worked with James Mason, Yul Brynner, Deborah Kerr and Peter Ustinov and calmed the nerves of Tennessee Williams. She brought Samuel Beckett to an American audience and persuaded Peter Brook to launch a series of awards to encourage artistic risk-takers. A doyenne of the West End, she's at nearly every opening night and her reviews are read by producers on ...
Nov 16, 2012•37 min
Kirsty Young's castaway this week is businessman Tidjane Thiam. He's chief executive of the Prudential, but he's about as far from the archetypal "man from the Pru" as you can get. The seeds of his success were sown amid the complex political terrain of the Ivory Coast with an extended family heavily involved in politics and a father imprisoned for his beliefs. His life quickly took on an international flavour from West Africa to Morocco, Paris to Washington, but in his early 30s a coup in his h...
Nov 04, 2012•34 min
Hilary Devey, businesswoman and TV star is interviewed by Kirsty Young for Desert Island Discs. The very incarnation of entrepreneurial spirit, Hilary Devey built a haulage network business from scratch, which now employs nearly eight thousand people and has an annual turnover of £100 million. She has a successful media career and is one of the current incumbents of the TV programme Dragons Den. The real drama in her life has happened off screen. The skeleton in her parents' closet reappeared in...
Oct 28, 2012•34 min
Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the academic & commentator, Mona Siddiqui. Born in Karachi and brought up in Huddersfield, she's a rarity - a female Muslim theologian. As Professor of Islamic and Interreligious Studies at Edinburgh University her analysis regularly sheds light on controversial issues affecting the Muslim faith. Her calm & reasoned standpoint can be heard regularly on the Today programme's Thought for the Day. Brought up in a house stuffed full of books, her academic...
Oct 21, 2012•35 min
Kirsty Young's castaway is the American opera singer, Noah Stewart. He's a hit in opera houses around the world and his solo CD has topped the classical charts. Yet for a long time the closest he managed to get to the stage was as a receptionist at Carnegie Hall. He won a scholarship to the prestigious Juilliard School in New York though while waiting for his big break, he waited tables and did voice overs for Sesame Street. Blessed not only with rich, clear tenor tones he also possesses the goo...
Oct 14, 2012•36 min
Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the designer Celia Birtwell. In the ephemeral world of fashion she has endured; Marian Faithfull wore her creations in the 60s, Kate Moss is a fan today. Whimsical prints and flattering forms are her signature style and the vintage creations that she designed with her then husband Ossie Clarke now change hands for a small fortune. Her new ranges are highly collectable and fly off the high street rails too. Never one of the fashion world's flamboyant self prom...
Oct 07, 2012•33 min
Kirsty Young's castaway is the Paralympian & broadcaster Ade Adepitan. Wheelchair basketball's his sport and this year he partnered Claire Balding anchoring the television coverage of the 2012 London Paralympics. When he's not stuck in a studio explaining the intricacies of Goalball he's reporting from the rainforests of Nicaragua or the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Adversity seems to suit him - he even survived turning up for his first day at school aged 7 in a pink checked suit and bow ti...
Sep 30, 2012•33 min
Kirsty Young's castaway is Hollywood's prototype dizzy blond, Goldie Hawn. Like most things in Tinseltown the image is somewhat at odds with the reality. Goldie is an Academy Award winner and producer who's been on the A list for 40-odd years, starring alongside Peter Sellers, Walter Matthau and Woody Allen. She's now transmuted from fantasy pin-up to best selling author - she writes parenting manuals and spearheads a childhood learning initiative. She tells Kirsty about her journey from dancing...
Sep 23, 2012•32 min
Kirsty Young's castaway is the critic and satirist Craig Brown. A prolific writer, he's lampooned everyone from DH Lawrence to Victoria Beckham and, earlier this year, he became the first journalist to win three separate prizes at the British Press Awards. He showed early promise - when he was 14 he started writing spoofs of Harold Pinter plays, and his characters have their own entries in Who's Who. Producer: Leanne Buckle.
Aug 12, 2012•35 min
Kirsty Young's castaway is the campaigner Baroness Jane Campbell. She was born with a degenerative condition and her parents were told she would not survive infancy. Now in her mid-fifties and a cross-bench peer, she's spent her adult life campaigning for equality for disabled people and was one of the leading voices behind the Disability Discrimination Act of 1995. She recalls: "I found myself sitting in the middle of Westminster Bridge bringing the traffic to a standstill. The police didn't kn...
Aug 05, 2012•37 min
Mary Berry is one of the UK's best-known and respected cookery writers. More than six million copies of her books have now been sold - not bad for a girl who failed her school certificate in English. On television, it is her role as a judge on The Great British Bake-off that has brought her to the attention of a new generation. It was in domestic science lessons that she discovered her love of cooking and she is in no doubt of the importance of teaching cookery in school "When everybody leaves s...
Jul 29, 2012•37 min
Kirsty Young's castaway is the dancer and choreographer Akram Khan. A child of Bengali immigrants, he started learning Indian dance almost as soon as he could walk. Talent-spotted in his teens, he went on to spend two years touring the world with Peter Brook's Mahabharata. A keen collaborator, he's worked with everyone from prima ballerina Sylvie Guillem to disco queen Kylie Minogue. He says he was a shy boy and dance allowed him to communicate properly for the first time: "It was like being all...
Jul 22, 2012•37 min
Kirsty Young's castaway is the actor, writer and director Simon McBurney. It's 30 years since he set up the ground-breaking theatre company Complicite. It brought extraordinary physical deftness to the stage and its productions won every plaudit going - from an armful of Olivier awards to the Perrier prize for comedy. His mainstream credits range from TV roles in the Vicar of Dibley and Rev, to screen credits for The Last King of Scotland and Harry Potter. On stage, he's directed Katie Holmes an...
Jul 15, 2012•37 min
Kirsty Young's castaway is the legendary tennis player, Martina Navratilova. In an extraordinary career she's won 59 Grand Slam titles - her last just a few weeks short of her fiftieth birthday. Her life off the court has been equally eventful - she grew up in communist Czechoslovakia and, as a teenager, threw rocks as Soviet tanks rolled in; tennis offered a way to see the world and she defected to the US when she was 18 years old. After thirty years at the top of her profession she retired - a...
Jul 08, 2012•38 min
Kirsty Young's castaway is the architectural critic and writer Charles Jencks. Born in America, for the past four decades he has lived and worked in Britain - where his designs are as likely to be found in sculptural landscapes as buildings. Perhaps his most significant legacy, though, is the work he did with his late wife, Maggie Keswick. They worked together to design Maggie's Centres - a series of practical and beautifully-designed buildings to give information and support to people with canc...
Jul 01, 2012•39 min
Kirsty Young's castaway is the comedian John Bishop. Growing up on a Merseyside council estate, his early ambition was to play football for Liverpool - otherwise, he thought he might find a way out by winning the Pools or joining a band. The youngest of four children, his family were, he says, the kind that filled factory floors rather than lecture halls. Now a hugely popular stand-up comedian, it was a failing marriage and a sense of desperation that led him, one night, to a comedy bar. He deci...
Jun 24, 2012•36 min
Kirsty Young's castaway is the Egyptian writer and commentator Ahdaf Soueif. She was the first Muslim woman to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize and, from an early age, her life has been divided between Egypt and Britain. She was among the crowds in Tahrir Square last year, witnessing the uprising at first hand, and describing events for the world's media. She says: "Every once in a while there would be a surge of a few meters forward, as your friends, who were being killed at the front, gaine...
Jun 17, 2012•37 min
Kirsty Young's castaway is the campaigner Doreen Lawrence. The life she thought was hers ended when her son Stephen was murdered by a group of young white men on a street in London in 1993. In the years since, her campaigning has resulted in a shift in public attitudes, laws being changed and policing methods overhauled. She set up a charity in her son's memory and has been awarded an OBE for services to community relations. She says: "My son was special and I think, what happened to him, I just...
Jun 10, 2012•36 min
Kirsty Young's castaway is Margaret Rhodes. As the first cousin to the Queen, she has a unique insight into the life of the royal family. She used to spend her summer holidays at Balmoral with the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret while, during the war, she worked for MI6 and lodged at Buckingham Palace. She attended the Queen's wedding and coronation and, in later life, worked as an assistant to the Queen Mother. Remembering the Queen's coronation, she says: "We had only just recovered from six...
Jun 03, 2012•36 min
