Emily Watson is an award-winning actor, widely regarded as one of the finest character actors of her generation. She began her career on stage with the Royal Shakespeare Company before rising to prominence in 1996, when she was cast as Bess McNeill in Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves. The role earned her an Academy Award nomination. She received a second Oscar nomination for Hilary and Jackie, for which she learned to play the cello to portray Jacqueline du Pré. Watson has built a reputation ...
Jun 20, 2026•53 min
Journalist Gary O’Donoghue is the Chief North America Correspondent for BBC News. Last year his coverage of the 2024 assassination attempt on Donald Trump won the Royal Television Society Breaking News Award. He made the news himself in 2025 when he secured a 20-minute exclusive phone interview with Trump who was by then the US President. Gary was born in London and brought up in Essex. When he was eight he lost his sight and attended specialist schools for blind and partially sighted children. ...
Jun 14, 2026•51 min
David Morrissey is an actor who grew up in Liverpool. His screen work ranges from playing a ruthless survivor of the zombie apocalypse in The Walking Dead to a troubled police officer in James Graham’s Sherwood. His television debut performance came playing a teenager in the Channel 4 series One Summer. Since then his career has seen him win awards including the Royal Television Society award for Best Male Actor for his role as Gordon Brown in The Deal. Morrissey’s interest in acting started in ...
Jun 06, 2026•51 min
Kirsty Young talks to the actor and comedian Whoopi Goldberg in a programme first broadcast in 2009.
May 31, 2026•35 min
Laurene Laverne talks to the former football manager Arsène Wenger in a programme first broadcast in 2020.
May 24, 2026•48 min
Lauren Laverne talks to the film studio executive Dame Donna Langley in a programme first broadcast in 2023. Dame Donna was awarded the BAFTA Fellowship this year.
May 17, 2026•35 min
Lauren Laverne talks to the musician Thom Yorke in a programme first broadcast in 2019.
May 10, 2026•50 min
Sue Lawley talks to the primatologist Dr Jane Goodall in a programme first broadcast in 2000. Jane Goodall died in October 2025, at the age of 91.
May 03, 2026•37 min
Si King is a broadcaster and cook, best known as one half of the duo The Hairy Bikers. Together with his onscreen cooking partner and real-life best friend Dave Myers, the pair travelled over 650,000 miles around the world on motor bikes filming their cooking exploits and they also wrote a number of bestselling cookbooks. Si was born in a pit village near Gateshead, the youngest child of three. His father had served in the arctic convoys and had met his wife whilst on shore leave in Newcastle wh...
Apr 25, 2026•50 min
Sara Pascoe is a comedian and writer who has appeared on programmes including QI, Taskmaster and the Great British Sewing Bee. She is also a screenwriter and the author of three books including her debut novel Weirdo which won the inaugural Jilly Cooper Prize for fiction last year. Sara was born in Dagenham and grew up in Romford. She joined a drama club when she was 14 and set her heart on an acting career but failed to get a place at drama school. She read English Literature at the University ...
Apr 19, 2026•51 min
Professor Stephen Westaby is a former heart surgeon and writer. During his career he performed over 11,000 operations and pioneered the use of life long artificial hearts as an alternative to donor transplants. Stephen was born in Scunthorpe in 1948 and went to medical school at Charing Cross Hospital in 1966. The following year he suffered a serious head injury during a rugby match which had a major impact on his personality. He changed from being a shy person lacking in confidence into a fearl...
Apr 12, 2026•51 min
Jessie Buckley is an actor and singer. She recently won a BAFTA and a Golden Globe Award for her critically acclaimed role playing Shakespeare’s wife Agnes in Chloé Zhao’s film Hamnet. Her performance has also garnered her an Academy Award nomination. Jessie won an Olivier Award for her portrayal of Sally Bowles in a 2021 West End revival of Cabaret. Her breakout film role came in 2018 when she played an aspiring country music singer in the musical Wild Rose. Jessie was born in Killarney in Coun...
Apr 05, 2026•51 min
Dwayne Fields is an explorer and broadcaster who was appointed the UK’s Chief Scout in 2024. He is the first black Briton to reach the Magnetic North Pole. His television work includes fronting the series 7 Toughest Days and co-presenting Endurance: Race to the Pole, and Expedition: Search for the Nile, with fellow adventurer Ben Fogle. Dwayne was born in Jamaica and was brought up by his great-grandmother for the first few years of his life. When he was six he moved to north London to live with...
Mar 29, 2026•51 min
Roula Khalaf is a journalist and the first woman to serve as editor of the Financial Times in its 138‑year history. She joined the paper in 1995 as North Africa correspondent, covering the Algerian civil war before reporting more broadly across the Middle East, including Syria, Iran and Iraq, and later the Arab Spring. Roula was born in Beirut and grew up there during the Lebanese civil war which began in 1975. She studied communications at Syracuse University in New York State and then complete...
Mar 22, 2026•51 min
Richard Young is a photographer who was once known as the “king of the paparazzi”. His portfolio is a who’s who of some of the biggest stars in film, music, stage and popular culture from the past fifty years. From gatecrashing Elizabeth Taylor’s party for Richard Burton’s 50th at the Dorchester to later being invited to photograph her Damehood celebrations. He can count the first photographs of Paul Getty Jr. after his kidnapping as just one of his many scoops. He was born in Hackney to a Jewis...
Mar 15, 2026•50 min
Tahra Zafar is a costume and creature effects designer. She designed the Paddington Bear puppet featured in the hit West End production Paddington: The Musical. Born into a theatre family, she grew up with an Armenian American father who worked as a choreographer in the first West End production of West Side Story, and a mother who moved from a career as a ballerina to theatre work around the world. Her interest in making began early, helping her father with practical projects such as restoring ...
Mar 08, 2026•51 min
Professor Michele Dougherty is President of the Institute of Physics and Professor of Space Physics at Imperial College London. She was appointed Astronomer Royal last year – the first woman to hold the post in its 350-year history. She was brought up in Durban in South Africa and studied for a Bachelor of Science degree in applied maths at Natal University. After completing a Master’s and PhD she took up a fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany where she investigated so...
Mar 01, 2026•52 min
Kemi Badenoch is the Conservative MP for North West Essex and the Leader of the Opposition. Since winning her seat in 2017, she has held cabinet positions as Minister of State for Equalities under Boris Johnson and Secretary of State for International Trade under Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak. She became leader of the Conservative Party in 2024 after Rishi Sunak’s resignation and is the first black person to lead a political party in Britain. Her Nigerian parents came to Britain for medical treatmen...
Feb 22, 2026•51 min
Adeel Akhtar is an award-winning actor whose breakthrough role came in 2010 when he starred in Chris Morris’s black comedy Four Lions. He won his first BAFTA for Best Actor in 2017 for his role in the BBC drama Murdered by My Father. His second, for Best Supporting Actor, came in 2023 playing Andy Fisher in the BBC series Sherwood. Adeel was born in Hounslow in West London and grew up in Buckinghamshire. He discovered a love of acting at school when he and a group of friends put on a production ...
Feb 15, 2026•50 min
Jesse Armstrong is a British author, screenwriter, and producer. He has written several award-winning TV comedies and satirical dramas and won many accolades for his work including two BAFTA TV Awards, three Golden Globe Awards, and three Writers Guild of America Awards. His hit HBO series Succession has won nineteen Emmys. Jesse was born and educated in Oswestry, Shropshire, and attended Manchester University where he studied American Studies as an undergraduate and American History for his Mas...
Feb 08, 2026•49 min
Jojo Moyes is a British novelist and screenwriter. She began her writing career as a journalist and worked at the Egham and Staines News, Independent and South China Morning Post. Whilst working nightshifts on the Independent, she pursued her novel writing ambitions and wrote books by day. Her first few books were well received but did not topple the best seller lists. That all changed in 2012 when her novel You Before Me was published. Readers fell in love with the story of Louisa Clark, who ta...
Jan 25, 2026•51 min
Kate Winslet is an actor who achieved global fame playing Rose DeWitt Bukater, opposite Leonard DiCaprio as Jack Dawson, in the 1997 James Cameron epic Titanic. During her career she has won five BAFTAs, two Emmys, five Golden Globes and an Academy Award for her role in the Reader. Kate was born in Reading in 1975 and attended Redroofs School for the Performing Arts in Maidenhead, Berkshire. Her film debut came in 1994 when she played a teenage killer in Peter Jackson’s film Heavenly Creatures. ...
Jan 18, 2026•52 min
Lee Child is a writer who is best known for his series of bestselling novels featuring Jack Reacher. Reacher is an enigmatic 6ft 5in, 17-stone ex-military police major who rights wrongs before disappearing off into the sunset. The books have sold in their millions around the world and have inspired two films starring Tom Cruise and a television series. Lee Child was born James - Jim - Grant in 1954 and grew up in Birmingham. He studied Law at the University of Sheffield and then joined the prese...
Jan 11, 2026•53 min
Margaret Atwood is a Canadian writer. She has published more than sixty books spanning novels, poetry, short stories, non-fiction, children’s literature, and graphic novels, and has been called “one of the sharpest and most imaginative novelists writing in English”. She is one of only four writers to have won the Booker Prize twice: for The Blind Assassin in 2000 and for her 2019 follow-up to The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments. Margaret was born in Ottawa in November 1939, shortly after the out...
Jan 04, 2026•54 min
Gordon Buchanan is a wildlife cameraman and TV presenter. He is best known for the Animal Family & Me series of BBC documentaries in which he gets up close to wild bears, Arctic wolves, elephants and reindeer among other species. Gordon was brought up in Tobermory on the Isle of Mull where he spent his days exploring the island and developed his lifelong love of the outdoors. In 1988, when he was 17, he met the charismatic wildlife cameraman Nick Gordon who invited him to become his assistan...
Dec 28, 2025•50 min
Sir Salman Rushdie is a writer who has written over 20 books, seven of which have been nominated for the Booker Prize. In 1981 he won with his novel Midnight’s Children which also topped the polls for the 25th and 40th anniversaries of the prize, making it the most lauded novel in Booker history. He was born in Bombay in 1947 and educated at Rugby School in Warwickshire. After studying history at the University of Cambridge he worked as a copywriter at various advertising agencies before publish...
Dec 21, 2025•50 min
Sir Tim Berners-Lee is a computer scientist and the inventor of the World Wide Web. He was born in 1955, a golden year for technology innovators. Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were also born in the same year. A curious child, he learned about electronics from his train set and spent his pocket money on transistors. His first significant connecting invention was building an intercom as a teenager for the family home before moving on to build his first computer. His parents were both mathematicians an...
Dec 14, 2025•51 min
Sally Mann is a photographer and a New York Times bestselling writer. She is best known for making large-format black and white photographs of the people and places in her immediate surroundings: her children, her husband, and the rural landscape of her home state and the American South. Sally was born in Lexington, Virginia, the youngest of three children to Robert and Elizabeth Munger. Her father was a doctor and gave Sally his old Leica camera to play with. After university, she wanted to be ...
Dec 07, 2025•52 min
Lorraine Kelly is a journalist and broadcaster who has been a mainstay of daytime television for over 40 years. She has hosted her own show Lorraine since its launch in 2010 and she was awarded a lifetime achievement BAFTA in 2024. Lorraine was born in Glasgow and later moved with her family to the new town of East Kilbride. She became a junior reporter at the East Kilbride News when she was in her teens and in 1983 joined the BBC as a researcher. In 1984 she started at TV-am as a reporter cover...
Nov 30, 2025•50 min
Lennie James is a British actor and writer. In 2025, he received the BAFTA for Leading Actor for his portrayal of Barrington Walker in the TV adaptation of Bernadine Evaristo’s novel Mr. Loverman. This award adds to his collection, which also includes accolades for writing. At seventeen, he wrote Trial and Error and won the National Youth Theatre–Texaco Playwriting Competition, earning the title of Most Prominent Playwright Under 21. For a decade, Lennie played Morgan Jones in The Walking Dead a...
Nov 23, 2025•52 min
