This week Sue Lawley's castaway is the cricket commentator Henry Blofeld. Blofeld's become known as much for his musings on pigeons, planes, double decker buses, tea ladies, cakes and his catchphrase 'my dear old thing' as he is for his cricket commentary. As a teenager he showed great promise as a cricketer and was even thought good enough to play for England until his dreams were dashed after a serious accident when his bike hit a bus. He dropped out of Cambridge and toyed with the idea of a c...
Nov 30, 2003•36 min
This week Sue Lawley's castaway is the chairman of the Press Complaints Commission Sir Christopher Meyer. Sir Christopher joined the PCC earlier this year after a glittering career in the diplomatic service. His last posting as Ambassador to Washington covered the September 11th attacks and the Monica Lewinsky scandal. In all he spent 36 years with the Foreign Office during which time he held postings to key missions in Washington, Moscow, Madrid and Brussels. He worked as Foreign Office spokesm...
Nov 23, 2003•36 min
This week Sue Lawley's castaway is the motoring journalist and motor-mouth Jeremy Clarkson. He came from a comfortable background - his mother was a teacher and his father a travelling salesman. But his parents had greater ambitions for their son and wanted to send him to public school. Their determination led his mother to set up a business making Paddington Bear toys, and the proceeds funded Jeremy's place at Repton School. However, he was a far from ideal pupil and says he was 'asked to leave...
Nov 16, 2003•33 min
This week Sue Lawley's castaway is Professor Sir Christopher Frayling the Rector of the Royal College of Art and a champion of popular culture. He was born into an affluent family living in London. His father, Major Arthur Frayling, was a successful furrier, and his mother was fascinated by the arts and cars - she won the RAC Rally in 1952. At six he was sent to boarding school, which he hated, and it was there that he developed his life long love of film acting and design. He studied history at...
Nov 02, 2003•37 min
Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the leader of the Liberal Democrats Charles Kennedy. Born in Inverness, Charles grew up on a croft near Fort William spending his early life learning how to shear sheep and milk cows on his grandfather's neighbouring farm. Music was always a big part of life with his father playing the fiddle at home and at local events but Charles's real passion was astronomy. He saved to buy a three-inch refractor telescope from his pocket money inspired by the Apollo Moon La...
Oct 26, 2003•37 min
This week, Sue Lawley's castaway is the Irish businessman and writer Bill Cullen. He was one of 14 children born to William Cullen and Mary Darcy. His childhood, in the tenement slums of inner-city Dublin was one of extreme poverty. Born during the war, the family lived in a one-room dilapidated tenement. Learning the secrets of street trading from his mother and grandmother, Bill started selling from market stalls from the age of five. He sold everything from fruit to evening papers home-fashio...
Oct 19, 2003•34 min
This week Sue Lawley's castaway is the journalist and songwriter Herbert Kretzmer. Born in South Africa in 1925, he came to Europe after World War II. For a while he lived in Paris, playing piano in a bar. He rubbed shoulders with Jean Paul Sartre and became friends with one of France's greatest singer-songwriters Charles Aznavour. The two formed a musical partnership and Kretzmer re-worked many of his songs into English - including the hits Yesterday, When I Was Young and She, which was more re...
Oct 12, 2003•34 min
This week Sue Lawley's castaway is the broadcaster, cook, mother and domestic goddess Nigella Lawson. She came from a privileged background - her father, the former Conservative chancellor Nigel Lawson, her mother the society beauty and heir to the Lyons Corner House empire Vanessa Salmon. After graduating from Oxford, she wrote a restaurant column for the Spectator. She became deputy literary editor of the Sunday Times in 1986 and it was on that paper that she met John Diamond - the couple marr...
Oct 05, 2003•34 min
This week Sue Lawley's castaway is the internationally successful author Nick Hornby. Originally from suburban Maidenhead, his obsession with football, as chronicled in the autobiographical Fever Pitch, began after his parents divorced and his dad struggled to find a suitable way to pass the weekend. The decision to visit Arsenal had lasting repercussions with Hornby becoming a fanatical supporter. His next work, High Fidelity, featured Horrnby's other great passion - pop music. It became a bibl...
Sep 28, 2003•35 min
This week Sue Lawley's castaway is the Welsh bass-baritone Bryn Terfel. Still only in his 30s, he's sung at the world's biggest opera houses and can pick and choose where he works and the productions he wants to star in. He began singing in his first competitions at the age of three. Born into a farming family in the tiny village of Pentglas in North Wales which has only a handful of houses, one shop and one church, he was brought up singing at Chapel and regularly competed and won the National ...
Sep 21, 2003•37 min
Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the popular novelist Barbara Taylor Bradford. Born in Upper Armley, Leeds, by the age of 16 Barbara had graduated from the typing pool and was a cub reporter in the newsroom of the Yorkshire Evening Post. By twenty she was Fashion Editor of Woman's Own in London. In 1976, after a number of failed attempts, she sold her first novel to a publisher on the basis of a ten-page outline. That book A Woman of Substance, has gone on to sell in the region of 20 million c...
Jul 06, 2003•37 min
Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the architect Daniel Libeskind. Daniel Libeskind's parents were Polish Jews. Daniel himself was a prodigiously talented musician, but the family couldn't afford the attention a piano would draw to them and so he learned the accordion. In Israel he won a prestigious music scholarship - Daniel Barenboim and Itzhak Perlmen were other recipients - and the family moved to New York. In his teens Libeskind dropped music suddenly and completely and turned to architectu...
Jun 29, 2003•38 min
Sue Lawley's castaway this week is The Bishop of Birmingham, John Sentamu. When John Sentamu was born, the sixth of 13 children, near Kampala in Uganda in 1949, he was so small the local bishop was called in to baptise him immediately. He survived his birth, a sickly childhood and a famine to become, a mere 25 years later, a judge in the Uganda High Court. In 1974 he managed to get a visa to leave Uganda and come to Britain where he studied theology with a view to returning to the Ugandan justic...
Jun 22, 2003•36 min
Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the veteran broadcaster Mark Tully. Born in Calcutta and with ancestors who were involved in the Indian Mutiny, he has a love of India in his bones and has made his career reporting it. Indeed, in his 30 years as BBC India correspondent his name and the role became synonymous - he has been called a cult figure and his reports were broadcast in English, Hindi, Urdu, Tamil, Nepali and Bengali to as many as 50 million people on the sub-continent. As a young man he...
Jun 15, 2003•36 min
Sue Lawley's castaway this week is Vittorio Radice. Born in 1957 and brought up near Lake Como, Radice is the son of a furniture retailer. He surprised himself and his family by studying agriculture at Milan University, but he was never destined to become a farmer. His military service he insists entailed nothing much more pressing than typing and taking the general's wife shopping, but this seems to have been the last period of treading water in his life. After leaving the army he joined Associ...
Jun 08, 2003•34 min
Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the actor and writer Meera Syal. She was born in the sixties after her parents had immigrated here from the Punjab and brought up in Essington, a Staffordshire mining village five miles north east of Wolverhampton. She studied English and Drama at Manchester University. Her one woman show One Of Us went to the Edinburgh Festival where she was spotted by a director from the Royal Court Theatre in London and offered an immediate equity card. Meera gave up her aca...
Jun 01, 2003•35 min
Sue Lawley's castaway this week is Derek Brown the Director of the Michelin Red Guides which are the French bible for restaurants. The original Guide was invented in 1900 to help travellers in France find good food at reasonable prices. These days the annual publication always creates a stir with restaurateurs and gourmands alike, all waiting on tenterhooks to see who has been awarded the prestigious Michelin stars - or who has had them taken away. In recent years some high profile chefs have cr...
May 25, 2003•37 min
Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the director Franco Zeffirelli. He was born the illegitimate son of a philandering businessman and a successful fashion designer, both of whom were married to other people. Unable to give him his father's or her own name, his mother plucked a word out of a Mozart opera - 'Zefferetti', meaning 'little breeze' - and gave it to her son. Somewhere along the line a slip of a pen transformed it into Zeffirelli, and Franco has gone by it for 80 years. He was only six ...
May 18, 2003•37 min
Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the composer George Fenton, whose work includes music for Groundhog Day, Shadowlands, Cry Freedom, The Company of Wolves and The Fisher King. Born George Howe in South London in 1950, he taught himself to play the guitar at the age of eight and by the age of 14 was playing the organ - "dreadfully"! He wanted to be an actor, and got an early break in Alan Bennett's play Forty Years On. As time went on, however, he found directors were always asking him to play a...
May 11, 2003•35 min
Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the sociologist and Oxford Emeritus Professor A H Halsey. Prof Halsey played a key part in the switch to comprehensives as an adviser to Labour Education Secretary Anthony Crossland in the 1960s. Born in 1923 to working class parents he grew up convinced that intelligence wasn't dependent on class. Chelly, as Halsey was universally known, won a scholarship to grammar school but started his career inauspiciously as a sanitary inspector's apprentice, where he bec...
May 04, 2003•36 min
Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the impressionist and satirist Rory Bremner. He was born in Edinburgh in 1961. A self-confessed show-off, he started doing impersonations at primary school, sending up teachers, sports commentators and Moira Anderson! Entertaining his school friends inevitably developed into performing on stage and he worked as a stand up on the comedy circuit, and notably at the Edinburgh Festival. Following his sell-out run at the Festival in 1986 the BBC offered him his firs...
Apr 20, 2003•36 min
Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the writer Margaret Atwood. Born just after the outbreak of the Second World War, Margaret Atwood spent much of her childhood in the Canadian outback where her father's work involved studying insects. She grew up mostly without television, cinema, mains electricity or even a proper road to civilisation. For company she had only her parents and her brother, with whom she wrote "serials, mainly about space travel". It wasn't until her teens that the urge to write...
Apr 13, 2003•36 min
Sue Lawley's castaway this week is David Gilmour of Pink Floyd. Gilmour grew up in Cambridge, where his father was a senior lecturer in zoology and his mother was also a lecturer and film editor. He was educated at a private school, in the hope that he would shine academically, but he really wanted to be playing music with his friends at the local state school, the County. At 16 he left and went to the Cambridge Tech where he became friends with Syd Barratt, the legendary founder of The Pink Flo...
Apr 06, 2003•33 min
Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the actress Kristin Scott Thomas. She was born in Redruth, Cornwall in 1960. Her father, a Naval pilot, was killed in a crash when she was five. Her mother married another pilot six years later, but he was also killed under similar circumstances. Kristin moved around the country with her parents and four siblings until she went to Cheltenham Ladies College at the age of eight, where she was 'always bottom of the class'. On leaving school she didn't go to drama ...
Mar 30, 2003•36 min
Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the composer of the hit musicals Les Miserables and Miss Saigon, Claude-Michel Schönberg. Claude-Michel always knew he would be a composer. As a small boy growing up in Brittany he would play the piano and compose pieces for his mother. He dreamt of getting away from his little village on the French coast and going to live in Paris and compose operas. To please his mother Claude-Michel went to University to study mathematics, but whilst he was there he formed a...
Mar 23, 2003•37 min
Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the photo journalist Nick Danziger. Nick was born in London but grew up in Monaco and Switzerland. He developed a taste for adventure and travel from a young age, and, inspired by the comic-strip Belgian reporter Tintin, took off on his first trip to Paris aged 13. Without passport or air ticket, he managed to enter the country and travel around, selling sketches to make money. Nick's initial ambition was to be an artist, and he attended art school, got an MA a...
Mar 16, 2003•35 min
Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the comedian Jim Moir, best known by the name of his alter ego Vic Reeves. Jim was born in Leeds but soon moved to Darlington with his family. He attended the local school and left with one O level in Art. He fulfilled the expectations of his school by getting a job in a factory, completing his apprenticeship and working there for four years. However, he was bored so he moved to London with three friends. After trying a few different jobs he began running club ...
Mar 09, 2003•34 min
"Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the singer-songwriter Gene Pitney. Gene grew up in Rockville, Connecticut, the middle child of a large family. His father worked in the local mills and the family sold fruit and vegetables from their garden to supplement this income. A shy child, Gene says that performing couldn't have been further from his mind, although he enjoyed singing. His first solo performance at school resulted in an embarrassing whimper as Gene was petrified by the expectant audience...
Mar 02, 2003•34 min
Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the actor, George Clooney. George was born in Lexington, Kentucky in 1961, the son of Nick Clooney, a TV newscaster. From the age of five, George spent time pottering round his father's sets, joining in where possible, shouting out the temperature during the weather report. After an initial plan to follow his father into broadcasting, then studying for a short while at Northern Kentucky University, George failed to join the Cincinnati Reds baseball team. But th...
Feb 23, 2003•34 min
Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the artist Cornelia Parker. Cornelia grew up in the country where she lived on a small holding looked after by her father. She spent much of her time mucking out pigs, milking cows, laying hedges and tying up tomato plants. Her means of escape was to run into the fields to daydream. English and art were her favourite subjects, and a trip to the Tate Gallery in London with her school when she was aged 15 confirmed that she wanted to be an artist. After studying ...
Feb 16, 2003•34 min
