Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the actor Patrick Stewart Patrick Stewart had to wait a long time for fame. The Shakespearean actor was nearly 50 when he was offered the role of Captain Jean-Luc Picard in the TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation. Contrary to predictions, the programme was a huge hit, and Patrick Stewart's famously bald cranium was on posters, duvet covers and Star Trek memorabilia the world over. Patrick was born in Mirfield, Yorkshire, a town with a passion for amateur d...
Apr 17, 2005•36 min
Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the high wire walker Philippe Petit. Since the age of 17 Petit had been, in his own words, a 'wandering troubadour', making a living by doing magic in the salons of Paris. Notre Dame became the site of Petit's first illegal wirewalk, on 6th June 1971. On 7th August 1974 Philippe Petit committed 'the artistic crime of the century' when he put a rope between the towers of the World Trade Centre in New York and spent nearly an hour walking back and forth across it...
Apr 10, 2005•36 min
Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the musical director of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra Lorin Maazel. He was a child prodigy whose career as a conductor has survived, and thrived, beyond his early precocity. His musical talent became apparent at the age of five, when he began playing the violin, while at seven he was discovered conducting a piece by Haydn playing on his parents' record player. He was the first American and youngest conductor, at the age of 30, to conduct Lohengrin at Bayr...
Apr 03, 2005•37 min
Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the theatre director Yvonne Brewster. She has been a major force in black British theatre for the last 20 years. Born into a wealthy family in Jamaica, Yvonne rebelled against her parents' plans for her - marriage and children - to become a theatrical pioneer. She says she was the first black drama student in Britain - but when she enrolled, her drama school's principal told her that, as a black actress, she would never get work here. She went on to become the ...
Mar 27, 2005•36 min
Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the writer and illustrator Raymond Briggs. For millions of children, Christmas would be incomplete without Briggs's story The Snowman, which has been shown on television every year since its first release, in 1982, and his enduringly popular Father Christmas. Raymond was born in 1934 in Wimbledon. His mother, Ethel, was a lady's maid and his father, Ernest, a milkman. He wanted to draw cartoon strips from an early age but, at art school, found his tutors looked...
Mar 20, 2005•37 min
Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the playwright and director Stephen Poliakoff. Stephen Poliakoff is probably best known for his explorations of the themes of memory, family and history in his dramas for television, including Shooting the Past, Perfect Strangers and The Lost Prince. He was born into an aristocratic, Russian Jewish family in 1952, the third of four children. Stephen's talent as a dramatist emerged from the embers of his ambition to be an actor. He discovered early that he could...
Mar 13, 2005•37 min
Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the academic Professor Alison Richard. Professor Alison Richard is Cambridge University's first full-time female Vice-Chancellor. An anthropologist by training, the role of Vice-Chancellor makes her the principal academic and administrative officer of one of Britain's oldest universities, at the head of some 18,000 undergraduates and assets of more than a billion pounds. She has been in post for just over a year and, for her, it is a return to the university wh...
Mar 06, 2005•38 min
Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the actor Geoffrey Palmer. Best known for his roles in The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, Butterflies and As Time Goes By, he had to wait a long time to become a household name and national treasure. Unsure what career to pursue after a spell in the army, he fell into acting because a girlfriend was involved in amateur dramatics. He worked in repertory theatre throughout the 60s and 70s and ended up working with John Osborne during the Royal Court's heyday i...
Feb 27, 2005•38 min
Sue Lawley's castaway this week is Dr David Starkey. Dr David Starkey forsook the ivory towers of academia to popularise history as a constitutional commentator in the press and as a broadcaster and writer. His approach to history is a personal one; he explains events through the lens of individual hopes, flaws and lusts and says historical influence can be seen in terms of who are "the movers and shakers and the bottom wipers" in the royal court. Their equivalent can be seen in government today...
Feb 06, 2005•39 min
Sue Lawley's castaway this week is Peter Maxwell Davies. He is one of Britain's greatest living composers. His career has seen him go from enfant terrible and champion of new music, writing pieces such as Worldes Blis and Eight Songs for a Mad King, to Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Master of the Queen's Music. Peter Maxwell Davies was born in Salford, near Manchester, in 1934. Whilst studying at Manchester University and the Royal Manchester College of Music he formed the key friendships which were ...
Jan 30, 2005•39 min
Sue Lawley's castaway this week is Dr Jonathan Miller. Jonathan Miller has been an influential and prolific force in British intellectual life since the 1960s. A writer, theatre and opera director and explainer of science to the public, he's had not one career, but several, and is seemingly capable of endlessly reinventing himself - as a scientist, a director, a television presenter, a writer, a film-maker and, more recently, a sculptor. Whilst still a medical student he received an invitation w...
Jan 23, 2005•35 min
Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the artist Sam Taylor-Wood. She is known for her photography and short films, including 'David' - a film of the footballer David Beckham sleeping - and her 365-degree photograph that was wrapped around the Selfridges store in central London. She is one half of art's most glamorous couple - her husband is the art dealer Jay Jopling. Her route into art was scattered and uncertain. Although she knew she wanted to study art, she ended up taking a BTech in fashion b...
Jan 16, 2005•35 min
Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the former SAS soldier turned author Andy McNab. After being abandoned as a baby, he was adopted and was brought up in the Peckham area of South London. A life of minor crime followed until he joined the infantry with the Royal Green Jackets in 1976 progressing to the SAS. In the Gulf War, McNab commanded the Bravo Two Zero patrol, given the task of destroying underground communication links in Iraq and mobile Scud launchers. Three of the eight-man patrol were ...
Jan 09, 2005•35 min
Sue Lawley's castaway is the dancer Carlos Acosta. Carlos Acosta is one of the greatest ballet dancers of his generation. He is the first black principal dancer at Covent Garden. Tocororo, the show about his own life, that he wrote, choreographed and starred in, broke box office records at Sadlers Wells and in his homeland of Cuba he is a national hero. But his extraordinary success has followed an even more remarkable journey from the impoverished back streets of Havana. He was the youngest of ...
Jan 02, 2005•37 min
Sue Lawley's castaway is the actress Kim Cattrall. Kim Cattrall became a household name in her forties as a result of playing man-eater, defiant singleton and PR mogul Samantha Jones in Sex and the City. She is about to star in the play Whose Life is it Anyway? in the West End of London. She was born in Liverpool but grew up in Canada and decided to be an actress at a young age. She says a formative experience was appearing in a school play Piffle It's Only a Sniffle when she took the role of a ...
Dec 26, 2004•36 min
Sue Lawley's castaway is the singer Engelbert Humperdinck. Engelbert Humperdinck is one of Britain's most successful entertainers. He is known as the King of Romance and has been at the top of the showbusiness ladder for nearly 40 years - selling more than 130 million records including sixty-four gold and 23 platinum albums. He was born Arnold George (Gerry) Dorsey in 1936 in India and was one of 10 children. At the age of 10, his family returned to the UK and Leicester. At 17 he began performin...
Dec 19, 2004•35 min
Sue Lawley's castaway this week is John Fortune. John Fortune is one of Britain's most respected and enduring satirists. For the past 12 years he has been half of the award-winning double act, The Long Johns, with John Bird, that have brought a sharper political edge to Bremner, Bird and Fortune. As a result of the act, they have been named the Best Opposition by The Oldie Magazine and are Bafta award winners. It is a return to the forefront of political satire for John Fortune - he had joined P...
Dec 12, 2004•36 min
Sue Lawley's castaway this week is Sir Bobby Robson. Sir Bobby Robson is one of the most enduring and popular faces in football. For more than five decades he has dedicated his life to the game - as a player and manager. As a small boy growing up in a mining village in County Durham, he learnt his ball skills by playing football in the streets and backyard with his four brothers. By the time he was 15, Bobby knew he had a particular gift and was attracting the attention of the local talent scout...
Dec 05, 2004•36 min
Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the artist Tracey Emin. Tracey Emin is one of the most successful and controversial artists to emerge during the 1990s. Her work was championed early on by influential art dealer Jay Jopling and later by the collector Charles Saatchi. Her work is highly autobiographical and confessional. A talented drawer and painter, she has attracted most attention for her art installations - including her tent, Everyone I Have Ever Slept With and the Turner Prize-nominated M...
Nov 28, 2004•33 min
Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the death row lawyer Clive Stafford Smith. Clive Stafford Smith spent more than 25 years representing people on death row. He's saved hundreds of lives and counts his clients among his friends. He says his work is his calling - one he was drawn to after writing an essay on capital punishment while at school. Initially he thought it was a history essay and was appalled to find the death sentence was still in use. He planned to become a campaigning journalist, bu...
Nov 21, 2004•34 min
Sue Lawley's guest this week is the internationally acclaimed choreographer Matthew Bourne. He was born in the East End of London in 1960. As a child, his great passion was musicals and stage shows - rather than ballet. Despite his later success, he showed no interest in dance until the age of 20 when he enrolled at the Laban Centre for Movement and Dance in London. He's built his reputation on his unconventional interpretations of classical ballets such as Nutcracker which he reworked from bein...
Nov 19, 2004•36 min
Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the distinguished foreign correspondent Ann Leslie. She has witnessed and reported on some of the most significant events of the past 30 years including the fall of the Berlin wall; the failed coup against Michael Gorbachev and Nelson Mandela's final walk to freedom. She has reported on uprisings, massacres and wars, collecting numerous awards as she has done so. She grew up in India and Pakistan and loved India and its culture. When she was around 10 years old...
Nov 07, 2004•35 min
Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the Olympic gold medallist Matthew Pinsent. Matthew Pinsent won his fourth Olympic gold medal at this summer's games in Athens. His first three were all won rowing with Sir Steve Redgrave - as a pair in 1992 in Barcelona and 1996 in Atlanta and as part of the coxless four in 2000's Sydney games. This summer's success saw him lead the four to victory - in a photo-finish that saw them beat the Canadian team by less than a tenth of a second. He won his first Gold ...
Oct 31, 2004•34 min
Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the poet Dr Jack Mapanje who is one of the most important living African poets. He was born into a poor household in a typical African village in 1944, when Malawi (then Nyasaland) was a British colony, but while he was still a child it became part of the Central African Federation, together with Northern and Southern Rhodesia. Jack started writing poems, inspired by his despair at the political woes besetting his country. Although his book, Of Chameleons and G...
Oct 24, 2004•34 min
Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the Liberal Democrat politician Sir Menzies Campbell. Born in Glasgow, he excelled at both academia and sports making it to the University in Glasgow and then Stanford in California where he studied law but all the while dividing his time between this and his other great love - athletics. He became the fastest man in Britain holding and re-breaking the record for the 100 metres between 1967 and 1974 and competed in the 1964 Olympic and 1966 Commonwealth games. ...
Oct 17, 2004•37 min
Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the journalist and writer Anne Scott-James. Now in her 92nd year, Anne Scott-James came from a line of critics and writers and became one of the first women career journalists, editors and columnists, before embarking on a second career as the author of a series of gardening books. After Oxford she joined Vogue - first as an assistant to a secretary and then went from writing the odd picture caption to proper articles. She became editor of Harper's Bazaar - and...
Oct 10, 2004•38 min
Sue's Lawley's castaway this week is the zoologist turned author and broadcaster Desmond Morris. He made his name with The Naked Ape first published in 1967 in which he persuasively argued the case for viewing man as a 'risen ape' rather than a 'fallen angel'. To him, humans should be observed like any other beast in the animal kingdom. The book has sold more than 12 million copies and has been translated into 23 languages. Dozens more books have followed including The Human Zoo, which compared ...
Oct 03, 2004•35 min
Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the actress and wildlife campaigner Virginia McKenna. She was born in London and, after spending five years of her childhood in South Africa to escape the Blitz, she returned to England. She enrolled at the Central School of Drama but left after two years when offered six months in Repertory at Dundee. Classics such as the Cruel Sea, Carve Her Name with Pride and A Town Like Alice, for which she won a British Academy Award for Best Actress, have been highlights...
Sep 26, 2004•36 min
Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the mountaineer Joe Simpson. He was born in Kuala Lumpur in 1960 where his father was stationed with the British Army. Over the next few years the family lived in Gibraltar, Ireland and Germany, although Joe returned to England for schooling at Ampleforth and showed an early adventurous spirit and love of sport. But it was only after reading the classic account of attempted ascents on the Eiger - 'The White Spider' - by Heinrich Harrer that he developed an inte...
Sep 19, 2004•34 min
Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the world famous musician Hugh Masekela. As a boy growing up in the impoverished townships of South Africa, he was inspired to learn the trumpet after seeing Kirk Douglas play Bix Beiderbecke in Young Man With A Horn. He begged one of his teachers - the anti-apartheid crusader Father Trevor Huddleston - to buy him a horn and in return he promised to stay out of trouble. Hugh soon made a name for himself in South Africa but as the racial tensions intensified dur...
Jul 11, 2004•34 min
