Immediately recognisable as one of Britain's most versatile actresses she's worked in television, theatre and films over the past four decades. While she's taken roles at the Royal Shakespeare Company and in big budget films, it's her instinct for TV comedy - working alongside Victoria Wood and Julie Walters - that has made her a household name. Audiences loved the spoof soap opera Acorn Antiques and she won an Olivier Award for her role in the stage production. In the early days, though, she re...
Feb 13, 2011•38 min
Kirsty Young's castaway is the writer Howard Jacobson. After many years of swiping at literary prizes, last October he walked off with the biggest one going, the Man Booker. His book, The Finkler Question, was a study of what it meant to be Jewish in England. It's a subject that has been very near to Howard Jacobson's heart. He says: "My sense of myself has always meant being on the outside. On the outside as a Jew, looking into gentile England, but also on the outside of Jewishness too. I have ...
Feb 06, 2011•38 min
Kirsty Young's castaway is the journalist Jon Snow. For the past 21 years he's been the face of Channel Four's nightly bulletins where, along with his patent enthusiasm and vigour for dissecting the day's stories, he's noted for his natty line in neckties and socks. He's a highly experienced foreign correspondent too - he's reported from Haiti, New Orleans, Washington and East Africa among many locations. However it was in El Salvador that he found his name on the list of people who might be tar...
Jan 30, 2011•37 min
Kirsty Young's castaway is the veteran Coronation Street actress Betty Driver. For more than forty years she's been pulling pints and dishing up her hot-pot in the Rovers Return. But her career in showbusiness started decades before she took up residence on Britain's most famous street. She was a child when her mother put her on the stage and she toured the country with an act that showcased her stunning singing voice - it brought success but not happiness. "I did it for over twenty years," she ...
Jan 23, 2011•38 min
Kirsty Young's castaway is the First Minister of Scotland, Alex Salmond. He has spent his political life campaigning for Scottish independence. As a schoolboy he stood in classroom elections - back then, he won on the canny ticket of half-days for all and replacing the school milk with ice-cream. He was a child when he realised he had a knack for public performance - he was a boy soprano who seemed to have a promising career ahead of him. He says: "If you can sing in front of thousands of people...
Jan 16, 2011•36 min
Kirsty Young's castaway is Gyles Brandreth. A former Conservative MP, he is also a some-time actor, broadcaster and prolific writer who has authored biographies, diaries, stage plays and mysteries. Pursuing a political career has been, he says, the over-riding ambition of his life. However the happiest moment came not from politics, but when he was performing in a West End show that he had written himself. These days, his ambitions are to return to the stage and the role he wants to take on is C...
Jan 09, 2011•36 min
Kirsty Young's castaway is the veteran RAF pilot Tony Iveson. Aged 21, he survived being shot down in his Spitfire over the North Sea during his first taste of combat in the Battle of Britain. Unusually for a fighter pilot, he then went on to join Bomber Command and the famous Dambusters squadron, sinking the German battleship The Tirpitz and winning a Distinguished Flying Cross. Aged 89 he returned to the skies, becoming the oldest man to fly a Lancaster bomber: "Well, I got out of that aeropla...
Jan 02, 2011•39 min
Kirsty Young's castaway is the singer Sandie Shaw. With her melodic, velvety voice, bare feet and Sassoon bob she was the epitome of everything that was swinging about the '60s. She was just 17 when she first topped the charts with Always Something There to Remind Me and went on to become Britain's first Eurovision winner with Puppet on a String. She loathed the song at the time, but has recently come to terms with it after recording a new version which is, she says, rather forlorn. Along with t...
Dec 26, 2010•36 min
Kirsty Young's castaway is the Oscar-winning animator Nick Park. His most famous creations are Wallace and Gromit: Gromit the silent but wise dog; Wallace, his well meaning owner with notably less brain-power. They now hold the same place in the nation's heart at Christmas that Morcambe and Wise once occupied. They are old-fashioned and quintessentially British - as familiar as bread and butter, or hoping the rain holds off - but their appeal is international. The world they inhabit is one of Ja...
Dec 19, 2010•36 min
Kirsty Young's castaway week is the aviator, inventor and arts patron, Sir Torquil Norman. He comes from a family where derring-do is in the DNA - his grandfather was a pioneering airman, his grandmother an adventurer and his father also a keen pilot. Torquil ended up in the toy trade where the skills needed were, he says, a close attention to detail combined with the outlook on life of a seven year old. He was, he admits, perfectly qualified. In retirement he set about his biggest project - he ...
Dec 12, 2010•35 min
Kirsty Young's castaway is the writer and historian Frances Wood. As head of the Chinese collection at the British Library she is the gatekeeper to some of the rarest printed texts in the world. Her life has been immersed in the language and culture of the Far East and, along the way, she's spent time learning how to throw hand-grenades, plant rice in the paddy-fields and bundle Chinese cabbages. She was in China in the final months of Mao Zedong's regime and remembers being aware of the sense o...
Dec 05, 2010•36 min
Kirsty Young's castaway is the best-selling writer Robert Harris. He was, apparently, a political junkie from a young age; he was just six when he wrote the essay: 'Why me and my dad don't like Sir Alec Douglas Home' and he also had an early realisation that he wanted to grow up to be a writer. His first novel - Fatherland - imagined a world after the Nazis had won World War II. It sold more than three million copies and made him a household name. "I can remember I wrote the opening sentence and...
Nov 28, 2010•37 min
Kirsty Young's castaway is the rock musician Alice Cooper. As a teenager he says it was British music that he tuned in to - listening to The Beatles, The Yardbirds and The Who. He realised that while rock music had many heroes, there were few villains - that was the territory he marked out for himself. He developed his trademark look - blackened eyes, straggly hair and glamorous clothes - and set about designing live shows that were gleefully gory and macabre. While critics have described him as...
Nov 21, 2010•36 min
Kirsty Young's castaway is the cookery writer Anna Del Conte. Born to a wealthy Milanese family, she arrived in Britain in 1949 where her Italian ingenuity with food was sorely needed in a nation still facing rationing and no olive oil. Her books, starting with Portrait of Pasta in 1976, helped to change all that, and established her as a food hero for younger cooks like Nigella Lawson and Delia Smith. She has still more to teach however: whatever you do, she says, you shouldn't serve bolognese ...
Nov 19, 2010•36 min
Kirsty Young's castaway is the poet and broadcaster Ian McMillan. Thirty years ago he was working in a factory gluing together tennis ball halves. Then he got a grant, chucked in his job and devoted himself to writing and performing. These days he's known as the Bard of Barnsley and his appeal stretches from the terraces of his local football club to the balcony of the London Coliseum... he is poet in residence at both Barnsley FC and the English National Opera... He still lives in the village w...
Nov 07, 2010•37 min
Kirsty Young's castaway is the Chinese pianist Lang Lang. He was five years old when he gave his first public recital in front of an audience of 800 people. It was a pivotal moment and from that point on it was clear where his future lay. His parents were both musical too but, during the cultural revolution, had not been able to pursue their own ambitions. Lang Lang was born under the one-child rule and so he was, he says, their only chance. Their aim was that he should become the No.1 pianist i...
Oct 31, 2010•39 min
Kirsty Young's castaway is the Deputy Prime Minister and Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg. Of his career, he says: "Joining the Liberal Party was a no brainer for me - when you're a young man, you don't get a calculator out saying 'Am I going to get to power?' you get propelled forward by idealism". Yet this week more than any other, critics have questioned whether his interest in power has meant his ideals have had to take a back seat. In this candid conversation, he describes the behind-the-...
Oct 24, 2010•37 min
Kirsty Young's castaway is the barrister Michael Mansfield. He is one of Britain's leading QCs - the Birmingham six, the Marchioness disaster, the Stephen Lawrence trial and the death of Jean Charles de Menezes are only a handful of the high profile cases he's been involved in. He describes himself as a 'radical lawyer' and says he's been educated by the cases he's taken on. He has become, he says, increasingly angry and radical over the years. "I do feel that reputation, standing up for princip...
Oct 17, 2010•37 min
Kirsty Young's castaway is the founder of Storm model agency, Sarah Doukas. She has never, she says, had a normal career - after running away from school, she ran bric-a-brac stalls in London and Paris and then lived in America before returning to Britain. She enjoyed a stint as a model herself (her speciality, at only five feet two inches tall, was perching on car bonnets so they seemed bigger in advertising pictures). But she discovered she had a knack for spotting future talent and is best kn...
Oct 10, 2010•37 min
Kirsty Young's castaway is the entertainer Johnny Vegas. As a stand-up comic he made his name as one of the most brilliant and unpredictable acts on the circuit. His stage persona was a belligerent drunk who would heckle his own audience. But the more successful he became, the more the similarities between his own life and his stage character seemed to blur. "I found popularity through self-destruction" he says, "and that can be quite addictive". In recent years, he has cut down on his drinking,...
Oct 03, 2010•35 min
Kirsty Young's castaway is the singer Sir Tom Jones. In a career spanning fifty years he's sold 150 million albums and his hits have included It's Not Unusual, What's New Pussycat? and Delilah. As a child it was assumed he'd follow in his father's footsteps and become a miner. But he developed TB when he was twelve and doctors warned his parents against sending their only son to the pit; they said his lungs were too weak. Now aged seventy, he has no plans to retire. "Singing's like breathing to ...
Sep 26, 2010•36 min
From Lady Gaga to The Specials. Actor and director Kathy Burke shares her castaway choices with Kirsty Young. She became a household name for her comedy performances, working with Harry Enfield to create the characters Kevin and Perry. She won critical acclaim for serious roles and picked up the Best Actress award at Cannes for her portrayal of an abused wife in the film "Nil By Mouth". Kathy's early life had been tumultuous - her mother died before she was two and her father was often drunk, le...
Aug 15, 2010•37 min
Kirsty Young's castaway on Desert Island Discs is Lord David Cobbold. He was just 32 years old when he took over the ancestral pile Knebworth House and he succeeded in turning a crumbling corner of the establishment into one of the best rock concert venues in the world. Over the past forty years, everyone from Led Zeppelin to Paul McCartney to Robbie Williams has played there. The concerts have not only allowed him to keep the house in private hands, but have also given him a front-row seat to s...
Aug 08, 2010•35 min
Kirsty Young's castaway is Jimmy Mulville. He began his life in comedy as a performer and writer but success in front of the camera clearly wasn't enough - he set up the production company Hat Trick and has turned out a huge number of hits, including "Have I Got News for You", "Father Ted" "Room 101" and "Outnumbered". But he says that for many years he was a ticking time bomb - he became addicted to drugs and alcohol and, after triumphing over them, also fought cancer. These days, he is the fat...
Aug 01, 2010•36 min
Kirsty Young's castaway is the interviewer Lynn Barber. A master of the profile interview, her razor-sharp observations have earned her the nickname the Demon Barber and won her a stack of awards. Although critics say her articles are hatchet jobs, she disagrees: "I think that people are well served by quite blunt or quite rude questions because it forces them to fight back and come back strongly," she says. Producer: Leanne Buckle Record: Macushla sung by John McCormack Book: The Complete F Sco...
Jul 25, 2010•36 min
Kirsty Young's castaway is the Oscar-winning actor, writer and director Tim Robbins. His film credits include The Shawshank Redemption, Dead Man Walking, The Hudsucker Proxy and Mystic River. Brought up in an artistic and creative household in New York's Greenwich Village, he was always encouraged to sing and perform. After talking politics around the dinner table as a teenager he would, on occasion, spend his evenings working the lights for the local drag act. Indeed it was on stage, rather tha...
Jul 18, 2010•36 min
Kirsty Young's castaway is the forensic psychotherapist Dr Gwen Adshead. A consultant at Broadmoor Hospital, it is her job to try to understand the behaviour of some of the most vilified people in our society. The Victorian institution in Berkshire is home to more than two hundred men; all people who have been convicted or accused of the most dangerous violent behaviour. Her life outside work seems impossibly normal - bringing up her children, singing in a choir and gardening fill her spare time...
Jul 11, 2010•38 min
Kirsty Young's castaway is Dame Fanny Waterman. It was during a sleepless night, more than forty years ago, that she came up with the idea of launching a piano competition in Leeds. Since then it's become a world renowned event and been a springboard for many of our most celebrated pianists including Radu Lupu and Murray Perahia. Although she is now 90 years old, she still teaches masterclasses and continues to be involved with every detail of the competition. "They call me Field Marshal Fanny" ...
Jul 04, 2010•40 min
Kirsty Young's castaway is the footballer Tony Adams. He's one of the few people who know at first hand the pressures and joys of captaining the England team. And, after signing as a schoolboy for Arsenal, he is the only man ever to have led a championship winning team across three decades. The drama and successes of his life have been as remarkable off the pitch as on it. He found sporting glory despite being an alcoholic and even served time in prison for drink-driving. But his journey of reco...
Jun 27, 2010•37 min
Kirsty Young's castaway is the film director Lewis Gilbert. His career started in the 1920s when he was a child actor in silent movies. Over the next seven decades, he went on to direct Hollywood blockbusters as well as landmark British films. His directing credits include Reach for the Skies, Alfie, Educating Rita and Shirley Valentine - as well as three Bond films. Depite his numerous successes, though, he remains haunted by the film he didn't make: he spent years working with Lionel Bart and ...
Jun 20, 2010•37 min
