The Godmother of English - and Irish - ballet, Dame Ninette De Valois or ‘Madam’ as she was known to those around her. She is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in the history of ballet. She established the Royal Ballet School, the Royal Ballet and the UK’s premiere touring ballet company, which went on to become the Birmingham Royal Ballet. Under the guidance of ‘Madam’, these institutions grew and became celebrated around the world, with post WWII Ballet tours generating mu...
Sep 05, 2023•28 min•Transcript available on Metacast Born in 1922, Hattie Jacques began her career in music hall before graduating onto the radio comedies of the 1950s such as Educating Archie', 'It's That Man Again' and 'Hancock's Half Hour' where she became a star. TV and films followed, most notably the role of Eric Sykes' twin sister in 'Sykes' and the stern but lovelorn matron, headmistress or housekeeper in the 'Carry On' films. Hattie was teased about her weight in school and she was often the person being laughed at in her work. She largel...
Aug 15, 2023•28 min•Transcript available on Metacast It's a famous name - there's Raffles Hotel and Raffles Hospital, plus the rafflesia, the largest flowering plant in the world, an ant, a butterflyfish and a woodpecker, as well as the Raffles Cup, a horse race in Singapore. He was born in 1781 and as an agent of the East India Company, Thomas Stamford Raffles rose to become lieutenant governor of Java during the Napoleonic war. He's also often named as the founder of Singapore and also London Zoo. But how did he achieve so much so fast? Recorded...
Aug 08, 2023•28 min•Transcript available on Metacast Thomas Mann was a German writer whose books explored themes around family, beauty and the creeping threat of fascism in Europe. Mann's best-known 'Death in Venice' revealed the author's attraction to young boys and it was turned into a film in 1971 starring Dirk Bogarde. Mann moved to Switzerland before the outbreak of the Second World War and lived in exile in Europe and the USA for the rest of his life. From his home in California he rubbed shoulders with the likes of Einstein and Brecht, and ...
Aug 01, 2023•28 min•Transcript available on Metacast "It's the complicated ones I enjoy the most." Matthew Parris Tony Benn, MP from 1950 to 2001, packed so much into a long career. He renounced the peerage inherited from his father, served in the Labour governments of both Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan, led the Stop the War Coalition from 2001 and became pretty much the country’s pre-eminent rock star politician in older age. Comedian Ellie Gibson says she was a Tony Benn groupie and saw him speak many times. A brilliant orator and prolific dia...
Jun 01, 2023•28 min•Transcript available on Metacast When Jon Ronson was growing up, he went to see The Specials play in Cardiff. "I went on my own to Sophia Gardens," he says. "The crowd was fantastically wild. There’s a lot to not like about the feral nature of British street culture – i.e. getting beaten up - but out of turmoil can come great art, songs like Ghost Town and Concrete Jungle. Anyway, before The Specials came on, I made a decision: I would pretend to faint in the hope that I could watch the show from the side of the stage. It worke...
May 16, 2023•27 min•Transcript available on Metacast Edward Coke was born in Norfolk in 1552. He's best known as a judge and Parliamentarian, the link says Jesse Norman between Magna Carta and the English Bill of Rights. He was also, the programme claims, an occasionally appalling human being who used his own daughter in a marriage deal to buy himself favour with the King. Joining Jesse Norman in studio, often backing up his claims for Coke's greatness, is Dr Alexandra Gajda of Oxford University. Jesse Norman is a government minister, former payma...
May 10, 2023•28 min•Transcript available on Metacast In 1997 Kofi Annan became the seventh Secretary-General of the United Nations. The nineties were a turbulent period for the organisation and it had received criticism for a lack of action in both Rwanda and Bosnia leading to thousands of deaths. Kofi was born in Ghana and after a brief spell in the USA slowly worked his way up through the organisation and his appointment was seen by many as a return to a consensus and multi-lateral approach to diplomacy. Choosing Kofi is the writer, biologist an...
May 02, 2023•28 min•Transcript available on Metacast "The most important thing to do in your life is not to interfere with somebody else's life." Frank Zappa was born December 1940 in Baltimore, USA. Comedian John Robins - who is obsessed - reckons that it was his subsequently itinerant childhood that had much to do with what happened next. Frank's musical output was prodigious and varied, but John laughs out loud when pushed on whether he had any hits. That wasn't the point of Frank Zappa - the music was everything, creating it and performing it....
Apr 25, 2023•28 min•Transcript available on Metacast Frederick the Great had a brute of a father. When young Frederick was captured trying to run away, he was locked up and forced to watch his friend - possibly his lover - being beheaded in front of his eyes. King of Prussia from 1740, Frederick was also a musician, a composer, a writer and a chancer who took extraordinary military risks to secure his place in Europe. Adolf Hitler thought the world of Frederick the Great, but how do Germans view him today? Joining Matthew Parris to discuss a reall...
Apr 11, 2023•28 min•Transcript available on Metacast Broadcaster Qasa Alom chooses the first African American tennis player to win the US Open and Wimbledon, Arthur Ashe. Arthur Ashe was born in Richmond, Virginia, a state in the US that in 1943 was still part of the segregated south. If Arthur wanted to compete with white players, he had to leave for St Louis and then California to play. His story is staggering, and not just his success in a notoriously elitist sport. His mother died when he was six, he had a heart attack when he was 36, and he d...
Apr 04, 2023•28 min•Transcript available on Metacast The best-selling author of How to Train Your Dragon, Cressida Cowell, explains her love for the Swedish author, Astrid Lindgren. Born in 1907, Lindgren invented the Pippi Longstocking stories to tell to her children during the war years, only writing them down for a publisher years later. Following the immense success of Pippi, Astrid Lindgren went on to write Emil of Lonneberga, Children of Noisy Village and the fantasy novels Mio, my son; Ronia the Robber's Daughter; and The Brother's Lionhear...
Feb 20, 2023•28 min•Transcript available on Metacast Actor Adjoa Andoh has a list of TV, theatre and film credits as long as your arm. She's best known worldwide as Bridgerton's Lady Danbury, and is due to direct - and star in the title role - in a new production of Richard III. Her great life is the 20th century American writer and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, author of "Their Eyes Were Watching God". An iconic figure in the literature of the jazz age, her name was all but forgotten after her death in 1960, before being pulled back into pub...
Jan 24, 2023•27 min•Transcript available on Metacast "‘For me, it’s all about his authenticity’. Chris McCausland Kurt Cobain, lead singer, guitarist and songwriter of the band Nirvana became the voice of a generation and is to this day considered one of the most influential musicians in the history of alternative rock. His angst ridden, often politically driven lyrics challenged the conventions of the day and resonated with youth audiences around the world. He championed the underdog and stood up for all those who had ever felt excluded from the ...
Jan 17, 2023•28 min•Transcript available on Metacast Matthew Parris travels along the Thames to meet Nick Hayes - illustrator and author of The Book of Trespass - to discuss the life of Roger Deakin. They also enjoy a naked swim. Joining them, in his pants, is Patrick Barkham. His new biography of Roger Deakin is published this year. The producer in Bristol is Miles Warde.
Jan 09, 2023•28 min•Transcript available on Metacast "I was born an Englishman but I'll die a European." Those are the words of Henry Plumb, Lord Plumb, a farmer who was President of the National Farmers Union in the 1970s and who became the first British person to be elected President of the European Parliament. Championing his life is the farmer and current President of the National Farmers Union, Minette Batters. She says that Henry supported her from the outset and that he would offer advice and support wherever it was needed. Minette is joine...
Jan 03, 2023•28 min•Transcript available on Metacast The voice behind The Old Grey Whistle Test and Radio 2’s country music show, Bob Harris, tells us why Manchester United Football Club manager Sir Matt Busby is his Great Life. Bob and Matthew hear how Sir Matt led the club out of the ruins of World War Two, through the tragedy of the Munich Air Disaster and on to European glory in 1968. Joining them is genealogist, historian and lifelong Manchester United fan Dr Michala Hulme. And you’ll also hear legendary manager Sir Alex Ferguson reflect on h...
Dec 27, 2022•28 min•Transcript available on Metacast In 1972 Chucky Berry was onstage in Coventry. Seeking some audience participation Chuck launched into a cover of an unusual novelty record called 'My Ding-a-Ling'. One of the men who can be heard in the crowd singing about their "Ding-a-Ling' was Noddy Holder whose band Slade were supporting Berry on his UK tour. This track became Berry's only UK number one and by default, one of Noddy's seven. Paul Gambaccini also saw Berry live in the 1970s and remembers him playing hits like 'Johnny B. Goode'...
Dec 20, 2022•28 min•Transcript available on Metacast Known to his friends as Christo, Lloyd spent his whole life, from childhood until his death aged 85, at work in the same garden: Great Dixter in East Sussex. He wrote a weekly column for Country Life for 42 years and was the author of 25 books, including The Mixed Border in the Modern Garden (1957) and The Well Tempered Garden (1970). Christo is the choice of the writer Olivia Laing, herself a passionate gardener. She and Matthew Parris go to Great Dixter to meet Head Gardener Fergus Garrett, wh...
Dec 13, 2022•28 min•Transcript available on Metacast "Cooking is like therapy to us. I grew up where my big extended family would come together in summer under the walnut tree. The adults would drink and we’d eat, stories would be told and we'd break into song. It was a healing process." In the first of a new series, the cookbook author Olia Hercules tells us why she's picked the Ukrainian artist and activist Alla Horska as her Great Life. A member of the Sixtiers, Alla was a part of the Ukrainian dissident movement of writers, artists and cultura...
Dec 09, 2022•28 min•Transcript available on Metacast Bonnie Greer OBE, playwright and critic, joins Matthew Parris to make a case for seven women from Jamaica who were hung or shot in 1865 after the Morant Bay Rebellion. Bonnie makes a case that this peasants' uprising was a pivotal event not only in Jamaican history, but in the history of the entire Caribbean region; Britain and the world. In Victorian England, the uproar following it included prominent names like Charles Dickens and Charles Darwin, who were on opposite sides of the debate. Bonni...
Sep 28, 2022•28 min•Transcript available on Metacast As Grandson of George V, George Lascelles was a first cousin to Queen Elizabeth II and with his distinguished beard and Nero style jackets, he was the very image of aristocracy, moving in the highest of royal circles, yet it was in the Royal Circles of Britain's opera houses that he felt most at home. It was at English National Opera North (now Opera North) that Lesley Garrett first met George. With their shared love of all things musical, and both proudly from Yorkshire, they developed a friend...
Sep 13, 2022•28 min•Transcript available on Metacast Chef Romy Gill remembers her Mother reading Amrita Pritam's poems to her when she was growing up. Romy was drawn to Amrita's fierce independent spirit and began to learn about her importance as a Panjabi writer whose work was heavily influenced by Partition, and in particular the experiences of women during this period. Romy's joined by the poet Rupinder Kaur who performs extracts of Amrita's work and says her work and influence still resonates today. Amrita Pritam's own voice is heard, speaking...
Sep 06, 2022•28 min•Transcript available on Metacast Rosalind Franklin was born in 1920 and studied Natural Sciences. After working in Paris at the Laboratoire Central - where she became an x-ray crystallographer - she moved to King's College London. Here she helped to take the famous Photograph 51 which led to the discovery of the double helix shape of DNA. Her contribution was famously and disgracefully downplayed by the men who won the Nobel Prize. Later at Birkbeck College she undertook pioneering work of the structure of viruses before dying ...
Aug 30, 2022•28 min•Transcript available on Metacast Dame Kathleen Ollerenshaw was born Kathleen Timpson in 1912. Deaf from an early age, she went on to have a brilliant career and is best known for her contribution to pandiagonal magic squares. She was also heavily involved in the establishment of the Royal Northern College of Music and was an advisor to Mrs Thatcher's government on education. She died aged 101. Nominator Sir John Timpson is chairman of the high street shoe repair shop that bears his family name and knew Dame Kathleen extremely w...
Aug 23, 2022•28 min•Transcript available on Metacast Ravi Shankar was born in India in 1920 and came to prominence just as India gained independence from Britain in 1947. He was initially a dancer and then a virtuoso sitarist and composer, and became famous internationally because of his collaborations with Yehudi Menuhin and George Harrison and the Beatles. Bobby Seagull's parents came from Kerala, and while Ravi Shankar's music came from the north, Bobby still remembers hearing him play growing up. There are early clips of Ravi Shankar explainin...
Aug 16, 2022•28 min•Transcript available on Metacast BS Johnson was born in Hammersmith in 1933. A wartime evacuee, he never quite shook a sense of dislocation for the rest of his life. Holly's favourite book, she calls it the gateway drug to his work, is Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry. It's the tale of a disaffected accountant who applies the principles of double-entry book keeping to his own life; any perceived slight permits him to repay the same on somebody else. These stretch from minor acts of personal revenge to poisoning London's water ...
Aug 10, 2022•28 min•Transcript available on Metacast Pat Nevin chooses Johan Cruyff who was part of the Dutch revolution of the 1970s. He burst onto the international stage at the 1974 World Cup with an incredible piece of skill against Sweden later dubbed the 'Cruyff turn'. Cruyff went on to play for Barcelona before retiring young only to be forced to return after some poor business investments wiped out his fortune. He played in the States before returning to coach at his beloved Ajax and Barcelona where he amassed more trophies, steadfastly st...
Aug 02, 2022•28 min•Transcript available on Metacast Susie Boyt picks Judy Garland, the child star who became one of the most famous entertainers of the twentieth century. June 2022 will be the centenary of her birth. "All people ever said to me was, ‘You have got to toughen up,'" Susie told us. "You cannot go round nursing these wild cascades of feelings, or you’re never going to have a happy life. Then one day my mother took me to see The Wizard of Oz. It was the first film I ever saw at the cinema, and when I heard Dorothy singing Over the Rain...
May 31, 2022•28 min•Transcript available on Metacast Joan Rhodes picked by Anna Maxwell Martin, star of Line of Duty and Motherland. Her choice is a lovely surprise, a strongwoman who could rip up phone books and bend nails. There's archive of her holding up 14 stone cricket commentator Brian 'Johnners' Johnstone in 1949 as well as the voice of the woman who knew her well - Triona Holden, author of An Iron Girl in a Velvet Glove. Abandoned by both her parents as a child, Joan Rhodes is an inspiring character who utterly merits her selection here. ...
May 24, 2022•28 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
