Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the actress Penelope Wilton. Her first love is the theatre and she's been highly acclaimed for her stage work in plays by Ibsen, Shaw, Shakespeare, Beckett - she relishes and shines in the difficult roles. Yet as one of our leading classical actresses she has no qualms about turning her talents to TV and film - Calendar Girls, Shaun of the Dead and Dr Who are among her more recent on screen appearances. In-spite of being one of our best regarded actresses she...
Mar 30, 2008•38 min•Transcript available on Metacast Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the cartoonist Mac. He's been the Daily Mail's cartoonist for the past 38 years - and it's his job, he says, to make the "dreary news copy of the daily paper brighter, by putting in a laugh". Since he was a child he was always drawing - inventing strip cartoons in his spare time and sketching figures in the margins of his school books. Yet despite his obvious talent, there was scant nurturing of his ambitions at home. His father told him he'd never make the g...
Mar 23, 2008•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the radical thinker, writer and broadcaster Tariq Ali. Forty years since the streets of London were filled with demonstrators, Tariq Ali describes how he came to be involved in anti-establishment politics and how, from an early age, he felt drawn towards those people who were the underdogs of society. He was born to privileged, atheist parents in Pakistan, he led his first street protest at 12 and his first strike at 15 He became increasingly political until,...
Mar 16, 2008•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the actress Liz Smith. Her story is a triumph of talent and perseverance over circumstance. Her mother died when she was tiny, her father walked out of her life and for many years she was brought up by her grandmother who was in mourning for her only child and her own husband. For Liz, acting and making people laugh was an escape from the often harsh realities of life, but she had to wait until she was 50 for her first real break - a role in Mike Leigh's film...
Mar 09, 2008•37 min•Transcript available on Metacast Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the actor and singer Michael Ball. For more than 20 years he's been the West End's leading man - winning stacks of awards, building a hugely successful recording career and attracting a large and loyal army of fans. He was a teenage drop-out, but when a teacher encouraged him to go to drama school he suddenly realised what he wanted to do. Success seemed to come easily to him and he quickly took on leading roles in Les Miserables, Aspects of Love and Phantom ...
Mar 02, 2008•37 min•Transcript available on Metacast Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the broadcaster David Dimbleby. When he was born, in 1938, his father Richard was already a national institution. Richard recorded reports from bombers flying over Germany, went to Belsen at the end of the war and, of course, commentated on the funeral of King George VI and subsequent coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. In Desert Island Discs, David tells Kirsty how his father had tried to steer him away from journalism. But he believes that it is a job that is...
Feb 24, 2008•37 min•Transcript available on Metacast Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the Nobel Prize-winning scientist Professor Sir Martin Evans. He is known as the grandfather of embryonic stem-cell research because of the breakthrough he made more than 25 years ago to first isolate the stem cells of mice and then cultivate them in a laboratory. After that leap forward, he worked alongside his fellow Nobel laureates Oliver Smithies and Mario Capecchi to develop the Knock-Out Mouse - a mouse that has had part of its genetic code disabled so ...
Feb 17, 2008•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast Kirsty Young's castaway this week is Oleg Gordievsky. He is the highest-ranking KGB officer ever to become a spy for the British. The insights he gave into the Soviet hierarchy and culture over the course of 10 years were so significant that, according to some, he did more than any other individual in the West to hasten the demise of the communist regime. A bright pupil with an aptitude for languages, he joined the KGB's diplomatic corps thinking it would allow him to travel and fulfil his inter...
Feb 10, 2008•37 min•Transcript available on Metacast Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the writer Dame Beryl Bainbridge. She grew up in Liverpool - in a home filled with acrimony and argument - and started writing when she was still a child. Her only ambition, she says, was to get married and have a 'proper' family, but when her first two children were still young, her marriage broke down and she turned to writing once again. She believes she finds inspiration from the trouble and friction of everyday life and that if her marriage hadn't failed...
Feb 03, 2008•33 min•Transcript available on Metacast Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the former diplomat, traveller and writer, Rory Stewart. His life has been part establishment convention, part wild adventure. He went to Eton, Oxford and then joined the Foreign Office, but along the way spent part of his childhood running wild in the jungles of Malaysia. He was based in Kosovo during the Nato campaign and, at the age of 29, turned up in Iraq and volunteered to help in the rebuilding work. He ended up running one of the provinces. He remains...
Jan 20, 2008•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast Kirsty Young's castaway this week is Sir Simon Rattle. For the past five years he has been Principal Conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic - regarded by many as the finest symphony orchestra in the world. He is only the sixth person to hold the position in 120 years and is the first Briton to take on the challenge. Growing up in Liverpool in the 1960s, while other youngsters were listening to The Beatles, he was transfixed by Mahler and was determined to become a conductor. His talent was prodigi...
Jan 13, 2008•37 min•Transcript available on Metacast Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the broadcaster and journalist John Humphrys. For 21 years he has been at the helm of Today, Radio 4's flagship news and current affairs programme. Millions of devoted listeners enjoy his tenacious interviewing style - and it's won him a healthy respect from politicians too. Not all are supporters though; Jonathan Aitken accused him of "poisoning the well of democratic debate" - an attack which he initially thought would cost him his career. Now, his life is ...
Jan 06, 2008•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the businesswoman Karren Brady. She is known as the First Lady of Football - and it's a moniker that is well earned. When she became Managing Director of Birmingham City she was just 23 years old, the club was languishing in the second division and it was in dire financial straits. Fifteen years later, and it is in the Premier League and is one of the few clubs to turn a healthy profit. Along the way Karren has married one of her players, had two children and...
Dec 30, 2007•33 min•Transcript available on Metacast Kirsty Young's castaway this week is Victoria Wood. For decades she has been one of our best-loved writers and performers. The television series she's made - including Acorn Antiques, Dinnerladies and Housewife 49 - have won her a devoted following as well as stacks of awards. But, in a moving and open interview, she describes how, as a teenager, she felt she was a misfit - she had few friends, she struggled with her weight and at school she used to steal other people's homework. She joined a yo...
Dec 23, 2007•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the musician Paul Weller. As the lead singer of The Jam, the founder of The Style Council and a hugely successful solo artist, he is one of the most revered music writers and performers of the past 30 years and is cited as an influence by countless other singers. In a rare interview, he describes the chronic shyness he had to overcome; how he is still gripped by fear before each performance and how, after he had been dumped by his record label, he was unable ...
Dec 16, 2007•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast Kirsty Young's castaway this week is Professor Sir Alec Jeffreys - the scientist who discovered genetic fingerprinting. It is 25 years since his 'Eureka moment' - when, pulling an X-ray photograph of his assistant's genetic code out of the developing tray, he realised he could trace the links between her and her parents and that her own unique genetic profile had been revealed. Over the following years, he was the first person to settle immigration disputes, paternity issues and crimes based on ...
Dec 09, 2007•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the cellist Steven Isserlis. It is, perhaps, little surprise that music has been central to his life. He was born into a family that already boasted a pianist, violinist and viola player within its ranks and so, as a child, he was taught the cello because it meant they could play chamber music together. Music was so much a part of their lives, he says, that even the pet dog would howl along an accompaniment as they played. He was seen as a brilliant young cel...
Dec 02, 2007•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the author Armistead Maupin. Regarded as one of the 'great social satirists of his era', he made his name with his Tales of the City novels, chronicling the shifting cultural landscape of San Francisco throughout the 1970s and 80s. He's written about the search for love and acceptance by a diverse cast of characters, but he was also one of the first novelists to portray the devastating impact of the newly emerging threat of HIV/Aids. His iconic status as a ga...
Nov 25, 2007•34 min•Transcript available on Metacast Kirsty Young's castaway this week is Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller. She has recently stepped down as Britain's top spy-master - or more correctly, the Director-General of MI5. She took the helm in the months after the attacks of 11th September 2001 in America and steered the service through a time when the nature of the terrorist threat facing Britain changed enormously and new measures were introduced to counteract it. She concedes that MI5 has to rely, in large part, on information that is 'pat...
Nov 18, 2007•37 min•Transcript available on Metacast Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the author Jung Chang. Jung was born in the years after Mao came to power in China and as a child she took part in the Great Leap Forwards by collecting saucepans and nails and trying to melt them down for steel. She was a teenager during the Cultural Revolution and witnessed her parents being denounced and sent to labour camps. After Mao's death she came to Britain as a student. At the time, she says, she didn't want to think about the past - it used to give...
Nov 16, 2007•37 min•Transcript available on Metacast Kirsty Young's castaway this week is Nicholas Parsons. Actor, quizmaster, cabaret performer, straight man, panel show host and fully-qualified marine mechanical engineer to boot; spanning more than 60 years his professional credits defy classification and flout convention. Yet it's not just the duration of his showbiz career that's exceptional but the fact that he made it on stage at all. From well-to-do parents, his family had a "neurotic dread of the dissolute thespian life" and did their utmo...
Nov 04, 2007•37 min•Transcript available on Metacast Kirsty Young's castaway this week is Joel Joffe. For many years he was the chairman of Oxfam, before that he set up a hugely successful insurance company and most recently he's been campaigning for terminally ill people to have the right to die. But the career in which he has had the greatest impact is the one he was forced to give up more than 40 years ago - law. In 1963, Joel Joffe was a young defence solicitor, so dismayed by the apartheid system of his native South Africa that he was on the ...
Oct 28, 2007•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast Kirsty Young's castaway this week is an entertainer so central to British popular culture he can be identified by the outline of his glasses alone - Ronnie Corbett. For more than 50 years, from late night reviews to prime-time sit-coms, his comic talents have made us laugh and made us love him; a nattily turned out national treasure with a quick wit and a ready smile. His success is due, of course, to his own ability but also to two enduring and remarkable partnerships. Along with Ronnie Barker,...
Oct 21, 2007•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the actress Jill Balcon. She has the voice of an old friend - and it's not surprising, she was a BBC radio announcer during the war and has been acting and performing poetry consistently since. Poetry has always played a central role in her life. She was only 12 years old when she first saw the poet Cecil Day Lewis. He had come to judge a poetry-reading competition at her school and although he was more than 20 years her senior, he was, she says, the most bea...
Oct 14, 2007•37 min•Transcript available on Metacast Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the Secretary of State for Health, Alan Johnson. He has the task of managing one of the most challenging briefs of government - and the stakes are raised further because, when there is an election, the Prime Minister Gordon Brown has made it clear that the main battleground will be health. Johnson says that unlike many politicians, he is not a keen strategist who has spent his life plotting his career, instead he has simply 'drifted along', taking whatever ch...
Oct 07, 2007•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast Kirsty Young's castaway this week is George Michael. As a singer and songwriter he has enjoyed massive global success for a quarter of a century. He's sold more than 100 million records, won two Grammy awards and notched up countless number one hits. His ability to write, produce, and perform perfect pop songs is unquestioned. But along with the career highs, there have been lows too: he lost a long wrangle with his record company, was crippled by bereavement and for years questions about his se...
Sep 30, 2007•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the conductor Vladimir Jurowski. Described as the most active and influential conductor in Britain today, he has been the musical director at Glyndebourne for the past six years, and this autumn takes over as Principal Conductor of the London Philharmonic Orchestra. Vladimir's roots however lie in Russia, where he was one of the last generation to experience the Communist regime. The two-room apartment in Moscow that he shared with his parents, siblings and g...
Aug 19, 2007•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the publisher Felix Dennis. He blossomed among the flower power generation, finding fame as one of the defendants in the notorious Oz Magazine obscenity trial in 1971. It fired his loathing of the establishment but instead of dropping out he opted in and beat them at their own game. For the past 30 years his talent has been spotting a niche in the magazine market and launching a title to fill it - his success has made him one of the richest men in Britain. Fo...
Aug 12, 2007•33 min•Transcript available on Metacast Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the writer Andrew Davies. He is the king of television adaptation; Pride and Prejudice, Vanity Fair, Middlemarch and Tipping the Velvet are just a few of the dramas he has brought to our screens. Until he was 50, he was an English lecturer and wrote in his spare time - it was a sort of mid-life crisis that sent his career soaring. Since then, his signature has been stripping down the classics, sexing them up and serving Austen, Eliot and Dickens to appreciati...
Aug 05, 2007•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the investment banker Nicola Horlick. She has, perhaps, done more than anyone else to shatter the glass ceiling - a mother of six children and now stepmum to another three, her proud boast is that she's never missed a sports day or a school speech day. She says her career is largely an extension of her maternal instinct and she nurtures the companies she's ploughing funds into. With her apparently limitless energy, talent and ambition she seemed to be the one...
Jul 29, 2007•38 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
