Kirsty Young's castaway is the comedian and actor Steve Coogan. As a child he found he had a knack for impressions, a talent which led him to work on Spitting Image. Recently he has also found success in films, but is best known for the comic monster he created - Alan Partridge. The chatshow host in Pringle jumper and slacks made us cringe with his crass questions and witless interventions and has remained one of our most enduring comic anti-heroes. [Taken from the original programme material fo...
Oct 11, 2009•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast Kirsty Young's castaway is the solo yachtswoman Dame Ellen MacArthur. She was 28 when she became the fastest person to sail solo around the world, and has been called the 'first true heroine of the 21st century'. She still sails with friends and with the charity she set up for children with cancer and leukaemia, but her ambition now is to try to find a way of living the same sustainable existence on land that she lives at sea. When your life depends on it, she says, you realise how scarce food a...
Oct 04, 2009•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast Kirsty Young's castaway is Barry Manilow. He has been a hugely successful performer for more than 30 years but, in this intimate interview, Manilow describes how it was never the career he intended to have. He always knew he would be a musician, but thought his future lay behind the scenes, not at the front of the stage. Brought up by his mother and grandparents in Brooklyn, money was always scarce and family life often difficult - but when there was music playing in their apartment, Manilow say...
Sep 27, 2009•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast Kirsty Young's castaway is the singer Roberto Alagna. He is one of the most celebrated tenors in the world and one half of opera's golden couple; his wife is the soprano Angela Gheorghiu. Yet, his is not a voice that was honed through early years in a conservatoire. He was brought up in Paris in a family of keen amateur musicians. He used to sing in nightclubs and in those early years, he says, the world of opera was, to him, no more than an impossible dream. [Taken from the original programme m...
Aug 16, 2009•37 min•Transcript available on Metacast Kirsty Young's castaway is the broadcaster Dame Joan Bakewell. Born in Stockport in 1933, it was in the 1960s that she first started to shape the cultural agenda, interviewing the likes of Kingsley Amis and Stockhausen for the radical BBC TV show Late Night Line-Up. It was also during the 1960s that she had an affair with Harold Pinter, a relationship which inspired his play Betrayal. Looking back on it now from the age of 76, she says, "We always said we had a damn good time". Now appointed as ...
Aug 09, 2009•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast Kirsty Young's castaway is the interior designer, socialite and one-time cowboy, Nicky Haslam. His life defies easy description. In America in the 1960s, he was part of Andy Warhol's circle of friends. He got to know Wallis Simpson and the Duke of Windsor and met Cyd Charisse and President Kennedy; and after all that, he became a cowboy. When he returned to Britain he brought the sleek style of the States with him. When he is designing a room, he says, first he lets the room speak to him, then h...
Aug 02, 2009•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast Kirsty Young's castaway is the food writer and cook Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. Famous for making paté out of placenta and dining on such delicacies as squirrel and rook in his TV programmes, he has made a name for himself as a cook on the wild side. So perhaps it is not surprising that his first ambition was not to spend his life inside a kitchen but in the great outdoors because, he says, he 'wanted to be David Attenborough'. A stint in the renowned River Cafe in London, however, set him on h...
Jul 26, 2009•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast Kirsty Young's castaway is comedian David Mitchell. Mitchell has won two Bafta awards and, as a sitcom actor, sketch show writer and humorous columnist, has never been in greater demand. But as a child, Mitchell was sure he wasn't funny and it was only when he was at university, he says, that he learnt how to have fun. It is now just the rest of his life that Mitchell needs to address - beginning, he says, by tidying up his flat and then, maybe, even getting a girlfriend. [Taken from the origina...
Jul 19, 2009•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast Kirsty Young's castaway is Professor Hugh Pennington. Professor Pennington has spent his life trying to understand diseases and how they spread. He has chaired two major enquiries into E. coli, and his influence is felt everywhere from school kitchens to hospital wards. But he concedes that in his own home, efforts to ban the humble tea towel from his kitchen have so far failed. [Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs] Favourite track: Sonata i...
Jul 12, 2009•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast Kirsty Young's castaway is the impresario and promoter Harvey Goldsmith. From the Rolling Stones to Pavarotti, and with pretty well every other name in music inbetween, he has been one of the country's top promoters for more than 40 years. His career has given him a unique insight into music history; he was there, after all, when Keith Moon threw his first TV out of a hotel window. Always passionate about what he listened to, he acknowledges that his own instrument is the pocket calculator. [Tak...
Jul 05, 2009•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast Kirsty Young's castaway is the choreographer, Arlene Phillips. In a career spanning 40 years, she set up the dance group Hot Gossip and has masterminded numerous music videos and West End shows. Already one of the country's leading choreographers, the hit TV show Strictly Come Dancing then turned her into a household name. [Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs] Favourite track: Smoke Gets in Your Eyes by Dinah Washington Book: Little Women by...
Jun 28, 2009•34 min•Transcript available on Metacast Kirsty Young's castaway is the actor Martin Shaw. He has been one of Britain's most popular stage and television actors of the past 40 years and has taken on more than 100 different roles. Yet Martin has spent half a lifetime moving out of the shadow of one of his earliest parts: Ray Doyle in The Professionals. [Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs] Favourite track: Surely He Hath Borne Our Griefs by George Frideric Handel Book: Post Captain ...
Jun 21, 2009•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast Kirsty Young's castaway is the Labour peer and former Chancellor of the Exchequer, Denis Healey. As a politician, he was known for his sharp intellect and biting oratory and now, as he approaches his 92nd birthday, those skills are still very much in evidence. He talks of his regret that his lack of ambition meant that he did not push himself further in politics but, he says, it is better for people to wonder why he wasn't Prime Minister than to wonder why he was. [Taken from the original progra...
Jun 14, 2009•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast Kirsty Young's castaway is the journalist and broadcaster Piers Morgan. He spent more than a decade as a Fleet Street editor and pioneered a style of journalism that devoured the day-to-day lives of celebrities. Now, he has become something of a celebrity himself, fronting a TV interview programme and sitting as a judge on both America's Got Talent and Britain's Got Talent. He is, according to one friend, 'the ultimate proof that self-confidence and self-belief can become a self-fulfilling proph...
Jun 07, 2009•34 min•Transcript available on Metacast Kirsty Young's castaway is Caroline, Countess of Cranbrook. Caroline has travelled the world to see how different zoos worked, spent years living in the jungle and, when she returned to Britain, taught herself how to be a farmer. She has become a champion of the countryside and, when a supermarket giant announced plans to open a store on her doorstep, she decided to take them on. [Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs] Favourite track: No. 54 ...
May 31, 2009•38 min•Transcript available on Metacast Kirsty Young's castaway is the comedian and performer Barry Humphries. For decades he has enjoyed global fame with his grotesque comic creations, the Melbourne housewife Dame Edna Everage and the drunken cultural attache Sir Les Patterson. Off stage, though, his life has been spent immersed in literature, music and the arts, and he says that his time spent on the desert island would allow him to devote himself to painting. [Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of D...
May 24, 2009•37 min•Transcript available on Metacast Kirsty Young invites actor Peter Sallis to choose eight records to take to Radio 4's mythical desert island. As the unassuming Clegg in Last of the Summer Wine and the equally mild-mannered Wallace in Wallace and Gromit, Sallis brings to life a sepia-tinted Britain that barely seems to exist any more. Now aged 88 and with failing eyesight, no-one, he says, is more surprised at his success than himself: "I've been lucky enough to keep going and I realise now, though it's taken me nearly 100 years...
May 17, 2009•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the comic and actress Whoopi Goldberg. As a child she used to practise the acceptance speeches she was sure she would one day make - little surprise then that she's one of a handful of people to have won an Oscar, a Grammy, a Tony and Emmy awards. Favourite track: Lovely Day by Bill Withers Book: Letters to a Young Poet by Raine Maria Rilke Luxury: Wise potato chips
May 10, 2009•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the writer Sebastian Faulks. He is best known for his novel Birdsong, which told in shocking detail the misery of life in the Flanders trenches. It was published with little fanfare or glossy advertising and failed to win any major awards - but it became a literary phenomenon and a huge best-seller. He was inspired to write it after visiting the battlefields of the Western Front with some veterans of World War I. One old soldier held onto Sebastian's hand and...
Mar 29, 2009•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the scientist Athene Donald. A Cambridge professor and fellow of the Royal Society, she has dedicated much of her life to studying everyday objects like plastic, food or plants. Her enthusiasm is so strong that, at her daughter's eleventh birthday party, she couldn't resist describing the structure of melting ice-cream - it was a rare case of misjudging her audience. By her own admission she is a workaholic - but she also champions the cause of women who want...
Mar 22, 2009•37 min•Transcript available on Metacast Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the musician Baaba Maal. He's among the best known African artists in the West, performing at events as diverse as the Glastonbury Festival and the Proms. Born in Senegal, music was always part of his life, but was not seen as a possible career option. Yet through his singing he has gained an incredible international profile - he represents the UN's development programme on HIV, is an ambassador for Nelson Mandela's 46664 campaign and champions the right of A...
Mar 15, 2009•34 min•Transcript available on Metacast Kirsty Young's castaway this week is Richard Madeley. It's 20 years since he opened the first edition of ITV's This Morning programme with his wife Judy Finnigan and, in the years since, pretty well everyone has sat on their sofa, from Madonna to Tony Blair, from the Clintons to, notoriously, OJ Simpson. Today, Richard Madeley is the epitome of a certain kind of smooth charm. In this frank interview though, he describes how he wasn't always so confident: he used to be so anxious about holding a ...
Mar 08, 2009•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast Kirsty Young's castaway on Desert Island Discs this week is Brian Rix. For many years he brought farce to a large and appreciative audience - dropping his trousers thousands of times for the benefit of television viewers and theatre-goers. He was one of the most successful actor-managers that Britain has produced. But, more than 30 years ago, he called a halt to his first career to devote himself to altering legislation and attitudes towards disability. His eldest child, Shelley, was born with D...
Mar 01, 2009•34 min•Transcript available on Metacast Kirsty Young's castaway on Desert Island Discs this week is David Walliams. He has seen extraordinary success - as one half of the comedy duo behind Little Britain, as a cross-channel swimmer and more recently on the West End stage and as a novelist. In this frank interview, he describes his life away from the spotlight; how he used to practise comedy routines in his bathroom, the excitement of an early trip out wearing a John Paul Gaultier skirt, the inner drive that propels him and the unhappi...
Feb 22, 2009•34 min•Transcript available on Metacast Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the scientist Professor Kay Davies. She has dedicated much of her life to finding a cure for the severest form of muscular dystrophy. Before she was 40, she had helped to develop the antenatal test which is now used around the world, then she isolated the gene sequence which could be instrumental in treating the condition. After years spent working on that, human trials for a possible treatment are about to begin. It's quite something for a woman who doesn't ...
Feb 15, 2009•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the actor David Suchet. He has won armfuls of awards for his work - most recently an Emmy for his portrayal of Robert Maxwell - but he is best known for the character he has been associated with for 20 years, Hercule Poirot. His approach to his work is meticulous and he says he has to inhabit each role he takes on. In this illuminating interview he recalls how, early in his career, a psychologist showed him how to shed his character at the end of each perform...
Feb 08, 2009•37 min•Transcript available on Metacast Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the bass-baritone Thomas Quasthoff. He has performed in concert halls the world over under the batons of the finest conductors and, while he made his name as a Lieder singer, he's equally popular for his jazz, spiritual and gospel recordings. Music critics say he is "one of the great singers of our time and one of the most remarkable of any time." That his life has been remarkable is a reference to his disability: he was born suffering the effects of Thalidom...
Feb 01, 2009•37 min•Transcript available on Metacast Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the writer Alan Sillitoe. 50 years ago his debut novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning captured the truth and brutality of post war working class life. It was a world he knew intimately - he grew up in the tight, terraced streets of Nottingham and, from a very young age, harboured an ambition to escape. As a child, he read voraciously and knew he wanted to explore the world. During the war he was a navigator in Malaya but, when he returned to Britain, he wa...
Jan 25, 2009•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the Liberal Democrat Treasury Spokesman, Vince Cable. He studied economics at Cambridge and had a rich career before entering parliament in 1997. Now, he's become something of a media darling; seen by many as one of the few people able to understand - and make credible suggestions about - the current financial crisis. In this personal interview, however, politics is largely set aside and instead Vince describes the home-life that shaped him as he grew up and ...
Jan 18, 2009•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the poet Ruth Padel. She is a highly acclaimed writer who is fascinated with the natural world around her. She's said of her poetry: "wildness, and wild animals lie at the heart of what I feel about writing". And perhaps that's no surprise - she is the great-great-granddaughter of Charles Darwin. As a child, her hero was Bagheera - the black panther from The Jungle Book. For a time, she confesses, she used to want to be a black panther. Later, she simply want...
Jan 11, 2009•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
