Desert Island Discs

Lorraine Kelly is a journalist and broadcaster who has been a mainstay of daytime television for over 40 years. She has hosted her own show Lorraine since its launch in 2010 and she was awarded a lifetime achievement BAFTA in 2024. Lorraine was born in Glasgow and later moved with her family to the new town of East Kilbride. She became a junior reporter at the East Kilbride News when she was in he...

Lennie James is a British actor and writer. In 2025, he received the BAFTA for Leading Actor for his portrayal of Barrington Walker in the TV adaptation of Bernadine Evaristo’s novel Mr. Loverman. This award adds to his collection, which also includes accolades for writing. At seventeen, he wrote Trial and Error and won the National Youth Theatre–Texaco Playwriting Competition, earning the title o...

Mary Greenwell is a makeup artist who has worked with some of the most famous faces in the world including Christy Turlington, Linda Evangelista, David Bowie and Cate Blanchett. Her less-is-more approach has won her plaudits in the beauty industry and she became Princess Diana’s makeup artist of choice. Mary was born in Sussex and left school at 16. By the mid-1970s she was living in Los Angeles w...

Ronnie Wood is a musician and artist who has been a major player on the UK music scene for over 60 years. In 1975 Ronnie became a member of the Rolling Stones, one of the most influential and enduring bands of the rock era. Ronnie’s parents were born and worked on barges moving cargo up and down the canals between Manchester, Stratford-upon-Avon and London. Ronnie and his two older brothers were t...

Angela Harding is an artist, printmaker and illustrator. Based in Rutland, Angela’s work is inspired by the countryside of the British Isles, and in particular British birds. Alongside her many prints and artistic creations, her award-willing illustrations can be found adorning many a book cover. Angela was born in Stoke-on-Trent in June 1960, the middle of three daughters to Stephen and Joan Hard...

Michael Sheen is an award-winning actor. After finding his love for the stage with the West Glamorgan Youth theatre as a teenager, he studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. He spent the 1990s making a name for himself as a stage actor, shining in the classics from Romeo and Juliet to Peer Gynt as well as in 20th century masterpieces such as Look Back in Anger and Amadeus, receivin...

Maggie Alphonsi is a broadcaster and former rugby player. She was part of the England team which took home the 2014 Women’s Rugby World Cup and by the time she retired she’d won 74 caps for her country. Maggie was brought up in north London and when she was 14 her PE teacher suggested she give the sport of rugby union a try. Maggie joined her local amateur club Saracens and relished the freedom sh...

Professor Dame Carol Robinson is a scientist who was the first female professor of Chemistry at both Cambridge and Oxford Universities. She has been awarded scientific prizes from all over the world for her pioneering work studying complex macromolecules using an instrument called the mass spectrometer. Carol was drawn to science as a child growing up in Folkstone where she started collecting flow...

Harry Hill is a comedian, writer and broadcaster best known for presenting popular television shows including You’ve Been Framed, Junior Bake Off and the multi award-winning TV Burp. He was born Matthew Hall in Surrey and brought up in Kent. He became a Cub Scout and got a taste for performing when he was nine after playing Widow Twankey in the Christmas pantomime. In 1983 he started studying medi...

Monica Dolan is a BAFTA and Olivier award winning actor. She is equally at home playing a wrongfully accused postmistress in Mr Bates Vs the Post Office as she is playing the serial killer Rosemary West. Alongside her many roles in TV, stage and screen, Monica has also written and performed in her award winning one woman play B*easts. Born in 1969, Monica was the youngest of four children and was...

Gustavo Dudamel is a Venezuelan conductor, violinist and composer. He is known for bringing humour and joy to the podium. He is currently director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Simon Bolivar Symphony Orchestra and in 2026 will take up the post of music director of the New York Philharmonic, following in the footsteps of Gustav Mahler and Leonard Bernstein. Gustavo was born in Barquisimet...

Ash Atalla is a television producer whose first hit was the BBC sitcom The Office, starring Ricky Gervais. He followed it up with the IT Crowd, People Just Do Nothing, Big Boys and Stath Lets Flats. His haul of awards from these programmes include six BAFTAs, four Royal Television Society awards, a Golden Globe and an Emmy. Ash was born in Cairo and when he was six months old he contracted polio....

Carol Klein is a gardener, broadcaster and longtime contributor to BBC Gardeners’ World. She is a six time Chelsea Flower Show gold medal winner, a certified RHS Horticultural Hero and was awarded the RHS Victoria Medal of Honour. Born in 1945 in Lancashire, Carol was the eldest of three children and her love of gardening was evident when she used to bring soil in from the outside as a toddler, an...

Sir Gregory Doran is the former artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company. He spent a total of thirty five years with the RSC directing fifty productions in the UK and abroad. He’s been called “one of the great Shakespeareans of his age” and has won multiple awards for his work. Born in 1958, Greg was brought up near Preston and played a number of female Shakespeare roles when he was a yo...

Norma Percy is a documentary film-maker. She has been making programmes for over three decades and her productions have featured a range of political leaders from Tony Blair and Bill Clinton to Mikhail Gorbachev and Slobodan Milošević. Her film-making method, which she developed alongside her colleague Brian Lapping, tells the stories of our times by taking viewers into the room where the big deci...

Lord Alf Dubs is a Labour peer and former MP. He came to the UK from Prague in 1939 on one of the Kindertransport trains organised by Sir Nicholas Winton which rescued mostly Jewish children from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. Alf was born in Prague in 1932. His father was from a Jewish background and was brought up in what was then Northern Bohemia while his mother came from Austria. His father le...

Professor Lucy Easthope is an adviser on disaster recovery and planning. She’s an expert in planning for and reacting to major incidents: natural disaster, terrorist attacks, pandemics and fires, and is the visiting Professor of Mass Fatalities and Pandemics at the University of Bath. Born in Merseyside in 1978, Lucy cites the impact of watching the Hillsborough football disaster on TV as a child...

Romesh Ranganathan is a comedian and BAFTA-winning broadcaster who has been a fixture on British television screens for the past decade. In addition to his TV shows and stand-up tours he presents the Weakest Link on BBC One, Radio Two’s Saturday morning show and another weekly Radio Two programme in which he shares his passion for hip hop music. Romesh was born in Crawley in West Sussex where he s...

Abdulrazak Gurnah is emeritus Professor of Post-Colonial Literatures at the University of Kent and the 2021 Nobel Prize winner in Literature. Born in Zanzibar in 1948, the second of six children, Abdulrazak grew up in the dying days of the island’s status as a British protectorate before independence was declared in 1963. The revolution which followed made Zanzibar an undesirable and unsafe place...

Professor Dame Ijeoma Uchegbu is Professor of Pharmaceutical Nanoscience at University College London and President of Wolfson College, University of Cambridge. She has devoted her career to harnessing the potential of nanoparticles – which are less than a thousandth of the width of a human hair - to take medicines to hard-to-reach areas of the body such as the back of the eye and the brain. Using...

Actor Danny Dyer became a household name when he joined the cast of EastEnders as Mick Carter, landlord of the Queen Victoria pub. He recently stole the show from some stiff competition playing Freddie Jones in the television adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s novel Rivals which won him a Royal Television Society Award for Best Supporting Actor. Danny was born in Custom House, East London in 1977. He lo...

Lindsey Hilsum is a multi-award-winning journalist who has been a foreign correspondent for the past four decades. She has been Channel 4’s international editor for the past 22 years and has reported on every continent except Antarctica. After studying French and Spanish at University, she worked as an aid worker in Mexico and Kenya before becoming the East Africa stringer for the BBC World Servic...

Donna Ockenden is a former clinical midwife who led the Ockenden Review which revealed, at the time, the biggest maternity scandal in NHS history. Published in 2022, the review highlighted serious failings in maternity care at the Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust which contributed to the deaths of more than 200 babies and nine mothers. Donna grew up in the village of Aberaman in the Welsh...

Professor Carl Jones is a conservation biologist who is best known for saving the Mauritius kestrel from extinction. He is the scientific director of Mauritian Wildlife Foundation, chief scientist at Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust and an honorary professor in ecology and conservation biology at the University of East Anglia. He was born in Carmarthen in Wales and was fascinated with animals f...

Cyndi Lauper is a multi-award winning singer and songwriter. She has sold more than fifty million records, won an Emmy for acting and her musical Kinky Boots earned her a Tony and an Oliver award. Born in 1953, Cyndi grew up in a blue collar neighbourhood in New York. Her mother loved music and art and took her children to free exhibitions in New York which inspired Cyndi. As a very young girl, Cy...