Desert Island Discs

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 w...

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 lo...

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 th...

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 mark...

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...

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 plou...

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the writer Thomas Keneally. He had already been nominated for the Booker Prize three times when he published a historical novel that many said should not have been eligible for the contest. It told the story of one man, Oskar Schindler, who risked his life and lost his fortune to save more than a thousand Jews. Schindler's Ark not only won the prize, it has bee...

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the animator Oliver Postgate. As the creator of Noggin the Nog, The Clangers and Bagpuss, Oliver holds a special place in many childhoods. So it may come as something of a surprise that he never thought about how his programmes would be received by children; instead he says he simply focussed on making the stories great - everything else was secondary. For 20 y...

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the actor Simon Russell Beale. Critics are torn over their descriptions of him: to some, he's the greatest stage actor in Britain today. To others, merely the greatest Shakespearean actor of his generation. Whichever it is, when he's cast in a play, it invariably sells out, the audience is spellbound and the reviewers smitten. Yet initially it seemed as if musi...

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the environmentalist and human rights campaigner Wangari Maathai. Known these days as 'Africa's Forest Goddess' for her pioneering work fighting soil erosion and poverty across the continent, she's united her passion for the power of nature with a crusade for political justice. Born the third of six children in the central highlands of Kenya, the family home wa...

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is Ricky Gervais. In just twelve episodes, his show The Office changed the face of British television comedy. At its centre was the comic monster, David Brent, a middle-manager being filmed for a mock-documentary who saw the ever-present cameras as his route to popularity and fame. Ricky Gervais's performance was both excruciating and unmissable - one critic calle...

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the Irish musician Christy Moore. His stature and influence in folk music is unparalleled - Bono, Elvis Costello and Billy Bragg are among those who cite him as a key influence. A passionate performer, he's the archetypal Irish poet and protest singer. In the late 1970s Special Branch raided the launch of his album H Block, his songs have been banned by both Lo...

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is Yoko Ono. She was already an avant-garde artist in her own right when, in 1968, she started dating one of the most famous men in the world, John Lennon. Then, depending on who you listen to, she either stole him from the nation or helped him to focus on what was important to them both. Now, more than 25 years after John's murder, she discusses how it felt to be...

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the leading scientist Professor Sir Tom Blundell. His specialism is in molecular biology, which involves studying the tiniest building blocks of life under a microscope, in the hope of finding treatments for diseases such as cancer and diabetes. It is a hugely visual kind of science, and this, he says, is no coincidence - he loves science first and foremost for...

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is Paul McKenna. He is Britain's best known hypnotist and made his name on prime-time TV. Millions used to watch on Saturday nights as he mesmerised ordinary people into doing extraordinary things. But he has found an even larger audience - and riches to match - through his series of self-help books. With titles like I Can Make You Thin and Change Your Life in Sev...

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is Greg Dyke. A top flight TV executive known for being instinctual and populist, his appointment as BBC Director-General was an uncharacteristically bold move for the corporation and an extraordinary moment for a youngster once marked out by his teachers as 'the boy least likely to succeed'. A natural businessman who relishes taking risks, his greatest successes...

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the actress Joanna Lumley. She first found fame as the high-kicking glamour-puss Purdey in the 1970s show The New Avengers, but the role that cemented her in the nation's psyche was Patsy in Absolutely Fabulous. A striking beauty with a cut-glass accent she had, until then, been cast as a certain sort of sexy toff. Yet in AbFab she stole the show as a shallow,...

Kirsty Young's castaway on Desert Island Discs this week is the Holocaust survivor Ben Helfgott. His inspirational journey has taken him from the horrors of Nazi-occupied Poland to the highs of Olympic glory. He was nine years old when Germany invaded and at that point, he says, his childhood ended. He spent the next three years in a ghetto while his mother and younger sister were among those roun...

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the physician, philosopher, novelist and poet Professor Raymond Tallis. His specialism is the care of elderly patients - it's an area that he combines with his philosophical interest in considering what it is that makes humans unique - all part, as he says, of 'unpacking the miracle of everyday life'. He was one of five children brought up in modest circumstanc...

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the stand-up comedian Jo Brand. From the word go she always anticipated she would be heckled about her weight and appearance. While most people would run a mile at the thought of standing in front of a rowdy, aggressive and largely drunk audience, she says that the worst that can happen is humiliation - and she adds that as a woman, she was already equipped to...

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the broadcaster and journalist Andy Kershaw. His career to date is as distinctive as his delivery - he combines an evangelical enthusiasm for world music with a fascination for reporting from the planet's most unstable places. He says he is happiest when marinated in mosquito repellent and living out of a rucksack - and although he is best known for unearthing...

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the writer J P Donleavy. The author of a dozen novels as well as numerous plays and short stories, he remains best known for his first novel, The Ginger Man, which is widely regarded as a modern classic. Born in 1926 and raised in New York, J P Donleavy was the son of Irish immigrant parents. They told him little of Irish culture when he was growing up but, aft...

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the journalist Andrew Neil. For 11 years he was editor of The Sunday Times. Under him, the paper broke the story of Israel's nuclear capabilities, revealed the Queen's dismay at the tone of Margaret Thatcher's administration and shone a bright light onto the difficulties of Princess Diana and Prince Charles's marriage. But as well as reporting the news, the pap...

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the artist Grayson Perry. For more than 20 years his work was broadly unknown outside the narrow confines of the art world. But in 2003 he became a household name after a collection of his exquisitely ornate pots won him art's most prestigious award, the Turner Prize. He's described as 'the hottest potter in the world' but newspaper headlines describing his suc...

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the screen writer Paul Abbott. He has written some of the most controversial and successful television programmes of the past decade. Shameless, Clocking Off and State of Play all flowed from his pen and have won him bags of awards. But he was driven to write as a response to the chaotic and traumatic childhood he'd suffered. One of eight children, both parents...