Desert Island Discs

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the singer and songwriter Neil Tennant. He is best known as one half of The Pet Shop Boys which, over the past 20 years, has been one of Britain's most successful and popular bands, noted for combining dance music with witty lyrics and delivering them in a uniquely English style. As a teenager growing up in Newcastle upon Tyne, he felt himself to be an outsider...

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the author Brian Aldiss. He is best known for pioneering, alongside JG Ballard, a new wave of British science fiction writing in the 1960s. He says science fiction is not so much a prediction of the future as a metaphor for the human condition; and for him, at least, writing it offered an escape route and a filter through which to view his own extraordinary upb...

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the Polar explorer Ann Daniels. Before she was 30, she hadn't so much as walked with a rucksack and had no experience of navigating with a compass. Then her husband saw a newspaper advert seeking ordinary women to join an all-women relay to the North Pole. Ann was successful and since then she has walked to both Poles, become a Polar guide and now has her sight...

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the writer Edna O'Brien. Described as a 'poet of heartbreak' her lyrical storytelling captures the fragility and pain of the human condition, reflecting the drama of her own life as much as the imagined journeys of her characters. She was born and raised in a small village in County Clare, where the only books in the house were prayer books which sat alongside...

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the musician Lady Natasha Spender. She was born at the end of the First World War and has spent her life immersed in the arts. Gifted with perfect pitch, she studied under Clifford Curzon and enjoyed a highly successful career as a concert pianist. In the months after the end of the Second World War she gave a concert at Belsen to inmates who were recovering in...

Kirsty Young's first castaway of 2007 is the writer Anthony Horowitz. He's a prolific author. His first novel was published when he was 23 and, as well as a series of children's books featuring the 'super spy' Alex Rider, he's also penned a slew of television crime programmes including Murder Most Horrid, Midsomer Murders and Foyle's Law. He first turned to writing when he was at boarding school;...

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the broadcaster Gloria Hunniford. She's one of our most popular interviewers and presenters and for 40 years has been a warm, but always incisive, figure on our radio and television airwaves. She grew up in Northern Ireland and first of all thought her career lay in singing - as a young girl she would spend several evenings each week singing in local church hal...

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the playwright Sir Arnold Wesker. He's a prolific writer and has penned more than 40 plays as well as books of poetry, short stories, children's tales and most recently a novel. But he first came to prominence in the late 1950s as one of the group of Angry Young Men; dramatists who made their art out of the stuff of everyday life. He was the son of Jewish commu...

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is Britain's most successful contemporary composer, Karl Jenkins. He is most famous for developing a style that fuses his classical background with his interest in jazz and world music and his albums top the charts around the world. He was brought up in a small Welsh village and, after his mother died, lived with his father, grandmother and widowed aunt. His fathe...

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the music impresario Raymond Gubbay. For 40 years he has brought popular classics and opera to the masses. His name has become synonymous with glittering evenings based on classical favourites with concerts often topped off with lasers, fireworks and light displays. He's worked with everyone from Pavarotti to Ray Charles and, while snooty critics dismiss it as...

Kirsty Young's castaway on Desert Island Discs this week is the comedy performer and writer Matt Lucas. As one half of the team that created the hit TV show Little Britain, he's been responsible for dreaming up such characters as Vicky Pollard, the Asbo teenager who swapped her baby for a Westlife CD and Dafydd, the Welsh homosexual who is adamant he's "the only gay in the village". When he was si...

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the author Stephen King. He's written more than 40 novels, won 23 major awards and sold hundreds of millions of books worldwide. He is best known for his tales of small-town America corrupted by the supernatural and macabre; with novels such as The Shining, Misery, Salem's Lot and Carrie making him a household name. His first success came with Carrie - at the t...

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the former head of the Metropolitan Police, Lord Stevens. Although he was to become known as 'the policeman's policeman', it was not his first career choice - as a child he wanted to be a pilot but was told that his eyesight was not good enough for him to make it his career. His first beat, more than forty years ago, was on Tottenham Court Road in London. He so...

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the veteran jazz musician and radio presenter Humphrey Lyttelton. To Radio 4 listeners, he's best known as Chairman Humph who has spent more than 30 years picking his bewildered way through the innuendo and mayhem of I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue. But his first love is jazz - as a child, he was always fascinated by music and when he was a teenager it was Louis Arm...

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the chef Heston Blumenthal. He is one of only three chefs working in Britain today to be awarded three Michelin stars and last year his restaurant, The Fat Duck, was named the best in the world by a panel of 5,000 food experts. His speedy rise to the top of his profession is little short of extraordinary. He has only ever spent a week in a professional kitchen...

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the children's campaigner Camila Batmanghelidjh. Camila Batmanghelidjh has devoted her life to the kind of children most people would cross the street to avoid - youngsters who are often violent, don't go to school and who are unfamiliar with a stable family life. More than a decade ago she took over a run of disused railway arches in South London to set up a c...

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the journalist Robert Fisk. He is one of our most distinguished foreign correspondents and has spent his life covering conflicts around the world - the past 30 years immersed in the life and politics of the Middle East. He formed his ambition at a young age - he saw Hitchcock's film Foreign Correspondent when he was just 12 years old and was determined to join...

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the actress Jane Horrocks. She specialises in unconventional, complex roles - from the eccentric secretary Bubble in the cult sit-com Absolutely Fabulous to a bulimic teenager in Mike Leigh's film Life is Sweet. But the role that brought her the greatest public recognition and critical acclaim was Little Voice. Written especially for her, it told the story of a...

Kirsty Young's first castaway is one of our most popular illustrators, Quentin Blake. His work is immediately recognisable and is full of energy, anarchy and joy. An award-winning author in his own right, he is best known for his long collaboration with the author Roald Dahl. In the same way that it is impossible to think of Alice in Wonderland without imagining Tenniel's solemn drawings, when one...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the actress Joan Plowright. Dame Joan Plowright is an actress who has been at the forefront of her profession since she first appeared at the Royal Court Theatre in London half a century ago. In those days she was identified with the new wave, appearing in plays by writers such as Arnold Wesker and John Osborne. She went on to make her name in more established ro...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the critic and columnist A A Gill. His witty, first-person articles have earned him a whole host of awards and a loyal following. But his life as a successful writer was preceded by more than a decade that was spent living in squalid squats, taking drugs and existing in an alcoholic haze. It was the unplanned intervention of a GP that made him face up to his alco...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the television star Simon Cowell. Simon Cowell is one of our most successful pop music moguls. He is the mastermind behind more than 100 number one songs in Britain and abroad and Westlife, whom he signed, holds the record for having seven consecutive number one songs in the UK. A lot of his early successes were gimmicky hits - singing wrestlers, the Power Ranger...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the author and children's poet Michael Rosen. Since his first book, Mind Your Own Business, was published more than than 30 years ago, he has been credited with revolutionising the way children's poems are written and performed. Words and language have always formed an important part of his life. The son of two teachers, he was born into a London, Jewish family,...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is a playwright whose work has chronicled Britain's changing political landscape over the past 30 years. David Edgar was brought up in a leafy suburb of Birmingham, but was radicalised during the 1960s and has never looked back. In 1976, he examined the right-wing National Front movement in Destiny, a play for the RSC. It was his first award-winning play and the wor...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the psychoanalyst Dr Hanna Segal. Hanna Segal is one of the most distinguished psychoanalysts of our time. She was born in Poland at the end of the First World War and after a sometimes difficult childhood her family moved to Switzerland and then France to flee the Nazis. They ended up on a Polish troop ship that brought them to Britain just in time, as she says,...