Desert Island Discs

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is John Bird. As a student, he changed the face of the Cambridge Footlights review by rejecting jokes on bed-makers and punting and writing a political review instead. In the early 1960s he helped found The Establishment Club with Peter Cook. Writing sketches with John Fortune, they found they were unable to find suitable actors to perform their work, and so took to...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is Dame Norma Major. In her book on the Prime Minister's residence, Chequers, she revealed how Neville Chamberlain would spend time measuring the girths of his favourite trees, and how Ramsay MacDonald chopped wood every morning dressed in plus-fours. She herself was uncomfortable there, and she remembers the loneliness and stress of being the country's First Lady....

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is Kathleen Turner. A versatile actress, she's been the femme fatal in films like Body Heat, parodied that role in comedies like Serial Mom, and played the romantic adventurer in Romancing the Stone. But, she says, ''I never play the victim, because I'm not attracted to a woman who doesn't try''. It's an attitude which must have helped her when she developed rheumat...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is Sir John Mills. He was only six when he decided he wanted to be an actor. And now after seventy years in show business he is still touring the world with his one man show. It was the war which made him a star and the films he made then eventually led to Hollywood. There he made friends with Laurence Olivier, Rex Harrison and Noel Coward, to whom he says he owes a...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is Sir Peter Bonfield. The chief executive of British Telecommunications, it is said that when he left his previous company, its Japanese owner presented him with a samurai sword and helmet to remind him of the warrior qualities he would need at BT. And certainly the challenges facing him in this fast moving industry have tested all his discipline and determination...

This week the castaway on Desert Island Discs is the conductor Leonard Slatkin. An American, he is about to take on the mantle of chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Renouned for his championing of both the American and British cannons, his aim has always been to demystify music of all kinds. He has spun discs on a pirate radio station and played honky tonk piano in a jazz bar. His pare...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is Sir Anthony Caro. Universally regarded as the 'grand old man of British sculpture', in the 1950s he had learnt from his mentor Henry Moore that artistic rules were there to be broken. So he yanked sculpture off it's pedestal and set it on the floor. And he rejected the traditional materials of bronze, marble and wood for girders, nuts and bolts. In fact as he con...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is Claire Tomalin. A writer and literary editor, she is probably best known for a series of acclaimed biographies of women, including Mary Wollstonecraft, and Jane Austin. She began working in the literary world late in life, after bringing up her family. This, and a series of personal tragedies, including the death of her husband and two of her children, has no dou...

Sue Lawley's guest this week is Harold Evans. One of the great campaigning journalists of all time, as editor of The Northern Echo in the 1960s he argued the the case for cervical smear tests for women. At The Sunday Times, he highlighted the problems of the Thalidomide children. When Rupert Murdoch bought The Times he was given the job of editor and then sacked. After writing a book which decribe...

This week the castaway on Desert Island Discs is Adrian Noble. Now the Artistic Director of The Royal Shakespeare Company, he says he learnt a lot about theatre from watching his father, an undertaker, conduct funeral services. He fell in love with the stage when, as a boy, he saw Laurence Olivier play Othello. A stage play, he says, whether Shakespeare or Chekhov, should not simply be good entert...

Sue Lawley's guest this week is Al Alvarez. In the late 1950s, as the influential poetry critic of the Observer, he favoured a style of writing which reflected the disarray of the times, in the aftermath of the Second World War and the shadow of the nuclear bomb. He befriended and championed poets such as Robert Lowell, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. Later he wrote The Savage God, a study of suicide...

Sue Lawley's guest this week is Colin Montgomerie. One of the biggest earners in the history of golf, he's ranked number three in the world. Despite having a natural talent for the game, he'd never expected to play it professionally. Having applied for a job with a sports management company, his interview took place on the golf course. He played so well that the company persuaded him to become one...

Sue Lawley's guest this week is Robert McCrum. The author of six highly acclaimed novels and literary editor of the Observer, he describes how he woke up one morning, at the age of 42, to a raging headache and partial paralysis. He had suffered a stroke and it was to take him more than a year to recover. Later, he was to write a memoir about that process which became not only a guide to other suff...

Sue Lawley's guest this week is Sheila Hancock. She first became a household name in the 1960s in the BBC sitcom The Rag Trade. Since then she has starred in everything from Carry On films to Chekhov. One of our most versatile actresses, she's been a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, sung in West End musicals and directed at the National. Twelve years ago she developed cancer, an experience...

Sue Lawley's guest this week is Michael Holroyd. A respected biographer, as a boy, he sought refuge from an unhappy home in Maidenhead Public Library. It was there he discovered the work of Hugh Kingsmill who was to become his first biographical subject. And it was then that he "discovered the attraction," as he says, "of stepping from my own life into other people's". Since then he has devoted se...

This week the castaway on Desert Island Discs is Professor Stuart Hall. Nearly 10 years after he came to England from Jamaica in 1951, he helped found the first Centre of Cultural Studies in Birmingham, with the academic Richard Hoggart. It was, he says, a reaction to how fast Britain was changing after the war, including the break up of the class structure and the growing impact of TV and the mas...

Sue Lawley's guest this week is Simon Callow. He impressed the theatre world when he played Mozart in Amadeus, and won our hearts as the genial Scot, Gareth, in Four Weddings and a Funeral. Like many actors, he learned his trade in rep. It's a good place to make mistakes, he says, recalling how he fell twenty foot through a trap door during 'A Christmas Carol'. [Taken from the original programme m...

Sue Lawley's guest this week is Peter Melchett. The executive director of Greenpeace, he has recently hit the headlines for his active opposition to genetically modified crops. Once a pillar of the establishment, Lord Melchett was a rising politician in Jim Callaghan's Labour government before he became interested in green issues. He did though shock his colleagues in the Northern Ireland office,...

Sue Lawley's guest this week is Neil Jordan. As a child he would cycle past Bram Stoker's house on his way to school, one of the reasons, perhaps, that he went on to direct the film Interview with a Vampire. His other movies include Mona Lisa and The Butcher Boy; the story of a little Irish lad who talks to the Virgin Mary which has echoes in his own Irish Catholic childhood. [Taken from the origi...

This week the castaway on Desert Island Discs is Ian McEwan. A Booker Prize winner, he was once dubbed 'Ian Macabre' because of the dark nature of his stories. His first novel The Cement Garden told a horrifying tale of family life. Later, The Comfort of Strangers described how a chance encounter can end in murder. He does though admit to his writing becoming gentler in recent years. In conversati...

Sue Lawley's guest this week is Dr. Jane Goodall. She had no formal scientific qualifications when she first went to Africa to study the Gombe chimpanzees. But it was this lack of preconceptions which made her so successful as a naturalist. Watching chimps use sticks to extract termites from their mounds she realised that she was about to smash the assumption that only humans used tools. Now, fort...

Sue Lawley's guest this week is Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber. His musicals dominate London's West End, including Cats, Phantom of the Opera and Starlight Express. He traces a career which began more than 30 years ago when he teamed up with Tim Rice to write Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. [Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs] Favourit...

Sue Lawley's guest this week is Michael Crawford. Renowned for his attention to detail, he has always performed his own stunts - whether roller-skating under moving lorries in Some Mothers Do Have 'Em, or walking the tightrope in the musical Barnum. A consumate professional, he admits to escaping from his hospital bed, where he was recovering from exhaustion, so the show could go on! [Taken from t...

Sue Lawley's guest this week is Michael Nyman. Said to be the best-selling classical composer in Britain, as a child visiting the opera or concert hall his imagination would be caught by a particularly pleasing sequence of notes. Later, he was to use these as inspiration for his own compositions. A Purcell manuscript inspired his music for the The Draughtsman's Contract. Scottish folk songs the so...

Sue Lawley's guest this week is Oz Clarke. As a wine expert, he has sipped, slurped and spat his way through thousands of vintages from around the world. Renowned for his enthusiasm for trying new flavours and varieties, his earliest memory is of drinking his mother's damson wine when he was just three years old. And it didn't put him off. [Taken from the original programme material for this archi...