Desert Island Discs

Sue Lawley's castaway this morning is the Australian poet Les Murray. He began writing when he realised that poetry didn't have to be about daffodils in a far off English field but could reflect the world around him; from the sheep and cows on the family farm, to the wallabies in the outback. His most powerful subject though, is his own depression which has dogged him for more than 50 years. [Take...

Sue Lawley's castaway this morning is the explorer David Hempleman Adams. This year he completed the Adventurer's Grand Slam. It took 18 years. When he reached the North Pole this April he had conquered the four main poles, and climbed the highest peaks in each of the seven continents. He was quite literally on top of the world. [Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition...

Sue Lawley's castaway this morning is the political cartoonist Ralph Steadman. His career was launched in 1961 with a five-pound cheque from the satirical magazine Private Eye. Later he collaborated with Hunter S Thompson and illustrated his Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas. More recently he's begun to write and illustrate his own books - on Freud, Leonardo da Vinci and God. [Taken from the original...

Sue Lawley's castaway this morning is the singer-songwriter Chris de Burgh. Best known for his ballad Lady in Red, he began his career playing to guests in the crumbling Irish castle which his family ran as a hotel. He chooses eight records to take to the mythical island. [Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs] Favourite track: Kyrie from the Mi...

Sue Lawley's castaway is the playwright Howard Brenton. In the 1960s he was part of a movement called the New Jacobeans. They took drama out of the drawing room and on to a bigger stage. Often controversial, in Romans in Britain he drew parallels with Northern Ireland and earned the wrath of Mary Whitehouse for what she described as "procuring the cast to commit immoral acts". [Taken from the orig...

Sue Lawley's castaway is Home Secretary Jack Straw. Favourite track: Soave Sia il Vento by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Book: The Franco Prussian War - the German Invasion of France 1870-1871 by Michael Howard Luxury: Saxophone

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the writer Sybille Bedford. Born the daughter of a German baron in 1911, her childhood brought her into contact with the great literary figures of her age - Aldous Huxley, Virginia Woolf and T S Eliot. She has received critical acclaim as a novelist, journalist and law reporter, covering the Lady Chatterley trial, the Auschwitz trial and the trial of Jack Ruby. [...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the playwright Jack Rosenthal. Bar Mitzvah Boy, and The Evacuees are among his many successes. His work often reflects his own life. He poured the grief he felt when his children left home into Eskimo Day, and touched a raw nerve with many parents who felt they had been left behind. [Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Is...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of The Big Issue, John Bird. From a childhood in orphanages and approved schools, he has gone on to run the most successful street magazine in the world, with a circulation of over 250,000 a week in Britain and an overall turnover of some £24 million. With Big Issues in major cities all over Britain, Europe and the USA, he is retur...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the theatre producer Bill Kenwright. His West End successes include Shirley Valentine, Medea and Stepping Out. A gambler at heart, he continued to run Blood Brothers on Broadway despite a panning by the New York critics and it became a huge box office hit. An actor himself - most famously as Gordon Glegg in Coronation Street - he started producing in the province...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the gardener and broadcaster Geoffrey Smith. He learnt his craft at his father's knee growing fruit and vegetables for the stately home where he worked. Later he learnt the science of horticulture at college and achieved top marks. He's always maintained the promise he made to himself as a boy: to spend his life outdoors. Except, of course, when he enters a studi...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the most-recorded saxophonist in the world. Inspired by Duke Ellington and encouraged by Jack Brymer, John Harle is equally at home playing jazz or classical music. He once marched with the Coldstream Guards, but left to test himself against other musicians at the Royal College of Music, gaining 100% in his final exam. As a composer he has collaborated with among...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is 'England's choir master', Sir David Willcocks. For some 38 years he trained the Bach Choir - the most popular amateur choir in Britain. His retirement in 1998 he describes as ""like the end of an affair"". As the Director of Music at Kings College Cambridge, he tranformed small boys with dirty knees into an angelic choir. His gift is a mix of natural talent and e...

"Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the sculptor Antony Gormley. His Angel of the North towers over the A1 just outside Gateshead. Elsewhere, his figures stand buried in sand at the mouth of an estuary, or hang from the ceiling of an American jailhouse. In 1994 he won the Turner Prize for his works called Field - thousands of small clay creatures, crafted by people from around the world. Another s...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week says changing her mind was one of the most difficult things she's ever had to do. After an out-of-body experience, psychologist Susan Blackmore set out to study and prove the existence of the paranormal. Twenty years on, she's a convinced sceptic. She continues, however, to be fascinated by the question of consciousness. In particular, the new theory of memes which...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the businessman Sir Ernest Hall. His life is like a fairytale. From a sickly boy, living in the one room he and his family shared, he became a successful businessman and millionaire - and all because of an inspirational piece of music. Today on the site of an old carpet factory in Halifax, he's brought together his two loves - business and the arts - to form an e...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the abstract artist Sir Terry Frost. He first became interested in art as a prisoner of war, when lack of food and freedom enhanced the beauty of a single leaf. On his return to Britain, nature continued to fascinate him and inform his work; bright circles of colour inspired by the Sun and Moon, or patterns of white-on-white remembered from a snowy landscape. Now...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the actress Dame Judi Dench. She's been delighting audiences for some 40 years, on film, television and the stage. It's partly this versatility that makes her so special. Nominated for an Oscar for the film Mrs Brown, in which she played an ageing Queen Victoria, she says the difference between film and the theatre is that on stage she can make an audience believ...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the experimental composer Gavin Bryars. One of his best-known works, The Sinking of the Titanic, pays tribute to the band which continued to play as the ship went down. It poses the question what if they hadn't stop playing; how would their music have sounded under water? His most popular composition, Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet, features a tramp singing the...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the novelist Alice Thomas Ellis. A devout and traditional Catholic, she didn't begin writing until she was 42. The Sin Eater, that first novel, was her reaction to the changes in the Catholic Church after Vatican Two and channelled her anger at what she saw as the excesses of the 1960s. She's a woman of apparent contradictions. She wanted to be a nun, but fell in...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the poet Andrew Motion. He describes his writing as a "biological thing" - like developing a headache or the flu - but much, much more pleasurable. Also a biographer, his first, controversial work was about his friend and fellow poet Philip Larkin. While researching for it, he collected together his own personal writings and burnt them. Dominant in his work is th...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week believes he has the answer to "life, the universe and everything". According to mathematician Ian Stewart, it's 137-and-a-half degrees. He calls it "the golden angle", and says it can be found everywhere in nature - whether in the pattern of seeds on a sunflower head or in the spiral of a snail's shell. Mathematics, he says, has nothing to do with arithmetic and eve...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the Artistic Director of the Royal Ballet, Sir Anthony Dowell. His future was determined as a child when he stood before Dame Ninette de Valois with his trousers rolled to the knee. It took only a short glance at his legs for her to accept him into the Royal Ballet School. As he grew and developed as a dancer, his talent was spotted and soon the great choreograph...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week has turned around a failing supermarket chain by introducing his staff to 'black-bin Mondays' and 'dress-down Fridays'. As the Executive Director, Archie Norman made ASDA one of the top three grocers on the high street. In the process, he's answered every one of the 40,000 suggestions from his staff - personally. And he's learnt how to keep his colleagues on their t...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the opera producer David Pountney. Alongside Mark Elder and Peter Jonas at the ENO, he tried to make opera more attractive to a wider audience. The opera stage, he says, shouldn't be treated like a mantle shelf filled with fragile objects. It's a versatile and robust art form which needn't be stuck in the past. So he staged Carmen in an automobile graveyard, with...