Desert Island Discs

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the man who broke the British land speed records, Richard Noble. His thirst for speed began when he was six years old and saw John Cobb's jet boat Crusader. Then, in the 1970s, he built his own jet-propelled car in his garage at home. He called it Thrust One, and wrote it off at over 200 miles per hour. Nine years later, he broke the land speed record with Thrust...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week has murdered 75 people, and although he wants to retire, his fans are begging him for just one more. He's the creator of Inspector Morse, Colin Dexter. A Classics teacher before he began to write, it was a profession he immensely enjoyed until deafness forced him to quit. His other great loves are shared by his fictional hero, Morse. Both live for Wagner, crosswords...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the QC Helena Kennedy. In 1992 she published a book which drew attention to the way English law discriminates against women. She called it Eve was Framed. It began a debate into how we view defendants and victims and how our judges are trained. Born into a working-class family living on the south side of Glasgow, she recently entered the House of Lords. She says...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the British bass John Tomlinson. He is most famous as Wotan - ruler of the gods in Wagner's Ring Cycle. In fact, it's a role he has made so much his own that the composer's grandson says it could almost have been written with him in mind. Growing up in a Methodist family music was a natural part of life, yet he studied to be an engineer until the urge to sing bec...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the artist and illustrator Paul Hogarth. He has portrayed A Year in Provence for Peter Mayle, depicted Doris Lessing's Africa and captured Majorca with Robert Graves. Born into a working-class family, his parents disapproved of his two great loves - travel and drawing. In the face of their opposition, he won a scholarship to art school where he was drawn into rad...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the scientist Professor Heinz Wolff. He came to public attention when he presented the television programme The Great Egg Race, in which he challenged people to conquer engineering problems with a rubber band, a pencil and a pickled onion. In the 1970s while designing aids for disabled people, he devised the phrase 'Tools for Living' to describe his work. After a...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the politician and Transport Minister Glenda Jackson. Politics is her third job. At 16, she left school to work in Boots. But it was as an actor that she reached the pinnacle of her profession, becoming an international star and winning Oscars for her roles in Women in Love and A Touch of Class. On television, she was the formidable Elizabeth R, but won our heart...

This is an archive edition of Desert Island Discs. What follows is what was said about the programme at the time: Sue Lawley's castaway this week has celebrated more than 50 years as a professional performer - he's the comedian and singer Harry Secombe. At 76, he can still hit the cruel Cs, although these days he turns puce with the effort. He can still make an audience laugh itself silly and numb...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the Chairman of Northern Foods, Chris Haskins. Until recently he was something of a curiosity - a big businessman who was also a lifelong supporter of Labour and enthusiastically pro-Europe. It was the Aldermaston marches in the late 1950s which influenced his political beliefs. Sent to report on them for the Irish Times, he was soon swept along by the protesters...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the artist Paula Rego. Born in Portugal, she was an only child, and spent her days sitting with the maids as they told tales around the kitchen table. Now she makes up stories about the people she knows and weaves them into her pictures. Like those early fairytales, her portraits always have a touch of danger about them. If you look the devil in the face, she say...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the television presenter Loyd Grossman. His career has allowed him to peer through the keyholes of the rich and famous and comment on their homes. He once described Tony Blackburn's house as like that of a maiden aunt in Eastbourne. It's a formula which has lasted 14 years. Although he was well into his 20s before he learnt to cook, some 20 million viewers watch...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the theatre producer Thelma Holt. Famed for introducing some of the best international productions to this country, she persuaded Dustin Hoffman to London's West End, brought Ingmar Bergman's Hamlet to the South Bank and premiered the work of the Japanese director Ninagawa in Britain. [Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the playwright and film director Anthony Minghella. He grew up on the Isle of Wight in a close-knit family of Italian descent, and says that he has never felt truly English. It is not surprising therefore that his most successful film explores questions of identity and nationality. That film, The English Patient, won nine Oscars. It is, he admits, unashamedly mov...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the broadcaster and popular historian, John Julius Norwich. Closely associated with Venice, he talks about his love for the city and his battle to protect it from the rising waters of the Mediterranean. It's a passion he learnt from his parents - the diplomat and politician Duff Cooper and the beautiful socialite Lady Diana. As a boy he grew up surrounded by his...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the naturalist and writer Richard Mabey. A romantic at heart, he regrets that so much written about nature these days concentrates on the scientific. Unlike past writers like WH Hudson or Gilbert White, he says we rarely confess our feelings and emotions about the countryside. What interests him is our relationship with nature; how we name our streets and houses...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the composer and performer Richard Rodney Bennett. A versatile musician, he is equally at home playing jazz, writing film scores or composing for the concert hall. He wants to give performers music which they want to play, so he has written percussion pieces for Evelyn Glennie and saxophone sonatas for John Harle and Stan Getz. "Nobody," he says, "needs another v...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the novelist Rose Tremain. She began writing as a child soon after her father left home. It became a kind of therapy for her and she explains it's something she still turns to, especially in moments of crisis. Recognised for her ability to get right inside the minds of her characters, she offers the reader a view of the world through their eyes. In her book Sacre...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the musician and presenter Jools Holland. He first shot into the public eye when he made what he still calls "a bit of a verbal slip", and used a four-letter word on the teenage music show The Tube. These days he hosts a late night television programme, where he plays alongside such musical greats as Eric Clapton, Oasis and Tony Bennett. His own musical performan...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week has been the voice of racing for half a century. Due to retire in November 1997, Peter O'Sullevan calculates that he has commentated on some 14,000 races. After calling his last Grand National earlier this year he perhaps breathed a sigh of relief, because even after 50 broadcasts he admits to still finding the responsibility nerve-wracking. Horses have always been...

The castaway on Desert Island Discs this week is the filmmaker and director Mike Leigh. He first came to public attention on a dark and stormy evening when 16 million people tuned to BBC1 to watch his film Abigail's Party. It was also the night that ITV was blacked out by a strike, there was a highbrow documentary on BBC2, and Channel 4 didn't exist. His recent films Secrets and Lies and Naked won...

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the editor and publisher, Ursula Owen. Twenty-five years ago she helped create Virago - the feminist publishing house which promotes women writers. A huge success, it became the focus of much attention when she and her colleague, Carmen Callil, fell out in what became a very public row. Recently, she has revamped the magazine Index on Censorship, which debates th...

The castaway on Desert Island Discs this week is the literary critic, Sir Frank Kermode. One of the most influential teachers of his age, he is credited with bringing the new literary theory of Structuralism to this country. Something, as he admits to Sue Lawley, he now profoundly regrets. He traces his life, "lived like tumbleweed in the wind", from a short-sighted, studious boy growing up on the...

The castaway on Desert Island Discs this week is the jazz singer Cleo Laine. Although driven by a great desire to be a performer, and travelling from one audition to another, she confesses to Sue Lawley that when her big break came, it wasn't jazz which attracted her, so much as the leader of the band - John Dankworth. Whether he spotted a cheap singer for the night, or recognised a great talent i...

This week's castaway is an author. In his book The Wasp Factory, the teenage protagonist tortures insects, experiments with bombs and kills a brother and a cousin. But, says Iain Banks, that was "just a phase he was going through". He tells Sue Lawley how, as a writer, he has not developed the filters that most adults do and so views the world with childlike eyes, describing what he sees. And this...

Sue Lawley's castaway is comedian Eric Sykes. Favourite track: Messiah Hallelujah by George Frideric Handel Book: Ripley's Believe It Or Not by Ripley Luxury: A sand wedge golf club and a crate of golf balls