Private Passions

When he started out on an acting career, Oliver Ford Davies was given some extremely discouraging advice by his first director, who said: “You’ll be OK when you’re forty, and even better when you’re fifty!” Davies was only twenty-seven at the time so that was a bit off-putting, to say the least; but in fact that advice was clairvoyant. His big breakthrough did indeed come at the age of fifty, in 1...

Memory, desire, madness: these are the themes that fascinate Lisa Appignanesi and that she’s explored over the last forty years in novels, in memoirs, and in prize-winning books such as “Mad, Bad and Sad”, a history of women and mind doctors. Lisa Appignanesi is the Chair of the Royal Society of Literature and a former President of English PEN, an organisation which campaigns for free speech. She’...

Tim Firth is the man behind the show that captured the nation’s heart: Calendar Girls, the true story about a Women’s Institute who produced a naked calendar. It’s been a film, a play, and is now a musical. He’s also responsible for the hugely successful film Kinky Boots, as well as multi-award winning TV shows, films and more musicals including Neville’s Island, The Flint Street Nativity, Preston...

Sigrid Rausing is a writer, publisher and philanthropist. She’s the co-founder of Portobello books, the owner of Granta books, and the editor of Granta literary magazine, a role she says she hugely enjoys. It’s impossible though to talk about her own achievements without mentioning her Swedish family background: her grandfather founded the packaging company Tetra Pak, and his brilliant idea for th...

Michael Berkeley talks to the actor Clarke Peters about his passion for breaking down barriers between musical traditions. Best known for his television roles as Detective Lester Freeman in The Wire and Albert Lambreaux in Treme, Clarke has also appeared in films such as Notting Hill, Mona Lisa and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. And he has a rich career in music too – from busking in F...

This week’s Private Passions is pretty crowded, with Kirsty Wark, Fiona Bruce, Emily Thornberry and Theresa May all putting in appearances - in the person of Jan Ravens, from the award-winning Radio 4 show Dead Ringers. Jan’s career has been a series of firsts – she was, in 1979, the first female president of the Cambridge Footlights, and the show she directed in Edinburgh went on to win the first...

Actor and theatre director Daniel Evans shares with Michael Berkeley his passions for musical theatre, opera and the piano. Daniel Evans grew up in the Rhondda Valley and won praise and prizes at Eisteddfods as a teenager. Since then his career has been something of a high-wire act: balancing performing versus directing and theatre management, stage versus screen, popular musicals versus edgy new...

David Rieff has admitted ruefully that he’s made a career out of telling people what they don’t want to hear: whether it’s the politics of the global food crisis in his book “The Reproach of Hunger”, or the failure of the West to prevent the terrible bloodbath of Bosnia in his provocatively-titled “Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the failure of the West”. As a war correspondent, Rieff has worked in the...

Rebecca Stott grew up in a community where the following things were forbidden: newspapers, television, cinema, radio, pets, universities, wristwatches, cameras, holidays – and music. Her family belonged to one of the most reclusive sects in Protestant History, the “Exclusive Brethren”, which has 45,000 followers worldwide. How and why she left the Brethren is the gripping story told in her memoir...

Michael Berkeley’s guest on the centenary of Armistice Day is the historian Margaret MacMillan. In this year’s Reith Lectures, Margaret Macmillan delivered a powerful series of lectures exploring war and society, and our complex feelings towards those who fight. She is Emeritus Professor of International History at the University of Oxford, and Professor of History at the University of Toronto in...

It’s the size and shape of a cauliflower, and weighs about 3 lbs. And yet the average human brain has so many intricate and complex connections that if you counted one connection every second it would take you more than three million years. Professor Anil Seth has devoted his career to trying to understand the brain, puzzling over the mystery of consciousness itself. He’s Professor of Cognitive an...

As part of Radio 3’s celebration of forests this autumn, Michael Berkeley’s guest is the American novelist Richard Powers. His latest novel, The Overstory, is his twelfth, and it’s a monumental work which was entirely inspired by trees. It all started when Powers was teaching in California, and visited the giant redwoods there. That encounter amounted he says to “a religious conversion”. He realis...

Big Issue founder John Bird talks to Michael Berkeley about the role music played in transforming his life. For two weeks in 1970 John Bird worked in the Houses of Parliament washing dishes; in 2015 he returned as a life peer. To say he didn’t have a great start in life is something of an understatement. Born in 1946 in a Notting Hill slum, he was five when his family was made homeless and at seve...

Ed Vulliamy has worked all around the world as a journalist; he’s best-known for his prize-winning coverage of the war in Bosnia, on television and in The Guardian. The war crimes he reported on led to his becoming a witness in the trial of the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic, and he was the first journalist since the Nuremberg trials to testify at an international war crimes tribunal. He wen...

Bel Mooney describes her pleasures as: watching for kingfishers, riding pillion on a motorbike, and dancing to a 1962 Wurlitzer. That entertaining list reflects something of her enjoyment of a life which has brought many challenges as well as pleasures. Bel Mooney started out as a writer almost 50 years ago, and in 1976 was one of the first journalists to speak from personal experience about the t...

Michael Berkeley’s guest is Bella Hardy, a passionate interpreter of traditional songs who has also blossomed into an accomplished songwriter, drawing on the Peak District, where she grew up, as well as influences from as far away as Nashville and China. Despite being only in her early thirties Bella has nine acclaimed solo albums to her name. She was part of the first - and highly memorable - Fol...

Steve Punt is well known thanks to the popular Radio 4 Friday night comedy, The Now Show - with fellow-host Hugh Dennis, he’s been mocking politicians and celebrities for an astonishing twenty years now. He also presents The Third Degree, the Radio 4 quiz which pits undergraduates against professors. But behind the scenes he’s been busy writing for a whole host of other shows, such as Mock the Wee...

At first glance chocolate brownies, puff pastry and Battenberg cake don’t seem to have a great deal in common with theoretical maths, but Eugenia Cheng has harnessed her love of cooking in order to tackle the fear of maths so many of us share – and has published a book about it called How to Bake Pi. Her mission is to rid the world of "maths phobia", and to this end she gave up her secure job teac...

Michael Berkeley's guest is the best-selling author, illustrator, and Children's Laureate Lauren Child. I Will Not Ever Never Eat a Tomato; I Am Too Absolutely Small for School; I Am Not Sleepy and Will Not Go to Bed - these are just three of Lauren Child's bestselling, funny and touching picture books for young children. Her big-eyed characters such as Charlie and Lola, and Hubert Horatio Bartle...

Ahead of this week's first test against India, Michael Berkeley's guest is cricket commentator Henry Blofeld. Henry was a very promising young cricketer, but his prospects of a first-class career were ended by a near-fatal accident at the age of seventeen. He eventually found his way to cricket journalism and ultimately to Test Match Special, where he was a mainstay for nearly fifty years, illumin...

Audrey Niffenegger had a huge worldwide success with her first novel, The Time-Traveller's Wife, which sold eight million copies in thirty-six languages. It was made into a film, of which, she says, the least said the better. But that commercial success bought her creative freedom - and what she's done with it is intriguing. After a second novel, about the ghosts in Highgate Cemetery, Audrey Niffe...

Paco Peña first started playing the guitar at the age of six; it was his older brother's guitar, and since there were nine children in the family, all living in two rooms in a crowded house in Córdoba, he had a ready-made audience right from the beginning. He made his first professional appearance at the age of twelve, and toured through Spain before moving to London in the 1960s, where he found h...

The actor Adjoa Andoh talks to Michael Berkeley about her passion for theatre, opera, and the music that reflects both her English and African heritage. Whether you're a regular at the National Theatre or Old Vic, prefer your entertainment on the big screen, or like to curl up on the sofa in front of Dr Who or Casualty (or - even - with the radio), you'll be familiar with the work of Adjoa Andoh....

Kim Moore won the prestigious Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize this year for her first poetry collection, "The Art of Falling", and is still only in her thirties. The judges described her prize-winning collection as "thrilling: language at its most irresistible and essential". But however thrilling, poets need to make a living, and Kim Moore's day job has been as a trumpet teacher, in Cumbria where s...

As part of Radio 3's week in the forest, Michael Berkeley talks to wildlife presenter, President of the RSPB and accomplished musician Miranda Krestovnikoff. She's dived with sharks, shown viewers how to eat roadkill, and searched for mammoth bones in the North Sea. The co-presenter of ten series of Coast, Miranda's also a regular on The One Show and Radio 4's Costing the Earth. As well as the RSP...