Saturday Live

Sian Williams and Richard Coles with author, playwright and poet Michael Morpurgo, Jane Esuantsiwa Goldsmith who went to Ghana to find her father and ended up being anointed Queen Mother of Akoanso village, Northumbrian dialect poet Raymond Reed, and animal movement coach Peter Elliott. John McCarthy continues his romantic tour of the Wye Valley, best-selling crime writer Peter James takes a strol...

On Saturday Live this week the Reverend Richard Coles and Sian Williams talk to broadcaster and comedian Robin Ince about science, art and rationalism, find out how Martin Spinelli coped with the car crash that killed his wife and nearly killed his young son, explore psychiatrist R.D. Laing's experiment at the Kingsley Hall commune in the 1960's with a patient who spent 4 years there, reunite a fo...

Richard Coles and Sian Williams with performer Jackie Clune, Rob Manuel who turned carnivore after 15 years of vegetarianism, Courtney Stewart who is turning the New Testament into Jamaican, and Sylvia Hillier and Jenni Evennett who as teenagers hopped on board the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour bus. JP goes stargazing with comedian and impressionist Jon Culshaw, and plays conkers with poet Luke Wr...

Richard Coles and Sian Williams meet author and screenwriter Anthony Horowitz, talk to Dolores O'Reilly who grew up signing for her deaf and mute parents, rack their brains with Italian memory man Gianni Golfera, and get rhyming with National Poetry Day founder William Sieghart. There's a Thing About Me feature about the UK's oldest working computer and an appreciation of spiders from Lawrence Bee...

Sian Williams and Richard Coles with cook and food historian Clarissa Dickson Wright, Daniel Bond and Stacey Drinkwater who can't afford a house so they live on a double-decker bus, Linda Cruse who experienced a bout of blindness which changed her life, and former Captain of the QE2, Nick Bates, who describes life on the ocean wave. There's a Sound Sculpture of a rugby ball from Andy Challis, a pa...

Sian Williams and Richard Coles with studio guest Charlie Higson and the extraordinary transgender love story of Victoria and Emma Cantons. Conservative Michael Ashcroft shows off his medal collection, we debate rites of passage for one mum and her son, the inheritance tracks of former politician Tony Benn and John McCarthy visits Kent! Producer Lisa Jenkinson.

Sian Williams and John McCarthy with studio guest Edwina Currie reflecting on her public and personal life, two very different attitudes to burial from Mark Elliott and Wendii Miller, Spanish author Javier Marias who is the literary and literal king of the micronation Redonda, the pros and cons of procrastination from Steve Swift, Talitha MacKenzie on why her song caught on in Serbia, the musings...

Suzy Klein and Richard Coles with studio guest Lynda Bellingham. This weekend in 1939 more than 400,000 pets were killed at the outbreak of World Ward Two. We talk to Dr Hilda Kean who's researched this forgotten piece of history. Fifteen years ago Philippe Kahn invented the camera phone which has revolutionised the way we view the world and communicate. Nicholas McCarthy, who has only one hand, t...

Sian Williams & John McCarthy with archaeologist and broadcaster Neil Oliver; Anthony Weir tells the story of his failed attempt to live with a pygmy tribe; open-water swimmer Anne Marie Ward reveals her plans to swim the Bering Straits; Alison describes her experience of living with face-blindness; Jackie Palmer explains why she loves the sound of a telephone exchange; a group of former Spitf...

Richard Coles & John McCarthy with actress Tamsin Greig; listener Lalage Cambell who sealed a friendship thanks to a washed-up wallet; Sally Becker, aka the Angel of Mostar, who carried the Olympic flag at the Opening Ceremony; Sophie and Louis Staley who organised their parents' wedding; and Dan Fox who sprang his friend from a Kabul gaol with the aid of a kipper tie. We meet the 90 year old...

Richard Coles & John McCarthy with broadcaster Joan Bakewell; listener Kirsteen Steel who turned detective to recover her father's stolen submarine bell; Jeremy Marks who in the 1980s ran a course to help gay people suppress their sexuality; moon rock investigator Joe Gutheinz; Olympic cycling pace setter Peter Deary; JP Devlin talks to the last surviving crew member of the Enola Gay which dro...

Sian Williams & Richard Coles live from the Olympics with newsman turned novelist Gerald Seymour, and James Partridge who founded of the disfigurement charity Changing Faces; JP Devlin mingles with the Olympic crowds; archer Tony George sets us aquiver with his Sound Sculpture; listener Arnold Gordon tells the tale of singing along to Over The Rainbow with Judy Garland in a bar during the Toky...

Suzy Klein and Richard Coles with boxer Barry McGuigan. Radio 4's Zeb Soanes on his path to recovery after suffering a paralysed vocal chord. Inheritance Tracks from Leo Sayer, update from Hazel Parry on her trip to the Congo where her parents were murdered in the sixties. Foundling Andrew Rowan on finding out about his roots and making contact with his half brother Ronnie Finlayson, a guerrilla r...

Sian Williams and Richard Coles with paralympian Dame Tanni Grey-Thompson; former beautician Georgina Blackwell who took on a local legal battle and has just graduated with a First in Law; Azzy B who is now friends with the boy he used to bully; Peggy Chadwick who secretly took the place of her twin sister in the choir at the closing ceremony of the 1948 Olympics; John McCarthy goes punting in Cam...

Sian Williams and Richard Coles with artist Grayson Perry; John McCarthy in revolutionary France; Ruth Ellis' nephew Mick Shepherd; JP Devlin meets naturist Emma James; Chris Tribe's Sound Sculpture of a hand-plane; Sylvie Dare's story of being rescued from a plane crash as a baby; Olympic Black Power athlete John Carlos' Inheritance Tracks. Producer: Lisa Jenkinson.

Sian Williams & Richard Coles with commentator and classicist Mary Beard; Namira Salim who's set to be one of the world's first space tourists; Phillippa Yaa De Villiers who was born mixed-race but brought up as white in apartheid South Africa; listener Owen Ephraim who worked with Alan Turing at Bletchley Park; John McCarthy goes biking with travel writer Ted Simon; JP Devlin meets cave colle...

Sian Williams & Richard Coles with author and arts champion Sir Christopher Frayling, Steve Marsling and Sean Hosey tell the story of their lives as undercover ANC recruits; listener Rupert Horrox describes how he chanced on a film set and ended up on the red carpet; listener Gail Simmons delivers a Soundsculpture about an iron; John McCarthy reveals more of Gran Canaria; JP Devlin goes on a D...

Sian Williams & Richard Coles with the BBC's Business Editor Robert Peston, artist and designer David Gentleman, Claire Guest who trains dogs to sniff out a range of diseases including cancer and Bomber Command pilot Frank Dell who was shot down behind enemy lines in WW2; John McCarthy watches cricket with comedian Miles Jupp, Uri Geller reveals his secret life, and writer and actress Meera Sy...

Sian Williams & Richard Coles with classicist and comedian Natalie Haynes; Mark Lawson and JP Devlin breakfast in Dublin for Bloomsday; Julie Wassmer who discovered the daughter she'd given up for adoption by quite extraordinary coincidence; Dominic Walker, The Bishop of Monmouth, who conducts exorcisms; Susan Richards who was inspired by a damp June village fete to send a million books to Rus...

Sian Williams and Richard Coles with actor and comic Stephen Mangan; Jackie Malton, the retired Detective Chief Inspector who was the inspiration for Prime Suspect's Jane Tennison; ex-cricketer David Gower reveals his secret life, a love of bats; John McCarthy discovers the deserted beaches and overlooked attractions of Gran Canaria; Beryl Ritchie, one of the few female record cutters of the 1970s...

Sian Williams & Richard Coles with founder of the Eden Project Tim Smit, a brother and sister returning for the first time to the Congo where the rest of their family was massacred in 1964, a couple who spent 12 years and £35,000 trying to have a baby, a caricaturist turned amateur scientist who's trying to prove that people who look the same also sound the same, John McCarthy as a tourist in...

Sian Williams and Richard Coles with writer and broadcaster Bamber Gascoigne, a woman dubbed 'The Angel of Mostar' who was reunited via Facebook with the baby she saved 20 years before, the funeral director decorated for his service to fallen soldiers, a real life Billy Elliot from Warrington who's off to the Bolshoi ballet school, John McCarthy returns to Beirut, a Thing About Me feature about a...

Sian Williams and Richard Coles with historian Peter Hennessy, John McCarthy on Canvey Island with Dr Feelgood's Wilko Johnson, Sheri Pitman a young woman who went through school refusing to speak, Tony Walker a 56 year old man whose life has been documented on TV since he was seven, Kevin Allmond the Yorkshire businessman who has become the Baron of a small European principality, a Crowdscape fro...

Sian Williams and Richard Coles with 1970's pop mega-star David Cassidy; writer Jane Johnson who got lost in the Atlas mountains in Morocco and ended up marrying the Berber tribesman who rescued her; actor Patrick Duffy (aka Dallas' Bobby Ewing) who describes his love of caravanning; translator Mary Hobson who took a degree in Russian in her sixties and, now in her 80s, is winning awards for her v...

Anita Anand with "The Idler" editor Tom Hodgkinson, gay dads Barrie and Tony Drewitt-Barlow talk about their decision to have a sixth child by a surrogate mother, Emma Gray on her life as a shepherdess, poetry from Matt Harvey, Caroline Cornish tells the story of her daughter's red dress, Jacquie Meredith explains how she was adopted by a stray cat, and former Bishop of Edinburgh Richard Holloway'...