Desert Island Discs

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Rt Hon Shirley Williams Jan 29, 2006

Show notes

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the politician Baroness Williams of Crosby. Shirley Williams has spent her life immersed in politics. Her father was a Labour Party activist and her mother the writer and pacifist Vera Brittain. Their home was always filled with topical conversation, from the rise of Hitler to the Spanish Civil War.

She became a Labour Party member when still a teenager and, after a chance encounter in an air-raid shelter, formed a friendship with the then Home Secretary Herbert Morrison. She enjoyed a career within the Labour Party but, dismayed by its drift to the left, she abandoned it to become one of the Gang of Four who set up the Social Democratic Party in 1981 and later supported its merger with the Liberal Party. Now, as the Liberal Democrats are in the midst of leadership elections, she reflects on the difficulties the party has faced in recent months, and what it must do to regain public support.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: How Beautiful are the Feet by George Frideric Handel Book: Collection by W H Auden Luxury: PC linked to the internet

John Sutherland Jan 22, 2006

Show notes

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the writer and academic John Sutherland. He is the recently retired Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at University College, London, a past Chairman of the Booker Prize panel and the author of one of the standard texts on Victorian fiction. But his route into academia was a curious one - and his life inside the ivory towers far from smooth.

His father was killed in the war and he was brought up by his extended family in a peripatetic childhood. He joined the army but, with no war to fight, left his commission and went to university instead. He worked in Scotland and America but as his reputation grew, so did his dependence on alcohol. He finally hit rock bottom while in America and stopped drinking 23 years ago. Today he is a pre-eminent literary figure - combining erudition and historical research with a taste for the modern and the new.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: The Piano has been Drinking (Not Me) by Tom Waits Book: Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray Luxury: iPod

Frankie Dettori Jan 15, 2006

Show notes

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the jockey Frankie Dettori. Over the past two decades he's won more than 2,000 races including most of the classics at home and abroad and has been Champion Jockey three times. The son of a famous Italian jockey, he was brought up in Italy but sent by his father to train at Newmarket when he was 14 years old - 18 months later he was winning races. In 1996 he won seven races out of seven in a single day at Ascot - a feat that has not been achieved before or since.

But in 2000 he thought his luck had run out when he and fellow jockey Ray Cochrane left Newmarket in a light aircraft - only for it to plunge to the ground moments after take-off. He thought he was about to die and on coming round in the wreckage was not sure whether he was alive or dead. The event left him undecided as to what to do next. He was a hugely popular team captain on BBC TV's A Question of Sport for two years, but a chance remark from one of the contestants who thought he had retired made him realise he had to focus on being a jockey. He returned to the sport with a renewed vigour and became Champion jockey once again. Now a father of five, Frankie plans to retire at 45 and hopes that by then he will have won the Epsom Derby - the only major title that has so far eluded him.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: Amazing Grace by Royal Scots Dragoon Guards Book: The History of the Derby Luxury: Lifetime's supply of Pinot Grigio

Richard Griffiths Jan 08, 2006

Show notes

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is one of this country's leading character actors - Richard Griffiths. Most recently, he won three Best Actor awards for playing the English master in Alan Bennett's play 'The History Boys' but he has cross-generational appeal - perpetual adolescents revere his performance as gay Uncle Monty in the film Withnail and I while the younger generation know him as beastly Uncle Vernon from the Harry Potter films.

He's had to work hard for his achievements: both his parents were profoundly deaf and, from a young age, he was their ears and their translator. He studied drama against his father's wishes - he had hoped his son would go to art college. However, he says his father was an expert in reading body language and he learned from him how people's physical behaviour reveals their inner thoughts. He is currently in the West End in Tom Stoppard's play Heroes; he's working on a film version of The History Boys, directed by Nicholas Hytner and is preparing to tour with The History Boys around the world.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: Träumerei by Vladimir Horowitz Book: Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray Luxury: Velasquez's Las Meninas

Kelly Holmes Jan 01, 2006

Show notes

Sue Lawley's castaway is the athlete Dame Kelly Holmes. Kelly Holmes was the heroine of the Athens Olympics. She achieved her lifetime's ambition when, at the age of 34, she won gold medals in the 800 and 1500 metres.

As a teenager she witnessed Sebastian Coe's Olympic success in 1984 and that was the inspiration behind her own career in athletics. Early on her trainers recognised she had the natural talent - and determination - to succeed. But her career has been blighted by injury - she bowed out of the 1996 Olympics due to injury; won a bronze medal at the 2000 Sydney Olympics despite considerable physical pain; and several times had appeared close to the end of her career as a result of a series of health problems.

Now retired from athletics, she says she wants to inspire other schoolchildren to take up sport - and make sure that the whole of Britain feels the Olympic spirit by the time it comes to host the games in 2012.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: If I Ain't Got You by Alicia Keys Book: A Set of Encyclopaedias Luxury: Large supply of chocolate

John Rutter Dec 25, 2005

Show notes

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the composer John Rutter. He is the most celebrated and successful composer of carols alive today and this Christmas his music will be heard in concerts and churches all over the world. He is drawn to the simplicity of Christmas carols and says he loves being able to compose 'a hummable tune'.

Inspired and encouraged by his school education, he became Director of Music at Clare College, Cambridge, and then with a string of winning commissions already behind him, moved into full time composition. But his relationship with composition is a difficult one - it's a process he finds isolating and says that although it does not make him happy - he feels compelled to do it. However, once he has finished a work he says nothing in the world compares with the feeling he experiences when he conducts it for the first time. He says: "I write music that people will enjoy singing. I'm not ashamed of that".

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: Gloria in Excelsis Deo from B Minor Mass by Johann Sebastian Bach Book: Teach yourself mathematics illustrated by voluptuous women Luxury: Viola

Maggi Hambling Dec 18, 2005

Show notes

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the artist Maggi Hambling. Above all else, she is known as a painter of people. Over the past 30 years she has painted George Melly, Stephen Fry and Michael Gambon among many others. But in the early years, her subjects were not well known; instead they were characters she saw on the streets or in the bars of South London. People whose faces she would commit to memory so that she could draw them when she returned to her studio.

She was the first artist to be given a residency at the National Gallery and in 1995 won the Jerwood Prize. But although she remains in great demand as a portrait painter, her work provokes controversy too - her tribute to Benjamin Britten, an enormous scallop shell standing on the shore at Aldeburgh, continues to divide opinion in the town.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: Runnin' Wild by Marilyn Monroe Book: The Complete Works of Just William by Richmal Crompton Luxury: A wine cellar from All Soul's, Oxford

David Hope Dec 11, 2005

Show notes

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the former Archbishop of York, David Hope. For a decade he was the second most important prelate in the Church of England but, earlier this year, he handed in his notice to return to life as a parish priest.

As a young boy growing up in Wakefield, it was his cousin Muriel who would take him along to the town's cathedral to worship - he was captivated by the ritual and atmosphere of the place and 35 years later he returned as its Bishop. A traditionalist himself, he opposed the ordination of women and believes the church should resist pressure to ordain practising homosexuals, but he fears that both issues will continue to divide Anglicans across the world for the rest of his lifetime. He says he has never been happier than he is as a parish priest - and that throughout his ministry, he has been someone who preferred people to paper.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: Vespers by Sergei Rachmaninov Book: Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens Luxury: A case of selected malt whiskies

Colin Firth Dec 04, 2005

Show notes

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the actor Colin Firth. He created an iconic moment in British television history when, as Jane Austen's hero Mr Darcy, he emerged wet-shirted from his stately lake. To his surprise, he became a sex symbol, was dubbed the 'male Ursula Andress' and was voted Britain's Most Popular Actor in a BBC poll. He went on to send up the role on the big screen - as the ironically-named Mark Darcy, the brooding boyfriend of Bridget Jones.

He always knew he wanted to act - from the moment when, as a five year old boy, he took on the role of Jack Frost at a school panto. He studied at the Drama Centre in London's Chalk Farm - where one of his teachers, Christopher Fettes, said he was by nature a poet and compared his acting to that of Paul Schofield. Married to an Italian woman and with two young sons, he now divides his time between life in London and in Italy.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: Opening of the Kyrie from Mass in C Minor by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Book: Stories by Woody Allen Luxury: His guitar

Sir David Frost Nov 27, 2005

Show notes

Sue Lawley's guest this week is the veteran broadcaster Sir David Frost - the only British television presenter to have interviewed seven American presidents and six British Prime Ministers who has, over the past five decades, become a broadcasting institution. The presenter once known as a scourge of the Establishment has become something of an establishment figure himself, noted for his formidable contacts book, his star-studded parties, and for his gentle but revealing interviewing style. Born in 1939, the youngest son of a Methodist minister and his wife, David was football and cricket-mad from an early age but with a burning ambition to go to Cambridge University. He arrived there in 1958, and threw himself into it, joining Footlights and editing Varsity and Granta. After Cambridge, Ned Sherrin saw him performing a comedy act in a Mayfair bar and hired him up to present the iconic satirical programme That Was The Week That Was. Other successful programmes followed including Frost Over Britain and The Frost Report.

Breakfast with Frost ran for twelve years until early 2005. David is not retiring though and is due to present a new interview programme for Al-Jazeera International which will begin next Spring, and will also conduct occasional interviews for the BBC.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: The Dam Busters by Eric Coates Book: London A-Z Luxury: Sunday papers

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