Desert Island Discs

Latest Episodes:

George Fenton May 11, 2003

Show notes

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the composer George Fenton, whose work includes music for Groundhog Day, Shadowlands, Cry Freedom, The Company of Wolves and The Fisher King. Born George Howe in South London in 1950, he taught himself to play the guitar at the age of eight and by the age of 14 was playing the organ - "dreadfully"! He wanted to be an actor, and got an early break in Alan Bennett's play Forty Years On. As time went on, however, he found directors were always asking him to play an instrument, so he switched to music as his main focus. He got his first job as composer and musical director for a production of Twelfth Night at the RSC in Stratford in 1974. Eight years later, and still almost entirely self-taught, he was nominated for an Oscar for his score for Richard Attenborough's Gandhi. It was only his fourth attempt at film music.

Since 1982 he has been nominated for four more Oscars (for Cry Freedom, The Fisher King and Dangerous Liaisons) and three Golden Globes; he's won three BAFTAs, two Ivor Novello Awards and an EMMY and written music for more than 100 television productions including Bergerac, The Jewel in the Crown, Talking Heads and The Blue Planet. In addition he cornered the market in jingles for daily news bulletins across the BBC. George Fenton is a visiting professor at the Royal College of Music in London, and regularly appears on television arts shows and documentaries as an authority on music.

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

Favourite track: On Going to Sleep from Four Last Songs by Richard Strauss Book: Short Stories by Anton Chekhov Luxury: A piano or, failing that, for comfort a tin of condensed milk & tin opener

Professor A H Halsey May 04, 2003

Show notes

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the sociologist and Oxford Emeritus Professor A H Halsey. Prof Halsey played a key part in the switch to comprehensives as an adviser to Labour Education Secretary Anthony Crossland in the 1960s. Born in 1923 to working class parents he grew up convinced that intelligence wasn't dependent on class. Chelly, as Halsey was universally known, won a scholarship to grammar school but started his career inauspiciously as a sanitary inspector's apprentice, where he became intimately acquainted with such delights as the putrid lungs of diseased cattle. During the war he trained as a fighter pilot and perfected the 'aerial handbrake turn' that would keep him out of the way of the Japanese Kamikaze pilots. It was practising this manoevre that very nearly cost him his life as his plane took a nose dive, recovering only yards from the ground.

After the war he went to the LSE and on to make a name for himself in the rapidly expanding discipline of sociology, and for some 40 years has held a professorship at Nuffield College, Oxford. Along the way he's taken on the grammar school system, the class system, the establishment and feminism. As he turns eighty, he talks to Sue Lawley about his life and times.

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

Favourite track: Benedictus by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Book: Utopia by Thomas Moore Luxury: Solar-powered radio

Rory Bremner Apr 20, 2003

Show notes

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the impressionist and satirist Rory Bremner. He was born in Edinburgh in 1961. A self-confessed show-off, he started doing impersonations at primary school, sending up teachers, sports commentators and Moira Anderson! Entertaining his school friends inevitably developed into performing on stage and he worked as a stand up on the comedy circuit, and notably at the Edinburgh Festival.

Following his sell-out run at the Festival in 1986 the BBC offered him his first television series, Now Something Else. It ran on BBC2 for seven years. In 1993 he moved to Channel 4, where his show Rory Bremner - Who Else? developed a much more hard-edged, satirical and political bite. It also picked up more than 10 major awards including Baftas for himself and fellow writer-performers John Bird and John Fortune. His meticulous research and observation of the politicians he mimics inevitably led to his fraternising with them and ultimately led to being awarded the final accolade for a satirist: he was banned from Labour's battle bus in the 2001 election campaign.

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

Favourite track: Have I Told You Lately? by Van Morrison Book: The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon Luxury: Radio

Margaret Atwood Apr 13, 2003

Show notes

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the writer Margaret Atwood. Born just after the outbreak of the Second World War, Margaret Atwood spent much of her childhood in the Canadian outback where her father's work involved studying insects. She grew up mostly without television, cinema, mains electricity or even a proper road to civilisation. For company she had only her parents and her brother, with whom she wrote "serials, mainly about space travel".

It wasn't until her teens that the urge to write struck seriously, an event she describes as "a large, invisible thumb descended from the sky and pressed down on the top of my head. A poem formed." After University, a spell in England and a period teaching early morning classes to engineering students she had her first novel, The Edible Woman, published. Since then she has written nine more novels, four of which were Booker nominated with The Blind Assassin finally winning in 2000. Three of those novels have been made into films: Surfacing, The Handmaid's Tale and The Blind Assassin. She has also published some dozen books of poetry, five collections of short stories, four books for children and assorted non-fiction titles. Her latest novel, Oryx and Crake, set in a genetically engineered, post-apocalyptic landscape is published on May 5th this year.

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

Favourite track: Shepherd's Hymn from Pastoral Symphony by Ludwig van Beethoven Book: Stories from 1001 Arabian Nights - traditional Luxury: A huge vat of Culpepers Rose Geranium bath salts

David Gilmour Apr 06, 2003

Show notes

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is David Gilmour of Pink Floyd. Gilmour grew up in Cambridge, where his father was a senior lecturer in zoology and his mother was also a lecturer and film editor. He was educated at a private school, in the hope that he would shine academically, but he really wanted to be playing music with his friends at the local state school, the County. At 16 he left and went to the Cambridge Tech where he became friends with Syd Barratt, the legendary founder of The Pink Floyd Sound, as they were originally known.

Pink Floyd went on to become one of the most successful bands of all time with albums such as Animals, Meddle and Wish You Were Here, and most famously, The Dark Side of the Moon and, later, The Wall. Dark Side of the Moon has remained in the best-selling albums chart ever since its release 30 years ago and has racked up some 35 million copies sold worldwide. The records were as groundbreaking in their presentation as their music, and the covers, designed by Storm Thorgerson, became iconic in their own rights: the man on fire on Wish You Were Here, the flying pig over Battersea power station on Animals, the black gatefold with a prism streaming light on Dark Side of the Moon. Pink Floyd concerts became a byword for spectacle through the 1970s and 1980s with lights and lasers and special effects.

Since the seventies, David Gilmour has also worked solo and guested with Bryan Ferry and Paul McCartney among others. He has several charitable interests, recently selling his mansion in Maida Vale to Earl Spencer and donating the £4.5 million to Crisis, a homelessness and housing charity. In 2001 he performed a mainly acoustic selection of his and Pink Floyd's songs at Robert Wyatt's Meltdown on the South Bank. He lives on 300 acres of land in Sussex with his second wife, writer Polly Samson and four of his eight children.

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

Favourite track: Dancing in the Street by Martha and the Vandellas Book: An English translation of the Koran Luxury: An acoustic Martin D.35 guitar

Kristin Scott Thomas Mar 30, 2003

Show notes

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the actress Kristin Scott Thomas. She was born in Redruth, Cornwall in 1960. Her father, a Naval pilot, was killed in a crash when she was five. Her mother married another pilot six years later, but he was also killed under similar circumstances. Kristin moved around the country with her parents and four siblings until she went to Cheltenham Ladies College at the age of eight, where she was 'always bottom of the class'.

On leaving school she didn't go to drama school, but took up a teaching course instead. When she tried to move over to the acting course she was told the only way she'd get to play Lady Macbeth was if she joined an amateur dramatic society. Stung, she moved to Paris where she was encouraged by the family she was working for to enroll at a Parisian drama school, which she did. She has worked almost constantly since, in France, England and America, on stage, television and film.

Her first starring film role was opposite Prince in his film Under the Cherry Moon and others soon followed. Among her most famous roles are Lady Brenda in A Handful of Dust, Fiona in Four Weddings and a Funeral, and Katherine Clifton in The English Patient. She has lived in Paris ever since moving there at the age of 19 and is married to a French obstetrician, Francois Olivennes. The couple have three children aged 14, 10 and two. Kristin Scott Thomas is in London to appear in Chekov's Three Sisters at the Playhouse in the West End. This is her first British stage appearance.

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

Favourite track: Morgen, Op.27.No 4 by Richard Strauss Book: Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen Luxury: A pair of mules by Christian Louboutin

Claude-Michel Schonberg Mar 23, 2003

Show notes

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the composer of the hit musicals Les Miserables and Miss Saigon, Claude-Michel Schönberg. Claude-Michel always knew he would be a composer. As a small boy growing up in Brittany he would play the piano and compose pieces for his mother. He dreamt of getting away from his little village on the French coast and going to live in Paris and compose operas.

To please his mother Claude-Michel went to University to study mathematics, but whilst he was there he formed a band and began writing songs. They caught the attention of an EMI A&R man which resulted in two singles and a job for Claude-Michel as an A&R assistant. Claude-Michel enjoyed a brief career as a pop star, when he had a huge hit in France with Le Premier Pas (The first date) - a song that is still played on the radio there today. During this time he had met lyricist Alain Boublil who had been impressed with his pop songs and both were keen to take on a bigger project. The result was La Révolution Française which did moderately well in France. The duo perfected their skills when they went on to create the hugely successful musicals Les Miserables, Miss Saigon and Martin Guerre.

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

Favourite track: Beim Schlagengehen by Richard Strauss Book: All the Little Live Things by Wallace Earle Stegner Luxury: Grand piano

Nick Danziger Mar 16, 2003

Show notes

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the photo journalist Nick Danziger. Nick was born in London but grew up in Monaco and Switzerland. He developed a taste for adventure and travel from a young age, and, inspired by the comic-strip Belgian reporter Tintin, took off on his first trip to Paris aged 13. Without passport or air ticket, he managed to enter the country and travel around, selling sketches to make money.

Nick's initial ambition was to be an artist, and he attended art school, got an MA and representation in a gallery. But his desire for travel remained - he applied and was awarded a Winston Churchill Memorial Fellowship in 1982 and used it to follow ancient trade routes - he travelled on foot or traditional local transport from Turkey to China and documented his adventures in diaries. The diaries formed his first book, the best-selling Danziger's Travels, and he never looked back. He has since travelled around the world taking photographs and in 1991 made his first documentary in Afghanistan, War Lives and Videotape, based on children abandoned in the Marastoon mental asylum in Kabul. It was shown as part of the BBC's video diaries series and won the Prix Italia for best television documentary series.

Nick has since travelled the world taking photographs and making documentaries about the people he has met. He has published four books, including his latest, The British, for which he returned to his roots.

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

Favourite track: The Girl From Ipanema by Stan Getz Book: 100 Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez Luxury: Pencils, paper and watercolours

Vic Reeves Mar 09, 2003

Show notes

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the comedian Jim Moir, best known by the name of his alter ego Vic Reeves. Jim was born in Leeds but soon moved to Darlington with his family. He attended the local school and left with one O level in Art. He fulfilled the expectations of his school by getting a job in a factory, completing his apprenticeship and working there for four years. However, he was bored so he moved to London with three friends. After trying a few different jobs he began running club nights - with music, acts and entertainment. He would hire a venue and the bands and he would be the compere.

Jim decided to take on the persona of Vic Reeves as it gave him an excuse to act up. A comedy night came up and instead of booking three comedians, he decided to do the whole night himself. Vic Reeves' Big Night Out was born. After teaming up with Bob Mortimer, a solicitor who had been in the audience of one of his shows, the show went from strength to strength. It was a huge success and TV rights were fought over by the BBC and Channel 4. Since then, he has appeared on both channels with a variety of programmes including The Smell of Reeves and Mortimer, Shooting Stars and Randall And Hopkirk (Deceased). The programmes have won BAFTA Awards for Originality and Best Live Performance plus British Comedy Awards.

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

Favourite track: Lark Ascending by Vaughan Williams Book: Three Men in a Boat by Jerome K Jerome Luxury: Potato seeds

Gene Pitney Mar 02, 2003

Show notes

"Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the singer-songwriter Gene Pitney. Gene grew up in Rockville, Connecticut, the middle child of a large family. His father worked in the local mills and the family sold fruit and vegetables from their garden to supplement this income. A shy child, Gene says that performing couldn't have been further from his mind, although he enjoyed singing. His first solo performance at school resulted in an embarrassing whimper as Gene was petrified by the expectant audience.

In his teens he began to learn the guitar and piano, and formed a local band whilst at high school, finding that performing was a good way to overcome his shyness. Spotted by what Gene calls "the proverbial fat man with a cigar", he was taken to New York and recording contracts soon followed. Soon his songs were being recorded by some of the biggest stars of the time - Hello Mary Lou was released by Rick Nelson, Roy Orbison recorded Today's Teardrops as the B-side to his million-selling single, Blue Angel, and Rubber Ball became a worldwide hit for US artist Bobby Vee and UK artist Marty Wilde. By the mid sixties Gene had found international success with the Bacharach song Twenty Four Hours From Tulsa. In 1990 he had his first number one in this country with Something's Gotten Hold Of My Heart, a duet with Marc Almond.

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

Favourite track: The Last Song by Elton John Book: The Giant Book of Mensa Puzzles by Robert Allen Luxury: Case of Opus One wine

Our TOPPODCAST Picks

Follow Us

Stay Connected

Related Podcasts

Links

Stay Connected