x

75% of people globally want unbiased news (Pew Research) but are concerned they're not getting that.

Get balanced coverage with Symby. See how stories are covered across diverse outlets and spot when one side covers a story the other skips.

PODCAST

Private Passions

Guests from all walks of life discuss their musical passions and talk about the influence music has had on their lives.

music personal journals

All Episodes

37:15

Misan Harriman

Private Passions ·

2022/03/20

Misan Harriman didn’t become a photographer till five years ago, when his wife gave him a camera for his fortieth birthday. Since then he’s become world-famous, photographing celebrities such as Tom Cruise, Cate Blanchett, and Meghan Markle – his was the romantic black-and-white photograph of Harry and Meghan announcing her pregnancy last year. Alongside these high-profile celebrity commissions, he’s also become a photographer known for documenting Extinction Rebellion, anti-Trump protests, and the

en

35:51

Katy Brand

Private Passions ·

2022/03/13

Katy Brand talks to Michael Berkeley about obsession, opera, brass bands and juggling her career as a comedian, actor, novelist and screenwriter. On television, Katy Brand’s Big Ass Comedy Show ran for three series and won her a British Comedy Award, and she has appeared in everything from Peep Show to Midsomer Murders. Her stand-up shows at the Edinburgh Festival have been highly acclaimed, and she is a regular on BBC Radio comedy and drama. Katy has starred in musicals such as West Side Story and

en

40:23

Esther Rantzen

Private Passions ·

2022/03/06

Back when Mrs Thatcher was prime minister, it was said there were three powerful women in Britain. There was Mrs Thatcher herself; there was the Queen; and there was Esther Rantzen. Breaking into television at a time when it was very much a man’s world, she became one of the most recognisable and powerful voices in the country, thanks to her Sunday-night show, That’s Life, which ran for 21 years. In today’s fragmented television world, it’s almost unbelievable quite how popular that programme was in

en

38:19

Theaster Gates

Private Passions ·

2022/02/27

Theaster Gates is a potter, a sculptor, a film-maker, a curator of black history, a real estate developer and a professor of fine art in Chicago, where he lives - and where he’s also transformed a whole run-down area near the university. When he was made a professor in 2007, he bought a derelict bank for a dollar, tore out the urinals, cut them up and sold them off at five thousand dollars each as artworks – thereby raising enough money to create a large new art centre. That was just the beginning,

en

40:41

Kate Bingham

Private Passions ·

2022/02/20

On 8 December 2020, a 90-year-old grandmother became the first person in the world to be given the Covid jab as part of a mass vaccination programme. Within six months more than 30 million people in the UK had received at least one dose. Many people say that extraordinary achievement would not have been possible without Dame Kate Bingham. A venture capitalist with a first-class degree in biochemistry, in May 2020 she was asked by the Prime Minister to head a new Vaccine Taskforce, leading British

en

35:03

Sanjeev Gupta

Private Passions ·

2022/02/13

The geologist Sanjeev Gupta tells Michael Berkeley about his search for evidence of ancient life in rocks on Mars with the help of NASA’s Mars Rovers, and he plays unique recordings of sounds from the surface of Mars. Professor Sanjeev Gupta is a scientist who takes the long view, the very long view, into Deep Time. As the Royal Society Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellow at Imperial College London, he investigates how landscapes have evolved over vast spans of time. His work as a geologist has

en

34:50

Barbara Taylor Bradford

Private Passions ·

2022/02/10

Barbara Taylor Bradford’s life story is every bit as extraordinary as one of her novels. As she tells Michael Berkeley in a warm and frank interview, she was born in the back streets of Leeds in 1933, left school at 15 to work as a typist at the Yorkshire Evening Post, and at 18 was the first editor of the paper’s 'Woman’s Page'. By 20 she was an established Fleet Street journalist. And then came the novels - her first book, A Woman of Substance, was published in 1979 and has sold over 32 million

en

32:55

Jamila Gavin

Private Passions ·

2022/02/09

Jamila Gavin was born in the foothills of the Himalayas; her Indian father and English mother met as teachers in Iran and married in Mumbai. By the age of 12, she’d lived in an Indian palace in the Punjab, a bungalow in Poona - and a terraced house in Ealing, west London. Ealing was where the family settled in 1953; Jamila went on to study at London’s Trinity College of Music, and to become a sound engineer and then a director in television. She didn’t start to write until her late thirties,

en

35:09

Katherine Parkinson

Private Passions ·

2022/01/23

Actress, comedian and playwright Katherine Parkinson shares her favourite music with Michael Berkeley.Two years out of drama school and heavily in debt, Katherine Parkinson was offered a part in a new television comedy series The IT Crowd. As all fans of the cult series know, she played Jen, the hopeless boss of two computer geeks – she was the so-called “normal” one. The series ran from 2006 to 2013, with audiences of two million. For Katherine Parkinson, it made her career, winning her a British

en

36:55

Dame Stephanie Shirley

Private Passions ·

2022/01/16

Dame Stephanie Shirley arrived in Britain from Vienna as a five-year-old, without her parents. It was 1939, and she was one of 10,000 Jewish children brought by train on the Kindertransport to escape the Nazis. She went on to become one of the most successful businesswomen of the 20th century; in 1962, working from home, she founded one of the first tech-start-ups: an all-woman software company, Freelance Programmers, which was ultimately valued at almost $3 billion, making seventy of her staff

en

39:50

David Nutt

Private Passions ·

2022/01/09

Professor David Nutt is an expert on drugs, and how they work on the brain. He trained as a psychiatrist, and for almost 50 years his research has focused on new drug treatments for anxiety, depression and addiction. In the late 1980s, at Bristol University, he set up the first unit in Britain to bridge psychiatry and pharmacology. He’s now at Imperial College, where he is Professor of Neuro-psychopharmacology. He has published hundreds of scientific papers and 27 books. All of this makes David Nutt

en

37:19

Meg Rosoff

Private Passions ·

2022/01/02

Meg Rosoff waited until she was 45 to write her first novel, How I Live Now, the story of a passionate love affair between young teenage cousins, set against the background of apocalyptic war. It changed her life, selling a million copies and becoming a film starring Saoirse Ronan. She gave up a series of unfulfilling jobs in advertising and reinvented herself as a writer. Over the last 16 years she’s published eight more novels, as well as eight books for younger readers, including four about

en

41:35

Valentina Harris

Private Passions ·

2021/12/26

Over the last 40 years, Valentina Harris has done more than anyone else to convince the British public that there is a lot more to Italian food than pizza and Spaghetti Bolognese. Her television series and her more-than-50 books have brought her passion for Italian food, wine and culture to a huge audience. She tells Michael Berkeley about her childhood in Tuscany, choosing a romantic song by Georgio Gabor for her aristocratic Italian mother and Stravinsky for her father, who taught her to speak

en

38:20

John Cleese

Private Passions ·

2021/12/12

John Cleese has been making us laugh for more than 50 years. Back in the 1970s, he became a comedy legend in Monty Python and in Fawlty Towers, and he now has a second generation of fans, discovering for themselves his unique combination of surreal humour, verbal pyrotechnics and farce. So much so that even now, as he enters his eighties, John Cleese is recognised in the street all across the world. With almost six million Twitter followers, his is still a powerful voice, mocking those in power and

en

36:20

Hayley Mills

Private Passions ·

2021/12/05

In a warm and frank interview, Hayley Mills talks to Michael Berkeley about the joys and difficulties of growing up in Hollywood as a child star and about the music that reminds her of her family. Hayley Mills was described by Walt Disney as ‘the greatest movie find in 25 years’. After winning a Bafta at the age of just 12 in the British crime thriller Tiger Bay alongside her father, John Mills, she was signed up by Disney for a six-movie deal which included The Parent Trap, In Search of the

en

33:58

Iain Sinclair

Private Passions ·

2021/11/28

Iain Sinclair describes himself as an urban prophet: in book after book, he has walked through London, recording the graffiti, the rubbish, the electric-green scum of a canal, the things you glimpse out of the corner of your eye and perhaps would rather not see. He brings to these pilgrimages many rich layers of reading about the city, interpreting what he sees through the eyes of past writers, particularly William Blake. In fact, he seems always to be walking with ghosts. It’s very hard to

en

37:47

Nick Lane

Private Passions ·

2021/11/21

Nick Lane is a scientist who peers down microscopes at incredibly small cells in order to ask really big questions. How did life on Earth begin? Why is life the way it is? Why do we have sex? Why do we die?He is Professor of Evolutionary Biochemistry at University College London and the Co-Director of UCL’s Centre for Life’s Origins and Evolution. He is also the award-winning author of five books, and his next – Transformer: The Deep Chemistry of Life and Death – is due out in May.Nick Lane tells

en

34:47

Tamsin Edwards

Private Passions ·

2021/11/07

In a special edition of Private Passions for COP26, Michael Berkeley talks to Dr Tamsin Edwards about her career as a climate scientist and her lifelong passion for music. As a child, Tamsin wanted to be a concert pianist and she went on to play the clarinet, saxophone and double bass, and to sing in choirs. Music is still a vital part of her life but now she is one of our leading climate scientists, at King’s College London, studying the uncertainties of climate model predictions, particularly in

en

42:31

Matthew Walker

Private Passions ·

2021/10/31

In this special programme for Radio 3’s Twilight Season, Michael Berkeley’s guest is the sleep scientist Professor Matthew Walker.So many of us have trouble sleeping, and are longing to find the secret of a good night’s rest, that when Matthew Walker goes to parties he is more likely to tell people he is a dolphin trainer than the world’s leading expert on sleep science. Otherwise, he says, ‘for me the evening is over’.Matthew began his career in Britain, training as a doctor, but he is now

en

40:45

Rory Stewart

Private Passions ·

2021/10/28

Diplomat, Soldier, Explorer, Politician, Academic – Rory Stewart defies easy labels. By his own admission, his identity is complicated: he describes himself as “a Scot, born in Hong Kong and brought up in Malaysia”. After Eton, he went on to Oxford and to the Diplomatic Service, but then abandoned this conventional career path and spent two years walking across Afghanistan and Iran. He became a deputy governor in Iraq after the 2003 invasion, and then ten years later entered British politics as a

en

484 results

Similar Podcasts

Pasquale Maassen Soundcloud

Pasquale Maassen

Marian Klose

Marian Klose

sevenism

sevenism

Dean Delray"s LET THERE BE TALK

Cactus Radio Network

Word In Your Ear

Mark Ellen, David Hepworth and Alex Gold