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PODCAST

Desert Island Discs

Eight tracks, a book and a luxury: what would you take to a desert island? Guests share the soundtrack of their lives.

society & culture personal journals

All Episodes

51:36

Professor Lucy Easthope, emergency planner

Desert Island Discs ·

2025/07/05

Professor Lucy Easthope is an adviser on disaster recovery and planning. She’s an expert in planning for and reacting to major incidents: natural disaster, terrorist attacks, pandemics and fires, and is the visiting Professor of Mass Fatalities and Pandemics at the University of Bath.Born in Merseyside in 1978, Lucy cites the impact of watching the Hillsborough football disaster on TV as a child as one of the driving reasons of her decision to pursue a career in disaster management. Her work has

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50:23

Romesh Ranganathan, comedian and broadcaster

Desert Island Discs ·

2025/06/29

Romesh Ranganathan is a comedian and BAFTA-winning broadcaster who has been a fixture on British television screens for the past decade. In addition to his TV shows and stand-up tours he presents the Weakest Link on BBC One, Radio Two’s Saturday morning show and another weekly Radio Two programme in which he shares his passion for hip hop music. Romesh was born in Crawley in West Sussex where he still lives. His parents came to the UK from Sri Lanka in 1975. His father Ranga was an accountant who

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51:17

Abdulrazak Gurnah, writer

Desert Island Discs ·

2025/06/22

Abdulrazak Gurnah is emeritus Professor of Post-Colonial Literatures at the University of Kent and the 2021 Nobel Prize winner in Literature. Born in Zanzibar in 1948, the second of six children, Abdulrazak grew up in the dying days of the island’s status as a British protectorate before independence was declared in 1963. The revolution which followed made Zanzibar an undesirable and unsafe place to live in for young men of Arab heritage. In 1967, he left to seek opportunities in Britain.He

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50:58

Professor Dame Ijeoma Uchegbu, scientist

Desert Island Discs ·

2025/06/15

Professor Dame Ijeoma Uchegbu is Professor of Pharmaceutical Nanoscience at University College London and President of Wolfson College, University of Cambridge. She has devoted her career to harnessing the potential of nanoparticles – which are less than a thousandth of the width of a human hair - to take medicines to hard-to-reach areas of the body such as the back of the eye and the brain. Using nanoparticles in this way is said to increase the efficacy of medicines and reduce side effects

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49:54

Danny Dyer, actor

Desert Island Discs ·

2025/06/08

Actor Danny Dyer became a household name when he joined the cast of EastEnders as Mick Carter, landlord of the Queen Victoria pub. He recently stole the show from some stiff competition playing Freddie Jones in the television adaptation of Jilly Cooper’s novel Rivals which won him a Royal Television Society Award for Best Supporting Actor.Danny was born in Custom House, East London in 1977. He loved drama at school and, with his teacher’s encouragement, he signed up for after-school classes in north

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35:41

Classic Desert Island Discs - Jack Thorne

Desert Island Discs ·

2025/06/01

Jack Thorne, screenwriter and playwright, shares the eight tracks, book and luxury item he would want with him if cast away on a desert island. With Lauren Laverne.

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35:13

Classic Desert Island Discs - Dame Joan Plowright

Desert Island Discs ·

2025/05/25

Sue Lawley talks to the actor Dame Joan Plowright in a programme first broadcast in 2006. Dame Joan died in January at the age of 95.

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37:53

Classic Desert Island Discs - Colm Toibin

Desert Island Discs ·

2025/05/18

Kirsty Young interviews writer Colm Toibin in a programme first heard in 2016.

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36:52

Classic Desert Island Discs - Dame Louise Casey

Desert Island Discs ·

2025/05/11

Lauren Laverne talks to crossbench peer Dame Louise Casey in a programme from 2021.

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34:55

Classic Desert Island Discs - Warwick Davis

Desert Island Discs ·

2025/05/04

Kirsty Young talks to actor Warwick Davis, in a programme first heard in 2016.

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50:59

Lindsey Hilsum, journalist

Desert Island Discs ·

2025/04/27

Lindsey Hilsum is a multi-award-winning journalist who has been a foreign correspondent for the past four decades. She has been Channel 4’s international editor for the past 22 years and has reported on every continent except Antarctica. After studying French and Spanish at University, she worked as an aid worker in Mexico and Kenya before becoming the East Africa stringer for the BBC World Service. After realising her calling was journalism she devoted her career to covering events around the

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50:58

Donna Ockenden, midwife

Desert Island Discs ·

2025/04/20

Donna Ockenden is a former clinical midwife who led the Ockenden Review which revealed, at the time, the biggest maternity scandal in NHS history. Published in 2022, the review highlighted serious failings in maternity care at the Shrewsbury and Telford Hospital NHS Trust which contributed to the deaths of more than 200 babies and nine mothers.Donna grew up in the village of Aberaman in the Welsh Valleys. She experienced a complicated childhood which included a period living in a homeless shelter

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52:52

Professor Carl Jones, conservation biologist

Desert Island Discs ·

2025/04/13

Professor Carl Jones is a conservation biologist who is best known for saving the Mauritius kestrel from extinction. He is the scientific director of Mauritian Wildlife Foundation, chief scientist at Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust and an honorary professor in ecology and conservation biology at the University of East Anglia.He was born in Carmarthen in Wales and was fascinated with animals from an early age, rearing rescued common kestrels, owls and hawks in his back garden. He studied

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49:15

Cyndi Lauper, singer-songwriter

Desert Island Discs ·

2025/04/06

Cyndi Lauper is a multi-award winning singer and songwriter. She has sold more than fifty million records, won an Emmy for acting and her musical Kinky Boots earned her a Tony and an Oliver award. Born in 1953, Cyndi grew up in a blue collar neighbourhood in New York. Her mother loved music and art and took her children to free exhibitions in New York which inspired Cyndi. As a very young girl, Cyndi listened to her mother’s extensive record collection and mimicked the voices she heard from

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50:52

William Boyd, writer

Desert Island Discs ·

2025/03/30

William Boyd is the author of eighteen novels, five short story collections and numerous screenplays. His first published novel, A Good Man in Africa, was inspired by his childhood in West Africa. He is well known for writing ‘whole life’ novels including Any Human Heart which he adapted as a BAFTA-winning television series. He was born in Accra in Ghana where his Scottish father worked as a doctor, specialising in tropical medicine. In 1964 the family moved to Ibadan, Nigeria where he witnessed

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51:41

Sir Jony Ive, designer

Desert Island Discs ·

2025/03/23

Sir Jony Ive is a designer who is best known for his pioneering work at Apple alongside his friend and colleague, the late Steve Jobs. Jony’s creative vision is behind some of the company’s seminal products which have transformed the way we live today including phones, music players and watches. He was born in Chingford in east London and loved drawing and spending time in his father’s workshop where the two of them made the young Jony’s Christmas presents including a go-kart, a treehouse and a

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50:55

Mina Smallman, activist

Desert Island Discs ·

2025/03/16

Wilhelmina – Mina – Smallman is an activist who campaigns for the safety of women and girls and police reform. She is a former teacher and priest who was the first woman of colour to be an archdeacon in the Church of England.In 2020 her daughters Bibaa and Nicole were murdered as they celebrated Bibaa’s 46th birthday in Fryent Country Park. It later came to light that two policemen, who were guarding the crime scene, had posed for and posted selfies with Bibaa and Nicole’s bodies in the

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50:40

Stephen Mangan, actor

Desert Island Discs ·

2025/03/09

Stephen Mangan is an award winning actor who is also a presenter and writer. His prolific career includes comedic roles in TV hits Green Wing; Episodes and Adrian Mole. He also plays the much loved Nathan in BBC drama The Split and has appeared in many award winning theatre productions in the UK and on Broadway.Born in London to Irish immigrant parents, Stephen studied Law at Cambridge University. His passion though was for acting and after taking time out to care for his mother, he spent three

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50:59

Nemone Lethbridge, lawyer and writer

Desert Island Discs ·

2025/03/02

Nemone Lethbridge is a barrister who was called to the bar in 1956. One of very few female barristers working at the time, she encountered misogyny and was one of the trailblazers for women working in the legal profession who followed behind her.At her first Chambers, she wasn’t allowed to share a toilet with her male colleagues and had to use the facilities in a nearby café. It was hard for her to find work and for some time she represented the Kray twins. After her marriage to a writer, and

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48:58

Nick Cave, singer and writer

Desert Island Discs ·

2025/02/23

Nick Cave is a singer and writer who, with his band Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, has released emotionally intense and provocative music since the mid-Eighties. He is also a novelist, composer and has written film scripts and soundtracks along with his writing partner and Bad Seed Warren Ellis. Nick grew up in Wangaratta, Australia the third of four children. He formed his first band, the Boys Next Door, in 1973 while he was at school. He studied fine art at the Caulfield Institute of Technology in

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