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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

50:02

Thomas Adès

Private Passions ·

2024/08/27

Thomas Adès is one of the UK’s foremost and most successful composers. His first opera, Powder Her Face, was premiered in 1995, when he was just 24. With its racy subject matter, based on the life of the Duchess of Argyll, it put him squarely on the musical map, winning widespread critical acclaim. His catalogue now includes almost 90 works, with commissions from the world’s leading orchestras and festivals, two further operas, The Tempest and The Exterminating Angel, and an epic ballet score for

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49:36

Clio Barnard

Private Passions ·

2024/07/14

The director Clio Barnard won prizes and critical acclaim for her first feature film The Arbor: it blended fact and fiction to depict the short, troubled life of the brilliant Bradford playwright Andrea Dunbar. Since then she’s taken on a wide range of British stories. She directed Claire Danes and Tom Hiddleston in The Essex Serpent, a six part adaptation of the best-selling book by Sarah Perry. She returned to Bradford for Ali and Ava, a love story which won a BAFTA nomination for outstanding

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47:58

Richard Thompson

Private Passions ·

2024/07/07

Richard Thompson began his career as a guitarist and a songwriter when he was still a teenager – and six decades on, his passion for making and sharing music is as strong as ever. In the late 1960s he co-founded the pioneering folk-rock band Fairport Convention. In 1969 alone, they released three albums. All featured the voice of Sandy Denny, and one - Liege and Lief - was later acclaimed as the most influential folk album of all time. In the early 1970s, Richard left the band to form a decade-long

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51:44

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall

Private Passions ·

2024/06/30

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall has long been passionate about food – not just about what we eat and how we cook it, but about how it’s produced and the wider environmental consequences of our appetites. He first appeared on our TV screens in 1995 in A Cook on the Wild Side - foraging for roadkill and frying up woodlouse fritters, earning him the nickname Hugh Fearlessly-Eats-it-all.He went on to document his early attempts as a smallholder trying to produce seasonal, ethical food in the River Cottage

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49:04

Olivia Laing

Private Passions ·

2024/06/23

Olivia Laing has won prizes and critical acclaim for her books, but readily admits that she led quite a wild life before becoming a writer: she dropped out of university, lived in a treehouse on an anti-road protest and later trained and worked as a herbalist. Her non-fiction books include The Trip to Echo Spring, which examined how writers who were damagingly addicted to alcohol could still produce great literature. She drew on her own experience of extreme loneliness in New York to write The

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49:40

Frank Gardner

Private Passions ·

2024/06/16

Frank Gardner is the BBC’s security correspondent, familiar to millions of viewers and listeners from his reports, which regularly take him around the world.He’s also written six books, including a memoir about his 25 years in the Middle East, and more recently, four thrillers about the adventures of MI6 operative Luke Carlton. In 2004, while filming in Saudi Arabia, Frank and his cameraman Simon Cumbers were ambushed by al-Qaeda gunmen. Simon was killed and Frank was shot six times and left for

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47:23

Brian Cox

Private Passions ·

2024/06/09

For years Professor Brian Cox has encouraged us to look up to and beyond the stars and to understand that the universe is very, very large and our place in it very, very small. He is Professor of Particle Physics at the University of Manchester – and through his extensive work on television and radio, he’s shared the wonders of the universe and of science with millions of us around the world. As a teenager and then a student, Brian combined his passion for physics with a parallel career in pop

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50:55

Dorothy Byrne

Private Passions ·

2024/06/02

Dorothy Byrne has worked in journalism for more than 40 years, including almost 20 years as Head of News and Current Affairs at Channel 4 from 2003 to 2020. She talks to Michael Berkeley about the sexism and harassment she experienced as a young producer, which she detailed in her MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh Television Festival in 2019, in which she added that she would still recommend journalism to young women today - ‘in what other line of work, when... you hear of some absolute disgrace,

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50:02

Imtiaz Dharker

Private Passions ·

2024/05/26

Imtiaz Dharker was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2014, and has published seven collections of her verse. She’s performed her poems to thousands of students at Poetry Live events, a scheme founded by her late husband Simon Rhys Powell. Imtiaz was born in Lahore in Pakistan and was six months old when her family moved to Glasgow. There she grew up as – in her words – “a Muslim Calvinist”. When she was 17 she fell in love with her first husband, married in secret and eloped to India. As

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48:26

Harry Cliff

Private Passions ·

2024/05/19

Harry Cliff is a particle physicist working on the Large Hadron Collider – the huge particle detector buried deep underground at CERN near Geneva. He’s part of an international team of around 1,400 physicists, engineers and computer scientists studying the basic building blocks of our universe, in search of answers to some of the biggest questions in modern physics. Harry is also passionate about explaining these mysteries to the widest possible audience. He has curated two major exhibitions at the

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50:17

Alison Owen

Private Passions ·

2024/05/12

Alison Owen is one of the UK’s leading film producers. Her credits range from the zombie apocalypse comedy Shaun of the Dead to Saving Mr Banks, the story of the making of the film Mary Poppins, starring Emma Thompson and Tom Hanks. Her most recent film is based on the short life of singer-songwriter Amy Winehouse and the making of her album Back to Black. Alison probably knows better than most what it’s like to be a young woman in the spotlight, as the mother of a high-profile star herself: the

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44:44

Percival Everett

Private Passions ·

2024/05/12

The American writer Percival Everett is enjoying a moment in the spotlight: his novel The Trees was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2022; an earlier book, Erasure, was adapted into the recent Oscar-winning film American Fiction; and his latest novel, James, is already a best-seller in the United States. It’s a powerful re-telling of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, from the perspective of Huck’s enslaved friend Jim. In the past four decades he's published two dozen novels, and

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47:12

Edith Hall

Private Passions ·

2024/04/28

Edith Hall is Professor of Classics at Durham University – and her passion for her subject reaches far beyond the lecture hall or seminar room. She wants us all to understand how the writing and thinking of ancient Greece still influence how we write and think today. She leads a campaign called Advocating Classics Education, to promote teaching in state secondary schools, and her books include Aristotle’s Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life, and Ancient Greeks: Ten Ways They Shaped the

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49:46

Sathnam Sanghera

Private Passions ·

2024/04/21

Sathnam Sanghera is a best-selling writer and journalist. He grew up in Wolverhampton to Punjabi parents in a home where, in his words, “no one read books or owned them, let alone wrote them”. When he started school, he couldn’t speak English but he went to graduate from Cambridge University with a first-class degree in English Language and Literature.He started out writing for newspapers, winning the Young Journalist of the Year at the British Press Awards in 2002. He now writes for The Times. In

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53:03

Professor Sue Black

Private Passions ·

2024/04/14

Professor Lady Sue Black is one of the world’s leading forensic scientists. She says “I have never been spooked by the dead. It is the living who terrify me. The dead are much more predictable and co-operative.”Her painstaking work and expertise mean she can work out how people have met their end, and police forces, the Foreign Office and the UN have called on her evidence in countless high profile investigations. She was the lead forensic anthropologist to the British forensic team during the

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51:51

David Mitchell

Private Passions ·

2024/04/07

David Mitchell is the author of nine time-traversing, genre-bending novels. His first, Ghostwritten, was published 25 years ago, and his third, Cloud Atlas, made his name around the world, and later became a Hollywood film. It follows six interlocking lives in an ambitious narrative that circles the globe and travels through time from 19th-century New Zealand to a post-apocalyptic future in Hawaii – and back again.Closer to home, he drew on his own childhood in Worcestershire in his coming-of-age

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35:44

John Krebs

Private Passions ·

2024/03/31

John Krebs is a zoologist who has specialised in the behaviour of birds. Although he was the son of a Nobel prize-winning chemist, ornithology was a very early passion: he hand-reared birds as a child and allowed them to fly freely around at family mealtimes. In his later research, he discovered that birds that store seeds for the winter have remarkable spatial memory and an enlarged hippocampus – the part of the brain essential for remembering. Alongside his academic career, he’s taken on

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36:34

Helena Newman

Private Passions ·

2024/03/17

Helena Newman has many strings to her bow, She is the Chairman of Sotheby’s Europe and the Worldwide Head of Impressionist & Modern Art. She is one of only a handful of female auctioneers and presided over the bidding of the most valuable painting ever sold at auction in Europe – Gustav Klimt’s Lady with a Fan – which went for $108 million in June 2023. Helena also plays the violin and the piano and her musical background has come in handy when standing on the auction block. She also loves the

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42:36

Mark Cousins - Sound of Cinema Sunday

Private Passions ·

2024/03/10

Michael Berkeley’s guest is the film-maker, producer and writer Mark Cousins. His documentary work includes The Story of Film, an epic 900-minute journey through the history of cinema, from the earliest moving images in the late 19th century to the digital innovations of our own times. Mark has interviewed many of the most significant directors and actors of the past half century, and with Tilda Swinton he created the Screen Machine, a large portable cinema which they and their supporters sometimes

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35:50

Michael Winterbottom

Private Passions ·

2024/02/25

Michael Winterbottom is one of Britain’s most prolific and eclectic film directors: his work encompasses political thrillers and pop culture, reworkings of classic novels and retelling real events.He’s made three films based on the novels of Thomas Hardy, including a version of Jude the Obscure with Christopher Eccleston and Kate Winslet.He’s worked extensively with Steve Coogan, starting in 2001 with 24 Hour Party People, in which Coogan played the Manchester music impresario Tony Wilson. More

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