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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

35:28

Ray Cooper

Private Passions ·

2024/02/18

The percussionist Ray Cooper is often referred to as the ‘father of rock and roll percussion’. He is renowned for his exuberant stage presence and for incorporating unusual instruments, including cowbells, glockenspiels, timpani and tubular bells to name but a few. He has worked with many of the world’s leading musicians including Pink Floyd, the Rolling Stones, Billy Joel, Carly Simon, Eric Clapton, Sting, Art Garfunkel, Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Ringo Starr and George Harrison. His most

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36:08

Raymond Blanc

Private Passions ·

2024/02/11

Raymond Blanc is one of the finest chefs in the world and he is completely self-taught. He grew up in post-war France in Besancon in the Comte region of eastern France between Burgundy and the Jura Mountains with his four brothers and sisters. Raymond’s mother – Maman Blanc - was his culinary inspiration. She would whip up delicious fresh, seasonal, local dishes, which became his guiding principal when he opened his first restaurant in Oxford, Les Quat’ Saisons, in September 1977. Within two years

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37:34

Louise Welsh

Private Passions ·

2024/02/04

Louise Welsh worked in a second-hand bookshop in Glasgow before she took the plunge to become a writer, bursting onto the scene in 2002 with her prize-winning crime novel, The Cutting Room. As the author of seven novels and the Plague Times Trilogy, she doesn’t shy away from difficult subjects and unpalatable truths in her fiction, exploring issues of identity, sexuality, class, immigration, viral pandemics and shady economics. Her latest book, To the Dogs, is a thriller centred around a university

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36:07

Neil Hannon

Private Passions ·

2024/01/28

Neil Hannon is a singer, songwriter and the driving force behind the band The Divine Comedy, which he founded in 1989. Along with hit singles such as National Express, and 12 albums with the band, his music appears in an impressively varied range of settings – including original songs for the recent film Wonka, a chamber opera inspired by Tolstoy for Covent Garden, and the theme tune for the sitcom Father Ted. Neil talks to Michael Berkeley about growing up in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland with a

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34:53

Lorna Dawson

Private Passions ·

2024/01/21

Professor Lorna Dawson is one of the UK’s leading forensic scientists. She examines soil in order to solve crimes. For over thirty years her pioneering techniques, using soil evidence on shoes, clothing and vehicles, have led to numerous high-profile convictions. Her work has received global recognition and now inspires crime writers such as Ian Rankin and Ann Cleeves. Lorna is head of the centre for soil forensics at the James Hutton Institute in Aberdeen, which conducts research into land, crops,

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36:11

Merlin Sheldrake

Private Passions ·

2024/01/14

Merlin Sheldrake is a biologist and writer with a mission: to make us look at and understand fungi. While we’re familiar with mushrooms, truffles and toadstools, there are millions of varieties of fungi all around us; in the soil, in our bodies, in the air we breathe - and only 6% of them have been identified. Merlin’s book “Entangled Life: how fungi make our worlds, change our minds and shape our futures”, was an international best-seller. It caught the eye of the Icelandic singer and musician

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38:20

Nina Stibbe

Private Passions ·

2024/01/07

Nina Stibbe was fifty when she first became a published writer with Love Nina, a collection of letters she wrote to her sister in the 1980s about her time working as a very inexperienced young nanny for Mary-Kay Wilmers, editor of the London Review of books.She found herself running a home where Alan Bennett often appeared at suppertime and other famous neighbours and people would pop round - though Nina had often no idea who they were. Her affectionate, witty memoir won non-fiction Book of the Year

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38:10

Johnny Flynn

Private Passions ·

2023/12/31

Johnny Flynn is a polymath – as comfortable as an actor on stage and screen as he is writing and performing songs. You have perhaps seen him as Mr Knightley in the film Emma or as Ian Fleming in Operation Mincemeat. In his latest film, One Life, he stars alongside Anthony Hopkins, as the young Nicholas Winton, who helped Jewish children flee from the Nazis in what became known as the Kindertransport. He’s currently starring as Richard Burton in the play The Motive and the Cue, the story of how

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36:11

Dame Ottoline Leyser

Private Passions ·

2023/12/10

Professor Dame Ottoline Leyser first realised plants are extraordinary and astonishing at school, when introduced to the round and wrinkled peas of Gregor Mendel. She is fascinated by plant genetics and as Regius Professor of Botany at the University of Cambridge her particular focus has been on a hormone called auxin which controls the growth of plants. In 2020, she was appointed the chief executive of UK Research and Innovation whose mission is to work in partnership with research organisations,

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37:55

Walter Murch

Private Passions ·

2023/12/03

Walter Murch is a Hollywood legend. He’s won three Oscars for his sound and editing work on Apocalypse Now and The English Patient, and his credits include some of the most acclaimed and discussed films of the past half century – The Godfather trilogy, The Conversation, The Talented Mr Ripley. He co-wrote the first movie George Lucas ever directed – the dystopian science fiction drama THX 1138. In 1985 he made his own directorial debut with Return to Oz – an unofficial sequel to The Wizard of Oz

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36:27

Kevin O'Hare

Private Passions ·

2023/11/26

Kevin O’Hare is the director of the Royal Ballet and he probably finds it hard to remember a time when dance wasn’t part of his life. He started young, and joined the Royal Ballet School at the age of eleven. He went on to dance with Sadler’s Wells and Birmingham Royal Ballet, taking on roles such as Prince Siegfried in Swan Lake, Albrecht in Giselle and Romeo in Kenneth MacMillan's Romeo and Juliet. He retired from the stage in 2000, at the age of 35, but before long he was back in the world of

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32:56

Daniel Handler

Private Passions ·

2023/11/19

The best-selling American writer Daniel Handler is perhaps better known by his pen name, Lemony Snicket. Lemony is the cynical narrator of a thirteen book saga called A Series of Unfortunate Events. It’s the tale of three unlucky orphans, Violet, Klaus and Sonny Baudelaire, who are hounded by their guardian, the sinister Count Olaf. The books are a phenomenon, selling more than 70 million copies around the world, along with a film starring Jim Carrey and a series on Netflix. Lemony has published

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39:40

Mali Morris

Private Passions ·

2023/11/12

The abstract painter Mali Morris is fascinated by colour and light, and has been exploring their possibilities in her work for more than 50 years. She was born in Wales and studied at the University of Newcastle, where the Pop Art pioneer Richard Hamilton was one of her teachers. He brought her and fellow students news of New York which she says “seemed as far away to me as the moon”. Mali herself taught at a number of art schools including Chelsea, the Slade School and the Royal College of Art.

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34:48

Abdulrazak Gurnah

Private Passions ·

2023/11/05

Abdulrazak Gurnah won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2021, honouring a career in which he’s written ten novels, and many short stories and essays. He’s an Emeritus Professor at the University of Kent. He was born in 1948 on the island of Zanzibar off the coast of East Africa, and first came to Britain as a refugee at the age of 18, in the aftermath of the Zanzibar Revolution. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, he recalled how, even as a young schoolboy, he loved writing stories. He also

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41:45

Chris Addison

Private Passions ·

2023/10/29

Chris Addison has built his career on laughter, as a stand-up comedian, a panellist on shows such as Mock the Week, and as an actor and director. You perhaps saw him as Ollie, the hapless junior Whitehall adviser in The Thick of It, the political satire created by Armando Iannucci. He’s worked as a director on another highly-acclaimed comedy in the corridors of power: the Emmy Award-winning Veep, set in and around the White House. He has also co-created and directed Breeders, a brutally honest

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38:03

Black History Month

Private Passions ·

2023/10/22

A special edition for Black History Month celebrating the lives and music of black women. Michael Berkeley revisits some of the many inspiring guests from the last few years who chose music written or performed by black women, and who have made their own important contributions to black history: artists Helen Cammock and Theaster Gates, writers Kit de Waal, Nadifa Mohamed and Isabel Wilkerson, jazz saxophonist YolanDa Brown, broadcaster Johny Pitts, and Kadiatu Kanneh-Mason, mother of seven

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36:48

Brian Cox

Private Passions ·

2023/10/15

Brian Cox has enjoyed a prolific career in theatre, film and television over the last sixty years, working with the most esteemed theatre companies and renowned Hollywood and TV directors.Born in Dundee, he was obsessed by film from an early age and after seeing Albert Finney in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning decided he could make a go of it too. Over the years he’s never been afraid to take on difficult, unlikeable characters, including Hannibal Lector in Manhunter, Hermann Göring in Nuremberg

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36:46

Fay Dowker

Private Passions ·

2023/10/08

Professor Fay Dowker is a theoretical physicist fascinated by space and time. She was obsessed with maths from a young age and went on to study at Cambridge University. There Professor Stephen Hawking became her mentor and a very close friend. She is currently Professor of Theoretical Physics at Imperial College London where she researches “quantum gravity” – how the force of gravity works on the universe's tiniest particles. Fay's musical choices include John Coltrane, Shostakovich, Bach and

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45:14

Olivia Harrison

Private Passions ·

2023/10/01

Olivia Harrison is a prizewinning film producer and charity director. Last year she published Came the Lightening, a poignant collection of twenty poems dedicated to her late husband George Harrison of the Beatles. George died in November 2001, at the age of just 58, and Olivia describes her poems as ‘thoughts, feelings and words about life and death, but mostly love and our journey to the end’. Olivia grew up in Los Angeles, and in her early 20s she joined A&M Records. She first met George in

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37:14

Peter Frankopan

Private Passions ·

2023/09/26

Peter Frankopan is a historian who likes to take on big ideas, sweeping across many centuries and national boundaries. In his acclaimed book The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, published in 2015, he argued that the Persian empire gave rise to the West and he explored the importance of the trading routes that linked Arabia and Asia to Europe, and how they spread ideas, culture and religion. The book was a bestseller in the UK, China and India and even inspired a musical collaboration between

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494 results

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