Alan Carr, comedian and chat show host, is known for his love of silliness, dressing up and camp daftness. His stand-up shows have filled arenas, and on TV he co-hosted the Friday Night Project and then his own show - Chatty Man.

Alan was born into a footballing family – his dad, Graham, was a professional player and then a manager. Alan first tried his hand at comedy while reading Theatre Studies at Middlesex University. After he graduated, he took on a range of jobs before his ability to make friends laugh with his stories of working in a call centre in Manchester led him to try stand-up at a local venue. In 2001 he won the City Life Best Newcomer of the Year and the BBC New Comedy Awards.

His break into TV came after a spell as the warm-up man for the Jonathan Ross chat show. He has won many awards including Best Entertainment Show for Alan Carr: Chatty Man at the 2010 TV Choice Awards, the 2013 BAFTA for Best Entertainment Performance and 2013 British Comedy Award for Best Comedy Entertainment Personality. In 2015 he won the National Television Award for Best Chat Show Host.

He and his long term partner Paul were married in January 2018 by Adele - who also organised the wedding, and paid for it.

Presenter: Lauren Laverne Producer: Cathy Drysdale

As one of the Guardian’s first female foreign correspondents, Hella Pick reported on events that shaped the world in the second half of the 20th century, from Martin Luther King's civil rights activism to Watergate, the Gdansk shipyard strikes to the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Born in Vienna in 1929, she was raised by her mother who, in March 1939, put her on a Kindertransport train to Britain to escape the Nazis. Her mother was able to follow her to England a few months later and Hella spent her formative years in the Lake District. After reading Politics at London School of Economics, she worked as commercial editor of a London-based weekly publication called West Africa. After she left, she offered her services to The Guardian – and spent the next 35 years or so with the paper.

While UN correspondent, she worked alongside Alistair Cooke in New York and subsequently held posts as European Integration correspondent, Washington correspondent, Eastern Europe correspondent, and diplomatic editor before retiring in the mid-1990s. Since leaving The Guardian, she has nurtured a new career as a writer, publishing a biography of Simon Wiesenthal and a book about Austria’s post-war history.

BOOK: Scorn by Matthew Parris LUXURY: Recliner armchair FAVOURITE TRACK: Mozart's Marriage of Figaro

Presenter: Lauren Laverne Producer: Cathy Drysdale

Composer Thea Musgrave celebrated her 90th birthday this year, an event marked by celebrations and concerts around the world, including the BBC Proms and the Edinburgh International Festival. She has published more than 150 compositions, including major orchestral works and numerous operas, and continues to write every day.

Thea was born in Edinburgh in May 1928, and still has sharp memories of hearing news of the Dunkirk evacuation in 1940. She learned the piano as a child, but had ambitions to become a doctor. She began medical studies at the University of Edinburgh, but after struggling with the sciences, she switched to the music department, which happened to be in an adjacent building. In the early 1950s, she spent four years studying composition with Nadia Boulanger in Paris before moving to London and establishing herself as a prominent member of British musical life.

In 1970 she became Guest Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In 1971 she married the American opera conductor Peter Mark, and she has lived in the United States since 1972.

She was awarded a CBE in 2002, and earlier this year she was presented with The Queen's Medal for Music.

Presenter: Lauren Laverne Producer: Sarah Taylor

Kirsty Young's castaway is the engineer and international expert on aircraft noise reduction, Professor Dame Ann Dowling.

The first female president of the Royal Academy of Engineering, one of her passions is encouraging more young people, particularly women to choose engineering as a career. In 1998 she became the first female professor of Engineering at Cambridge University and went on to be the first female head of the Department.

As a child she was fascinated with how things worked, taking her bike apart aged six, and even dismantling the electric lights in her dolls house. Later, an over enthusiastic session with her chemistry set caused the conservatory curtains to briefly catch fire.

A passion for aeroplanes led her down the path of aeroacoustics and aircraft noise reduction alongside her hobby of flying airplanes.

She was awarded the DBE for services to science in 2007 and was appointed to the Order of Merit in 2016.

Producer: Sarah Taylor.

Kirsty Young's castaway is the entrepreneur, Levi Roots.

His business success began following an appearance on BBC Two's Dragon's Den in 2007. With guitar in hand, he sang about his 'Reggae reggae sauce' which he had been selling for years at London's Notting Hill Carnival. Both Peter Jones and Richard Farleigh invested in the business and within six weeks, his sauce was bottled and on supermarket shelves. Recipe books, TV shows and a restaurant, or 'rastaurant' followed.

He is the youngest of five children born in Jamaica. When he was four, his parents went to build a new life in the UK. Each year one of his siblings came to join the family in Britain. When Levi was 10, he left his much loved grandmother behind, never to see her again. Unable to read or write when he started school, he caught up quickly. He became a Rastafarian as a teenager. Following school, he became an apprentice engineer but left that to pursue a career in music.

In his late twenties, he went to prison for five years. His time inside would prove to be a turning point for him. Music continued to play an important part in his life and he was nominated for a Best Reggae Act MOBO award in 1998.

A father of eight, he lives in Brixton, London.

Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Kirsty Young's castaway is the designer and sculptor Nicole Farhi.

Born into a Turkish family in France, Nicole's interest in fashion was present from an early age. As a child, she used to design clothes for her paper dolls; as a teenager, she was taken to couture shows in Paris by her stylish aunts.

Aged eighteen, she enrolled in fashion school in Paris and began selling her design sketches to earn a little pocket money, thus setting out on a career as a freelance designer. In the early 1970s, she met the British entrepreneur Stephen Marks who was just starting the retail chain French Connection where she became chief designer, and it was he who encouraged her to set up her eponymous label in 1982. Her fashion empire would eventually extend to New York, London and Tokyo before being sold in 2010, and Nicole herself left the business in 2012.

Since retiring from fashion, Nicole Farhi has dedicated herself to her other passion - sculpture. She sculpts predominantly in clay and then casts her works in different materials including glass, bronze and concrete.

She has been married to the playwright Sir David Hare since 1992.

Producer: Christine Pawlowsky.

Kirsty Young's castaway is the US Ambassador to the United Kingdom, Matthew Barzun.

Born in New York City as the second of four children to Roger Barzun, a lawyer, and his wife Serita Winthrop, he was brought up in the small Massachusetts town of Lincoln. He followed in the family tradition and read History and Literature of America at Harvard University, taking a break for a year to work as a teaching assistant in Cape Town. After graduating he worked for an internet start-up company in San Francisco, where he became chief strategy officer. He left in 2004 after getting involved with fundraising for John Kerry's failed presidential campaign.

He was in the audience for Barak Obama's, 'there are no red or blue States, just a United States' speech in 2004 and subsequently went to work for him, fundraising for Obama's 2008 bid for the White House. When President Obama won, he appointed Matthew as Ambassador to Sweden only to recall him to take up the role of National Finance Chair for the 2012 re-election campaign. Matthew is credited with developing a 'low dollar' model of funding, where many pay a few dollars for tickets to political events. In July 2013, he was nominated as the new Ambassador to the UK by President Obama, a post he took up in August 2013 and which ends in January 2017.

Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Kirsty Young's castaway is Sara Khan.

A British Muslim human rights activist, she's the director of Inspire, a counter-extremism and women's rights organisation which she co-founded in 2009.

Born in Bradford in 1980 to Pakistani parents, she decided to wear the veil when she was thirteen changing her mind eighteen years later. She studied Pharmacy at the University of Manchester but never felt she was fulfilling her potential, and set up Inspire in her home. She has been at the heart of various campaigns to raise awareness of her cause from Jihad Against Violence to #MakingAStand which encouraged women in particular to stand up against extremism.

In 2009 she was listed in the Equality and Human Rights Commission Muslim Women's Power List and in 2015 was included in BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour Power List. She is currently sitting on the Department for Education's Due Diligence and Counter-Extremism Expert Reference Group and on the Government's Community Engagement Forum.

Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Kirsty Young's castaway is the actor and theatre director Barrie Rutter.

He is the founder and artistic director of the touring theatre company Northern Broadsides.

There was nothing in his background to suggest he'd spend his life on stage. He was brought up by his father, who worked nights unloading fish in Hull. There were no books in his childhood home and he discovered his passion for theatre whilst at secondary school with the help of his English teacher who spotted his talent for performing. His first role was as the Mayor in Gogol's, 'The Government Inspector'.

He was a member of the National Youth Theatre where he appeared with Helen Mirren and went on to study at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama. After a career in the National Theatre and the RSC, in 1992 he founded Northern Broadsides which stages Shakespeare plays, other classical works and new writing with the aim of presenting "Northern voices, doing classical work in non-velvet spaces".

Producer: Sarah Taylor.

Kirsty Young's castaway is the actor Warwick Davis.

His career began thanks to his grandmother who heard a radio advert calling for short people to be in the latest of George Lucas's Star Wars films. He played his first role as an Ewok in Star Wars when he was 11 years old and found himself on set with his childhood heroes. Since then he's worked on all the Harry Potter films, appeared in TV sitcoms, documentaries, horror movies, quiz shows and Christmas pantomimes.

Born with Spondyloepiphyseal Dysplasia Congenita (SED), a rare disorder of bone growth which results in dwarfism, the view of his doctors was that he'd be wheelchair bound and unlikely to live beyond his teens. Now in his mid-forties, he is married with two children of his own.

Producer: Sarah Taylor.

Kirsty Young's castaway is the surgeon, David Nott.

He works across three London hospitals performing general, vascular, trauma & reconstructive surgery. In addition, for the past two decades, he's spent several weeks every year working in conflict zones around the world for Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).

Born in Carmarthen, Wales, he was brought up by his grandparents until he was four while his parents finished their training - his Welsh mother became a nurse, his Indo-Burmese father an orthopaedic surgeon. He studied medicine at St Andrews University and completed his medical and surgical training in Manchester and Liverpool before becoming a consultant general and vascular surgeon working in London.

He first volunteered to go into a war zone in 1993 when he travelled to Sarajevo. Since then he has worked in Iraq, Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ivory Coast, Chad, Haiti, Yemen, Nepa, Gaza and Syria. In 2016 he and his wife, Elly, set up the David Nott Foundation, a charity which funds the training of local doctors to work in conflict zones and hostile environments. Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Kirsty Young's castaway is the political scientist and Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University Professor Louise Richardson.

She was born in Ireland, is one of seven children and has gone on to have an international career as an academic with a particular expertise in terrorism. She has been consulted by many politicians for her knowledge and insight. After many years as a Harvard Professor, she came to Britain to be the first female Vice-Chancellor of St. Andrews University.

Since January 2016, she has been the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University and is the first woman to hold the post.

Producer: Sarah Taylor.

Kirsty Young's castaway is the producer Berry Gordy.

He founded the Motown record label and his musical empire made worldwide stars of Smokey Robinson, Stevie Wonder, Diana Ross & The Supremes, The Jackson 5 and Marvin Gaye.

The second youngest of eight children, he was brought up in Detroit. He left school at sixteen to become a Featherweight boxer, and served as a soldier in the Korean war before making music his career. His first foray into the music business was a jazz record store in Detroit but he was out of step with popular taste and he became bankrupt.

It was whilst working on a a car production line that he came up with the idea of setting up a record label. The combination of his song-writing skills and entrepreneurial spirit took Motown music to the top of the charts on both sides of the Atlantic and to the centre of American culture during a pivotal moment in America's civil rights history. He was friends with Dr Martin Luther King and recorded some of his speeches on the Motown label.

Producer: Sarah Taylor.

Tom Daley started diving aged seven and by the age of 14 was representing Great Britain at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. He has won six British Championships, three European Championships and won the World Championships in 2009 and 2017.

Born in Plymouth in 1994, he’s the oldest son of Rob and Debbie Daley. He has two younger brothers. His success at a very young age led to widespread media attention, but as he became famous, he was bullied and had to change schools at the age of 15. His parents encouraged his sporting ambitions and he was always able to spot his father in the crowd at competitions because he’d be waving a huge union jack. In 2006 Rob was diagnosed with brain cancer and despite initially successful treatment, the cancer returned. He died in 2011, missing the London 2012 Olympics, where Tom won a bronze medal in the individual 10m platform event.

In 2013 Tom met Dustin Lance Black and they married in 2017. They recently became parents – through surrogacy – of a son called Robert. Tom is currently in training for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

Presenter: Lauren Laverne Producer: Cathy Drysdale

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is the business woman, Inga Beale.

She has been the CEO of Lloyd's of London since January 2014 and was the first woman to hold the post in the 325 years since the insurer was founded in 1688.

She is the middle child of a Norwegian mother and an English father and grew up in Newbury, Berkshire. Her career in insurance began in London in the early 1980s, but she tired of the predominantly male culture of the industry and left the City in 1989 to go travelling for a year. On her return she worked for the Prudential and then for GE Solutions, the insurance arm of General Electrics, where the work took her abroad.

She left GE in 2006 to turn around a failing Swiss company, before joining the Zurich Insurance Group. Her last role before joining Lloyd's as CEO in 2014 was as chief executive of Canopius, a privately held Lloyd's insurer.

In 2015, she topped a power list of the world's leading 100 LGBT executives. She is openly bisexual after coming out in 2008 and has been married to her husband since 2013.

Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Kirsty Young's castaway is Tom Hanks.

From 'Big' to 'Sleepless in Seattle', 'Captain Phillips' to 'Apollo 13', his long and distinguished film-making career has brought him multiple awards and many plaudits. He's the recipient of eight Emmys, one Bafta and four Golden Globes and was the youngest ever actor to be given a lifetime achievement award by the American Film institute. The voice of Woody in the 'Toy Story' films, he won the first of his two Oscars in 1993 for Philadelphia and again the following year for Forrest Gump.

His parents split up when he was five and he went to live with his father. By the age of ten he'd lived in ten different houses in five different cities. He loved school and developed a passion for history which is reflected in the film he made with Steven Spielberg, 'Saving Private Ryan' and the TV mini-series 'Band of Brothers' and 'The Pacific' which he also produced.

His latest film is 'Hologram for The King'.

He is married to the actor & producer, Rita Wilson.

Producer: Cathy Drysdale

The podcast version of this programme is an extended version of the broadcast interview.

Kirsty Young's castaway is the businessman, John Timpson.

He is chairman of his eponymous high street retailers and the business is in his blood: started by his great-grandfather in 1865 it is now run by one of his sons.

Although he fulfilled his family's expectations by running the family firm, he's a man who ploughs his own furrow as all his staff are given the day off on their birthday, and can use the company's holiday homes for free. A proponent of what he calls 'upside down management', his employees, all of whom are called 'colleagues', enjoy an unusual degree of autonomy in the running of the individual shops and 10% of the company's employees have spent time in prison.

Married to his late wife Alex for over 47 years, together they fostered 90 children. He has written several books on leadership and pens a weekly business advice column.

Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Kirsty Young's castaway is the writer, feminist & activist, Gloria Steinem.

At the forefront of the second wave of feminism, she came to prominence after publishing an article entitled "After Black Power, Women's Liberation" in 1969. Two years later she co-founded the feminist magazine Ms. As an activist, she has spent much of her life travelling, giving talks and lecturing.

Born in 1934 in Ohio, her father was a businessman who ran a lake-side resort in the summer and packed up his family at the first sign of frost to travel cross-country in a caravan selling antiques. Her mother had been a newspaper journalist and later suffered a nervous breakdown before Gloria was born. She became her mother's sole carer aged eleven when her parents divorced. It was only following their separation, having settled down in a house in Toledo, that she spent her first full year at school.

After high school, she read politics and government and then traveled around India for two years on a fellowship. On her return, she established herself as a writer in 1960s New York and co-founded Ms. magazine in 1971. Since then, her writing has appeared in innumerable magazines, newspapers, anthologies, television commentaries, political campaigns, and film documentaries in America and internationally. In 2013 she was awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States' highest honour, by Barack Obama.

Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Kirsty Young's castaway is the artist Yinka Shonibare MBE.

His work has populated museums around the globe, with a vivid, subversive and often tragi-comic presence; exploring themes of cultural identity, post colonialism and the impact of globalisation. A Turner Prize nominee in 2004, he has exhibited at the Venice Biennial and internationally.

His 'Nelson's Ship in a Bottle' became his first public art commission when it was one of the art works chosen for the Fourth Plinth in London's Trafalgar Square.

Born in London, his parents moved the family back to Nigeria when he was three. Later he returned to Britain to finish his education but his plans to study art were brutally interrupted when he was 19 contracted the disease, Transverse Myelitis, which attacked his central nervous system and rendered him paralysed from the neck down. He had three years of intensive rehabilitation before beginning again at art school.

He went on to study at Goldsmiths and was part of the Young British Artist generation.

Producer: Sarah Taylor.

Kirsty Young's castaway is the engineer and nuclear scientist Dr Dame Sue Ion.

The first woman to be awarded the highly prestigious President's Medal by the Royal Academy of Engineering, she has worked her way to the heart of an industry that remains very contentious.

Her passion for understanding how and why the world works the way it does first began as she tinkered for hours at her parents' kitchen table with a little chemistry set.

Today she goes into schools to encourage more girls to take up engineering and her enthusiasm for the subject has galvanised many to take up the discipline.

Producer: Paula McGinley.

Kirsty Young's castaway is Hugh Bonneville.

Known around the world for his portrayal of Lord Grantham in ITV's hugely popular Downton Abbey, he made British audiences laugh with his portrayal of the hapless Ian Fletcher in the BBC comedies Twenty Twelve and W1A and charmed audiences of all ages as Mr Brown in the animated film, Paddington Bear.

His immense range as an actor has ensured he's seldom been out of work since joining the National Theatre in 1987, but his thespian leanings started much earlier - writing, performing & even creating tickets for his very own dramatic productions - performed for his family at home. He was born in London to a surgeon and a former nurse and grew up with two older siblings. At junior school he refused to let a teacher put him off his passion for acting which he continued to pursue while doing a degree in Theology at Cambridge.

He chose an acting career over law, and following a brief time at drama school, his first professional role was "bashing a cymbal" in A Midsummer Night's Dream at London's Regent's Park theatre in 1986. He joined the National the following year and achieved his ambition of being a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1991. His television debut was as a conman in the ITV drama Chancer and his first appearance on the big screen was in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, directed by Kenneth Branagh. He appeared opposite George Clooney in the 2014 film The Monuments Men and was the voice of Father Christmas in the BBC's adaptation of the Julia Donaldson picture book Stick Man.

Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Kirsty Young's castaway is the architect, Dame Zaha Hadid.

The first woman to be awarded architecture's highest honour, the Pritzker Prize, she designed the Aquatic Centre for London 2012, Glasgow's Riverside Museum and has twice won the Stirling Prize - first for the MAXXI museum in Rome and secondly for her design for the Grace Academy school in Brixton, London. She recently became the first woman in her own right to receive the RIBA Gold Medal.

She was born in Baghdad in 1950 where her father was a prominent member of the opposition National Democratic Party. After attending school there, she travelled to Switzerland and England to boarding school before returning to London in 1972 to study at the Architectural Association.

In 1983 she won her first competition to design the Peak Leisure Club in Hong Kong. It gained her international recognition though it was never built: her first building was the Vitra Fire Station in Germany in 1993. In the late 1990s she built a contemporary arts centre in Cincinnati & a BMW car manufacturing plant in Leipzig. She won competitions to design a new opera house in Cardiff but it was never realised and her first permanent building in Britain was a Maggie's Cancer Care Centre in Scotland built in 2006. She has designed stations for the Nordpark Cable Railway in Innsbruck, Austria and in 2010 the Opera House in Guangzhou, China. In 2014 she became the first woman to win the Design Museum's Design of the Year Award for the Heydar Aliyev Cultural Centre, in Baku, Azerbaijan.

She was made a Dame in 2012 for services to architecture.

Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Kirsty Young's castaway is the polar adventurer Ben Saunders. In his own words he "specialises in dragging heavy things around cold places".

He's one of only three people to have skied solo to The North Pole and he holds the record for the longest solo Arctic journey ever on foot.

After traversing Russia and the frozen crust of the Arctic Ocean, his most recent adventure was to triumph where, a century before, Captain Scott and his men failed. Ben successfully retraced that ill-fated Terra Nova route by making the eighteen hundred mile journey through Antarctica-and-back, entirely on foot.

When he's not wrapped up somewhere cold, he is a motivational speaker.

Producer: Sarah Taylor.

Kirsty Young's castaway is Professor Dame Carol Black.

She is Principal of Newnham College, Cambridge, and is a special adviser to the Department of Health and Public Health England. She is also Chair of the Board of the Nuffield Trust, the health policy think tank.

She read History at Bristol University before beginning her medical career with encouragement from Dame Cecily Saunders, the founder of the hospice movement. She was Head of Rheumatology at London's Royal Free Hospital from 1989-1994, and was Medical Director of the hospital between 1995 and 2002. She's an international expert on scleroderma, a skin and tissue auto-immune disease, and is the second woman to become President of the Royal College of Physicians.

She was made a Dame in 2005 for her services to Medicine.

Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Henry Marsh is a neurosurgeon, who pioneered a technique of operating on the brain while the patient is under local anaesthetic. The procedure is now standard practice. He is also an acclaimed writer.

He was born in 1950 in Oxford, where his father was an academic. His mother came to England as a political refugee from Nazi Germany in the late 1930s. Henry did not initially pursue a career in medicine: after dropping out of university, he found work as a hospital porter, and only then decided to train as a doctor.

He was appointed a consultant at St George’s Hospital, London, in 1987. He has spent his career in the NHS, and has also frequently worked abroad, in Ukraine, Nepal, Albania and elsewhere. He retired in 2015, but continues to teach one day a week and to work overseas to help less experienced surgeons.

In 2014, he published a memoir, Do No Harm, which was widely praised for its honesty about mistakes in the operating theatre.

Presenter: Kirsty Young Producer: Sarah Taylor

Kirsty Young's castaway is Bill Gates.

He sat at his first computer while still at school in Seattle, wrote his first computer programme aged just 13 and went on to co-found the company Microsoft, becoming one of the key figures of the technological revolution. In 2000, he and his wife, Melinda, launched the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation which has given to date over $34 billion to projects aimed at reducing health inequality around the world.

Born into a professional family - his father was a lawyer, his mother a former teacher who later became involved with volunteer work - he was introduced to the idea of 'giving back' at an early age. An avid reader as a child, he attended Harvard where in his sophomore year he and Paul Allen developed software for the first micro-computers. The company would go on to achieve huge success with its Windows operating system.

By 1987, Gates had become the world's youngest self-made billionaire, then worth $1.25 billion. Consistently listed as the Richest Man in the World, he stepped down as CEO of the company in 2000 although he remained as Chairman until 2014.

These days his primary focus is his philanthropy. In 2010, Gates and his friend Warren Buffett announced the Giving Pledge which aims to inspire the wealthy people of the world to give away the majority of their net worth to worthy causes.

Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Kirsty Young's castaway is the philanthropist and publisher Sigrid Rausing.

Founder of one of the UK's largest philanthropic foundations, her trust has given away around £230m to human rights causes since it began.

Brought up in Sweden, she is currently the publisher of Granta Books and the editor of Granta Magazine and her work spotting and developing new writers stems from her lifelong love of literature.

As the granddaughter of Ruben Rausing, who founded food packaging company Tetra Pak, she is a member of one of Britain's richest families. Her interest in human rights was sparked as a child by a love of animals and hearing her parents talk about the Holocaust.

Producer: Paula McGinley.

Kirsty Young's castaway is the educationalist and writer, Sir Anthony Seldon.

Now Vice-Chancellor of Buckingham University, he was the Master of Wellington College. He has written, co-written and edited more than 30 books, including political biographies of Prime Ministers Churchill, Blair, Brown and Cameron.

He had to take his 'A' levels twice before going on to read PPE at Oxford and doing a PhD at the LSE, before embarking on his teaching career. His first headmaster job was at Brighton College and then he went onto be Master of Wellington College. During his tenure, the school became co-educational, set up partner schools in China, and introduced a more holistic approach to learning with happiness classes and stillness sessions added to the curriculum and in 2009 the state secondary Wellington Academy was founded in Wiltshire.

He is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and of the Royal Society of Arts and in 2014 was knighted for services to education and modern political history.

Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Kirsty Young's castaway is the Sky TV news correspondent Alex Crawford.

She's won the Royal Television Society's Journalist of the Year award an unprecedented four times - reporting from the world's worst war zones and hot spots. Where most people would do anything to stay well away from trouble she seems drawn to danger , whether it's covering the Ebola crisis in Liberia, hunting for Rhino poachers in South Africa or being first on the scene as the drama of Libya's revolution unfolded.

She spent the first five years of her life in Nigeria, where her family survived two political coups. After childhood in Zambia and subsequently what was then Rhodesia, she came back to Britain as a teenager to go to boarding school and then got her first job as a trainee reporter on the Wokingham Times.

She's been shot at, arrested and interrogated. But it's a job she loves and is still passionate to do. For her, there should be no 'no-go' areas for journalists and journalism remains an essential pillar of freedom and democracy.

Producer: Sarah Taylor.

Kirsty Young's castaway is the writer Colm Toibin.

Best-known for his novels "Brooklyn" - now made into a film - "Nora Webster" and "The Master," he has been nominated for the Booker Prize three times.

Born in 1955 in Enniscorthy, County Wexford, the second youngest of five children, Colm's life changed suddenly when his father died after a long illness when he was twelve. He says he has been dealing with the trauma which resulted in his writing ever since. After attending St Peter's College in Wexford and University College Dublin, he spent three years in Barcelona teaching English before returning to Ireland. He worked as a journalist until his books began to get published.

He once told a class he was teaching that "you have to be a terrible monster to write. I said, 'Someone might have told you something they shouldn't have told you, and you have to be prepared to use it because it will make a great story. You have to use it even though the person is identifiable. If you can't do it then writing isn't for you. You've no right to be here. If there is any way I can help you get into law school then I will. Your morality will be more useful in a courtroom.'"

Producer: Christine Pawlowsky.

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is Patricia Greene.

For nearly sixty years she has played the role of Jill in Radio 4's The Archers which celebrates its 65th anniversary on January 1st 2016. Over the decades the storylines have followed her character through one marriage, four children and since 2010, widowhood.

Born in Derby in 1931, Paddy's love of acting began early on inspired by her father who was a keen amateur actor. As an only and independent child she was surrounded by the adult world and would often eavesdrop as she hid under the kitchen table. Her parents loved entertainment and would take her to the cinema every week to see Hollywood romances or comedies.

After attending a grammar school she went to the Central School of Speech and Drama in London in 1951. She wanted to be a classical actress, but then a phone call from the Archers production office changed her career path and she joined the cast initially on a six week contract in 1957. Her character Jill went onto marry the farmer Phil Archer, and is still there with a recent storyline seeing her return to Brookfield, the family farm.

Patricia has been married twice and was widowed in 1986. She was awarded an MBE in 2007.

Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Danielle de Niese is a soprano who has taken starring roles with leading opera companies around the world. She was born in Melbourne, Australia, to Sri Lankan parents, and at the age of eight she won a national TV talent show, singing a pop medley. When she was ten, her parents moved the family to Los Angeles, so that she could pursue her dream of becoming an opera singer. She also presented a TV programme, L.A. Kids, for which she won an Emmy award at the age of 16.

She made her professional operatic debut when she was 15 with the Los Angeles Opera, appeared briefly in Les Miserables on Broadway, and first performed with the Metropolitan Opera in New York at the age of 19, taking the role of Barbarina in a production of The Marriage of Figaro, directed by Jonathan Miller.

In 2005 she came to more widespread public attention with her performances as Cleopatra in Giulio Cesare at Glyndebourne, stepping into the role at the last minute when the original Cleopatra was unwell.

She first appeared at the Royal Opera House in London four years later, and her international stage career now ranges from baroque operas to new works. She has also presented a number of television programmes about music. She married Gus Christie, the grandson of Glyndebourne’s founder, in 2009.

Presenter: Kirsty Young Producer: Sarah Taylor

Pam Ayres is a poet and broadcaster.

Pam was born in the Vale of the White Horse and retains her characteristic Berkshire burr. She is the youngest of six children, and grew up in the company of her four brothers and a sister in a small council house.

Although she was interested in writing from an early age, she failed her 11-plus exam and left school at 15 to join the Civil Service and later the Women's Royal Air Force, where she found opportunities to appear in amateur dramatics.

She began to perform her comic verse in local folk clubs in the early 1970s and her first break came when she secured a spot on BBC Radio Oxford. In 1975, she won the TV talent show Opportunity Knocks and by the following year she had given up her day job.

Pam has sold more than three million copies of her books, and has been called "the people's poet", thanks to her ability to write verse which resonates with a wide audience. Her best-loved poems include Oh, I Wish I'd Looked After Me Teeth, which was voted one of the UK's top ten comic verses in a BBC poll. Striking a very different note, her poem Woodland Burial has become a popular reading at funerals.

Presenter: Kirsty Young Producer: Sarah Taylor.

Marianne Elliott is the first woman to win two Tony awards for theatre direction: the first for War Horse and the second for The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time. Both transferred to Broadway from the National Theatre, London, and have gone on to travel the world.

Marianne's parents, grandparents and great-grandparents all worked in the theatre. Her father, Michael Elliott, was a founding director of the Royal Exchange theatre in Manchester and her mother, Rosalind Knight, now in her 80s, has enjoyed a lifetime on the stage and is still working. Although Marianne read Drama at Hull University, it wasn't until she was in her late 20s that her career began, when she became assistant director at the Regents Park Open Air Theatre. She went on to follow in her father's footsteps, working at the Royal Exchange, before becoming Associate Director at the National Theatre in London. In 2017 she left to set up her own theatre company with producer Chris Harper. Their next show will be Stephen Sondheim's Company.

In addition to all her theatrical prizes, she has just been awarded the OBE for services to theatre in the 2018 Birthday Honours list. She is married to actor Nick Sidi and they have one daughter.

Presenter: Kirsty Young Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Baroness Newlove is the Victims' Commissioner for England and Wales. She became a campaigner after her husband, Garry Newlove, was murdered by several youths in 2007. Born in Salford in 1961 she grew up in a working class family. Having left school at sixteen she became a copy typist at a magistrate's court and later a committal court assistant. She met Garry when she was 20 and they married and had two daughters. In 1992, when he was just 32, Garry was diagnosed with stomach cancer. He survived and the couple went on to have a third daughter.

The family lived in an area of Warrington which was experiencing an increase in anti-social behaviour. In August 2007, Garry went outside to investigate a disturbance and was viciously attacked by some youths in front of his three daughters. Three days later, the decision was taken to switch off his life support. Three youths were subsequently found guilty of Garry's murder and in the wake of the family's experience, Helen set up an initiative called Newlove Warrington to provide support to the young people in the area.

She was given a peerage in 2010 and sits on the Conservative benches. She took up various roles in support of victims in the House of Lords, culminating in her appointment as Victims' Commissioner, a post she took up in 2013. She is currently in her second term and will be serving in the post until 2019.

Helen remarried in 2012.

Presenter: Kirsty Young Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Billie Jean King won 39 Grand Slams and a total of 20 Wimbledon titles and is regarded as one of the greatest tennis players of all time.

Born in California in 1943, she was the eldest daughter of Bill and Betty Moffitt. She discovered tennis at the age of ten: at 15 she won in her age bracket at the Southern California championships, and in 1961, she won the women’s doubles at Wimbledon with Karen Hantze, the youngest pair to achieve such a victory.

In 1968, when professional competitors were admitted to Grand Slam tournaments, she won Wimbledon for the third time and was paid just £750 while Rod Laver, the Men's champion, took home £2,000. So began her campaign for gender equality, which involved boycotting tournaments and setting up their own professional women’s circuit. In 1973, then aged 29, she beat the 55-year-old former tennis champion Bobby Riggs in a match which became known as 'The Battle of the Sexes': it remains the most-watched tennis match ever. That year the US Open awarded the same financial reward to men and women and in 2007 Wimbledon followed suit. Billie Jean also founded the Women’s Tennis Association and the Women’s Sports Foundation in the 1970s.

She married her husband, Larry, in 1965 but by the late 1960s, she had realised that she was gay. She was outed by a former lover who sued her for palimony in 1981, and although she won the case, she lost almost all her commercial endorsements. She has been with her partner, Ilana Kloss, for nearly 40 years and retired from singles matches in 1983 and doubles in 1990. She was awarded the Medal of Freedom by President Obama in 2009 and has continued to be an ambassador for her sport and for gender equality.

Presenter: Kirsty Young Producer: Cathy Drysdale

Philip Treacy is one of the most prolific and acclaimed hat designers working in the UK.

His work was very much in evidence at this year's Royal Wedding and at Royal Ascot. Meghan Markle wore one of his designs for her first official public engagement as the Duchess of Sussex. Other notable clients include Madonna, Tina Turner, Grace Jones, who has showcased his creations on and off stage, and Lady Gaga, for whom he made a black telephone hat.

Originally from Ahascragh, a small village in County Galway, Ireland, Philip learned to sew when he was six years old. He grew up opposite a church and he recalls how, as a young boy, he would go to all the weddings, uninvited, to look at the clothes and in particular the wedding dresses.

He went on to study fashion at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin, and then won a place on the MA fashion design course at the Royal College of Art in London, graduating in 1990 with first class honours. He enjoyed a meteoric rise to success when fashion stylist Isabella Blow saw his student hat collection. She introduced him to Karl Lagerfeld, who quickly invited him to design hats for Chanel Couture when he was still in his early twenties.

He has won the title of British Accessory Designer of the Year at the British Fashion Awards on five occasions, and was awarded an honorary OBE for services to the British fashion industry in 2007.

Presenter Kirsty Young Producer Sarah Taylor.

Guy Singh-Watson is an organic farmer and founder of Riverford, a major British supplier of organic vegetables through a box delivery scheme. Born in 1960 and the youngest of five children, his parents became tenant farmers in Devon in 1951. He describes himself as "a proper little farm boy", and spent his free time outside, clambering up trees, catching rabbits, rearing his own pig and helping on the farm.

Severely dyslexic, he disliked school, but thanks to an aptitude for performing well in exams, he won a place at Oxford University to read Agricultural and Forestry Science, graduating with a First. He briefly joined the family farm, but left to become a management consultant in London and then New York, returning to the farm in 1986. He started cultivating vegetables on three acres of land with a wheelbarrow and a borrowed tractor, and found his niche, moving from three to 18 to 50 acres quite rapidly.

Initially, Guy sold to supermarkets, but became convinced that there must be a better way of getting his produce to customers, and set up a veg box scheme in 1993. His company now delivers to around 50,000 homes a week and had a turnover of £56.7 million in 2017. Guy has four grown-up children from his first marriage and an eight-year-old step-daughter from his second marriage to Geetie Singh.

Presenter: Kirsty Young Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Professor Mariana Mazzucato is an economist, who focuses on value and innovation.

Born in Italy, Mariana moved to America as a child, when her father accepted a post at Princeton University. She has lived in the UK for the last 20 years and is currently Professor in the Economics of Innovation and Public Value and the Director of the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose at University College London.

She examined how government funding has enabled highly profitable inventions in the private sector in her 2013 book The Entrepreneurial State. She advises policymakers around the world on how to deliver sustainable growth, and has also taken a particular interest in pricing and profit in the pharmaceutical industry.

Earlier this year she published The Value of Everything, in which she argued that we need to re-think our ideas about how wealth is created in the global economy. In 2013 she was named as one of the 'three most important thinkers about innovation' by the New Republic.

BOOK CHOICE: Memoirs of Hadrian by Marguerite Yourcenar LUXURY: One of her mother's handmade quilts CASTAWAY'S FAVOURITE: Round Midnight by Thelonious Monk

Presenter Lauren Laverne Producer Sarah Taylor

Martina Cole is a British crime writer, known to her fans as the Queen of Crime.

Martina has written 24 novels, 15 of which have topped the original fiction sales charts - more than any other author. She has sold more than 16 million books around the world, and her work has been translated into 29 languages. She also works in prisons, leading reading schemes and writing workshops for prisoners.

Martina grew up in Essex, the youngest of five children born to Irish parents. She was expelled from her convent school at 15 for reading a book by Harold Robbins. She married at 16, divorced at 17 and then had a baby at the age of 18. She wrote stories and scripts in her spare time to amuse herself, whilst taking on a series of low-paid jobs, including cleaning, waitressing, stacking shelves and leafletting.

At the age of 31, she re-discovered one of her early attempts at a novel, and decided to send it to an agent. She chose Darley Anderson from the Writers' and Artists' Yearbook because she liked the sound of the name. He quickly contacted her and told her she would be a star. He was right: she received an advance of £150,000, then a record for a first time novelist. She has written a best-selling crime novel almost every year ever since.

Presenter: Kirsty Young Producer: Sarah Taylor.

John Walker Motson, OBE, also known as Motty, has been commentating on football since 1971. He covered more than 2000 games on television and radio, including all the major football championships, 29 FA Cup finals (with an additional five replays), 10 World Cups, 10 European Championships and 200 England games. At the age of 72 he's just retired.

Known not only for his footballing knowledge and his voice, he is often recognised by his knee-length sheepskin coat. His passion for football was ignited by his father, a Methodist minister for 40 years, who on his one day off each week would take his only son to watch football. The first game John attended was at Charlton Athletic when he was seven, and the excitement of it inspired him to create scrapbooks of footballing facts and collect match programmes.

After five years at boarding school, where he wasn't allowed to play football, he left at 16 after one term doing A levels. He joined the Barnet Press as a trainee reporter and then moved onto the Sheffield Telegraph. When BBC Radio Sheffield, one of the first six local radio stations, came on air, he was one of the reporters pulled in to give match summaries. He then moved to the BBC as a sports assistant in radio, before joining the Match of the Day team on television.

He has been supported in his career by his solicitor wife, Annie, who meticulously kept details of every match in thick A4 books which John used for his preparation. He was awarded an OBE for services to football and in May 2018 he was honoured by BAFTA with a Special Award for his lifetime's work.

Presenter: Kirsty Young Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Professor Carlos Frenk is a cosmologist and one of the originators of the Cold Dark Matter theory for the formation of galaxies and the structure of the universe. He has worked at Durham University since 1985, where he was appointed the inaugural Ogden Professor of Fundamental Physics in 2001 and has been Director of the Institute for Computational Cosmology since 2002.

Born in Mexico in 1951, he is the son of a German Jewish immigrant father and a Mexican mother with Spanish roots. After completing his physics degree in Mexico, he came to Cambridge University in the mid-1970s to do a PhD in Astronomy. His first postgraduate job took him to the University of California where he worked on a computer simulation of the universe with three fellow cosmologists, disproving the idea that the universe contains hot dark matter and establishing the theory of cold dark matter instead.

Professor Frenk's papers have received more than 100,000 citations, making him one of the most frequently cited authors in the field of space science and astronomy. He has won a number of prizes for his work, including the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society. He was awarded a CBE in 2017.

Presenter: Kirsty Young Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Gillian Reynolds spent 42 years as the radio critic of the Daily Telegraph before she was headhunted by the Sunday Times at the age of 82. Born into a working class family in Liverpool, her mother ran a market stall and her father was a seaman, but also a gambler. Her mother was determined to ensure that Gillian had a good education, and she was the first in her family to go to a grammar school. She went on to study English at Oxford.

She took up an internship in America, where she met her husband, and they returned to Liverpool when she became pregnant with the first of her three sons. She first worked as a radio critic for the Guardian in 1967. She became the first female controller of a commercial radio station when she joined Radio City, Liverpool, in 1974. She moved to London in 1975 when she left her troubled marriage, and secured the job of radio critic for the Telegraph, as well as working as a journalist in television and radio, at one point even co-presenting the Today programme.

She chaired the Sony Radio Awards for four years, the only woman to have done so, and the Radio Academy Festival for a decade. She lives alone, but with around two dozen radios, in Notting Hill.

Presenter: Kirsty Young Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

David Baddiel is a comedian and writer. Known both for his solo work and for his comedic collaborations with, among others, Rob Newman and Frank Skinner, he has also written a screenplay, a musical and several books. Born in 1964 to Jewish parents, the second of three boys, he was brought up in Dollis Hill, London. His father was a scientist from Swansea and his mother was a refugee, whose family had to flee from Nazi Germany. When David was 13, his older brother Ivor played him sketches by Derek and Clive which kindled his appetite to become a comedian.

He read English at Cambridge and became vice-president of the Footlights before starting out on the London comedy circuit. Together with Steve Punt, Hugh Dennis and Rob Newman, he was part of The Mary Whitehouse Experience for Radio 1 and later BBC 2. Rob and David went on to create Newman and Baddiel in Pieces, and were the first comedians to sell out Wembley Arena with a gig in 1993, prompting newspapers to declare comedy "the new rock 'n' roll". David then formed a comedy partnership with Frank Skinner and they hosted Fantasy Football League and later Baddiel and Skinner Unplanned. They co-wrote the lyrics to one of the best-known football songs, Three Lions.

In 2005, David took a break from performance and concentrated on writing novels for adults and children's books as well as the script for a film, which became a musical, The Infidel. He returned to stand-up in 2013 with a show about fame. He recently mined his parents' idiosyncrasies and the rare form of dementia from which his father suffers for a stand-up show entitled My Family: Not the Sitcom. His partner is fellow comedian and writer Morwenna Banks. They have two teenage children.

Presenter: Kirsty Young Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Dr. Sue Black is a computer scientist, academic and social entrepreneur. She was instrumental in saving Bletchley Park, the home of vital codebreaking during the second world war. Currently an honorary professor at UCL, she founded BCS Women for women in science and the social enterprise Tech Mums, which teaches parents about computing. She is also on an advisory board for the government's digital services.

Born in Fareham, Hampshire, she was 12 when her mother died of a brain haemorrhage. She left school and home at the earliest legal age, 16, and by the age of 20 she was the mother of three children. She returned to education by taking a maths access course at night school which led to a degree in computing from London South Bank University in 1993. She gained a PhD in software engineering in 2001 and became a lecturer. She was Head of Department of Computing Science at the University of Westminster before leaving in 2012 to become a technology evangelist.

In 2016 She was awarded the Order of the British Empire for services to for services to technology.

Presenter: Kirsty Young Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Sir Peter Lampl is a philanthropist who has given over £50 million and worked for 20 years to combat educational inequality. In 1997 he founded the Sutton Trust with the aim of improving social mobility. The Trust has funded over 200 research studies, and it initiates and supports a wide range of programmes, covering everything from early years education to access to the professions.

The son of a Viennese émigré, Peter Lampl grew up in modest circumstances in Yorkshire until the age of 11, when his family relocated to Surrey. He attended grammar schools, Oxford University and the London Business School. He worked as a management consultant and businessman in the USA and Europe, and in 1983 he set up the Sutton Company, an international private equity firm.

His first move into philanthropy came in the wake of the Dunblane school shootings in 1996, when he funded the campaign which led to a complete ban on the private ownership of handguns in the UK.

His interest in social mobility was sparked by his realisation that in recent years "a kid like me had little chance of making it to Oxbridge", noting that his school was now "all fee-paying" and his Oxford college "used to have lots of ordinary Welsh kids, but they're not coming through any more."

He received an OBE in 2000 for services to Access to Higher Education, and was knighted in June 2003.

Presenter: Kirsty Young Producer: Sarah Taylor.

Abi Morgan is a screenwriter and playwright best known for TV dramas The Hour, River and The Split and the films Shame, Suffragette and The Iron Lady. She won two Emmy Awards for The Hour, as well as two BAFTAs for Best Single Drama for White Girl and Sex Traffic, and Meryl Streep won an Academy Award for her portrayal of Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady.

Born into a theatrical family - her father was a theatre director, her mother is an actress - she only began to write during her university days at Exeter. After graduating, she kept herself afloat by waitressing while continuing to write and had her first play performed professionally in 1998 when she was 30.

She's become known for her gritty storylines in the dramas Murder, Sex Traffic, and Tsunami, but has also adapted several books for both the small and the big screen including Brick Lane, The Invisible Woman, and Birdsong.

Abi lives in London with her long-term partner, the actor Jacob Krichefski, and their two teenage children.

Presenter: Kirsty Young Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Anne-Marie Duff is a stage and screen actor.

Born in 1970 to Irish parents, she grew up in a working class household in west London. A shy child and a voracious reader, she took acting classes from the age of 11, but failed to get into drama school on her first attempt. Her second application to the Drama Centre in London was successful and she's barely been out of work since.

She started off on stage, but gained more widespread recognition when she took the role of Fiona Gallagher in Shameless, the acclaimed Channel 4 comedy drama.

She has since played dozens of roles, both in the theatre and on screen, which range from Queen Elizabeth I to John Lennon's mother, from a penniless suffragette to a retired police officer with skeletons in the cupboard, and from Joan of Arc to Lady Macbeth on Broadway and at the National Theatre. Her performances have been described as having a "multi-faceted, diamond-hard intensity".

Presenter: Kirsty Young Producer: Sarah Taylor.

David Byrne was a founding member of the band Talking Heads. Born in Dumbarton, Scotland, he emigrated first to Canada and then to the USA before the age of ten.

He started playing in bands at school and, when art school didn't work out for him, he founded Talking Heads with a couple of friends. They played their first gig, opening for the Ramones, at the legendary New York club CBGB's, in June 1975. Eight studio albums later, cracks were beginning to show in the relations between band members, and by 1991 Talking Heads had officially split up.

Since then, he has enjoyed a solo career, and also made films, published photographic books, composed scores for musicals, created art installations and written books. He has received an Academy Award for Best Original Music Score, as well as a Golden Globe and a Grammy, for his soundtrack to the 1987 film The Last Emperor.

He and his fellow Talking Heads members were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2002. He lives in New York and has a daughter in her late twenties from his 17 year marriage to Adelle Lutz.

Presenter: Kirsty Young Producer: Cathy Drysdale.

Gary Barlow, musician and Take That lead singer, has written more than a dozen chart-topping songs, and has received six Ivor Novello awards including the award for Outstanding Contribution to British Music.

Born in Cheshire in 1971, his interest in music was sparked at an early age by a child’s keyboard. At the age of 10, he saw Depeche Mode on Top of the Pops, prompting the desire to take to the stage himself. He wrote A Million Love Songs, which later became a Top 10 hit for Take That, in his bedroom when he was 15. By this time he was a regular performer in a Labour club just across the Welsh border, where he cut his teeth playing the organ and singing.

By the time he was 18, he was so good at writing songs that he successfully auditioned for a place in the group which became Take That. They went on to be one of the most successful bands of all time, winning a devoted audience with tracks such as Back For Good, Everything Changes and Pray. When they broke up in early 1996, helplines were set up to assuage their fans’ feelings of loss and grief. In 2005, Take That reformed, with Robbie Williams rejoining them for a spell in 2010, and – in some form or other – the band has kept going and will tour again in 2019.

Gary was put in charge of organising the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee concert and performed at the closing ceremony for the London Olympics in 2012. He was a judge on the X-Factor for three series and his talent show, Let It Shine, was broadcast on BBC One in 2017. Earlier this year he published a second autobiography.

BOOK CHOICE: Recording the Beatles by by Kevin Ryan and Brian Kehew. LUXURY ITEM: Piano CASTAWAY'S FAVOURITE: Nimrod by Elgar

Presenter: Lauren Laverne Producer: Cathy Drysdale